Voices: What does the government need with a hot pink photo booth?

On the one hand, it is possible to become weary of the endless rage about apparently decadent spending by government ministers.

The Americans are rather proud of their largesse. They were proud of Air Force One, even while Donald Trump was flying around in it. We, meanwhile, react with fits of rage when a member of the cabinet is caught in first class on a train, or flying anything other than Ryanair.

But then, on the other hand, what the actual hell is this? Do my eyes deceive me, or do I sit here reading the words: “£2,564 on home-brewing kits, filed under ‘Computer Equipment and Services’”?

That somebody or other in His Majesty’s Government really has spent two and a half grand on a home-brewing kit and put it through under computer equipment? Has that really happened? Yes it has. The Labour Party has spent months compiling the info it has received in response to more than 300 freedom of information requests, to assemble what it hopes is a grand dossier of government waste.

(It was Tony Blair, you may recall, who made this possible, through bringing in the Freedom of Information Act. In his autobiography, he would later write of that decision: “You idiot. You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There is really no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate. I quake at the imbecility of it.”)

Labour’s findings have now been posted online. It’s a bit of a turgid document, but the most absurd bits are easy enough to find by pressing Ctrl + F followed by T, R, U, S and then S again.

The former foreign secretary and former prime minister is the real star of the show here. “£7,128 on a reception for Liz Truss against the backdrop of a Sydney Harbour Amusement Park.”

This almost certainly occurred on the same trip for which £500,000 was spent chartering a private plane. There were, of course, other trips – like the one on which she had to have her photo taken, mainly for her own instagram account, riding a bicycle and holding a big union jack umbrella beneath the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Then there’s £1,500 spent on one lunch and one dinner at two restaurants in Jakarta, Indonesia. The Foreign Office has issued a general statement, clarifying that British politicians’ largesse is necessary in order to repay the largesse they receive from others. Which kind of makes sense but, you know, very nice work if you can get it.

That statement, by the way, does not make any attempt to deny that at the Jakarta double dining experience, no foreign dignitaries were present – just Truss’s team and the British ambassador.

It is intended, however, to provide an explanation for the £1,903 spent on a hot pink photo booth for a movie screening at the embassy in Washington DC. It is well known that embassies and consulates around the world have quite a thing for James Bond-based screenings and parties whenever a new Bond movie comes out, and such events probably do help to bolster British soft power.

But we can only wonder: if it was Bond, why hot pink? And if it wasn’t, then what was it? Legally Blonde 2 was a long time ago.

It would, naturally, be wrong to conclude that all government largesse is a waste of money, and it would also be somewhat mean not to allow public servants any of the kind of perks of the private sector (or frankly, no one would ever want to do their job).

But at the same time, a lot of government largesse is, frankly, a waste of money. For a very long time, Truss flew all around the world as international trade secretary, breathlessly announcing copy-and-paste trade deals that served no purpose beyond making her popular with Conservative Party members (and look how that ended).

As for the actual value of all those expensively secured trade deals? Well, Rishi Sunak, in his first meaningful bit of action as prime minister, has shut the department down.

It is also clear to see that spending has tended to increase towards the end of the financial year. In March 2021, the Treasury, under Sunak, spent £25,000 on IT and office equipment – more than double any other month of the year – including £5,000 on a paper shredder.

Not much should set alarm bells ringing quite like the purchase of a clearly extremely high-spec shredder. You would think the first thing through it might have been its own receipt, but no. Self-evidently that was needed, just so that the extravagance could be documented.

Once, as it happens, I was hired to work as a temp in a government agency that no longer exists. I worked there for nine weeks. At no point did I ever understand what I was doing there, until I heard my manager explaining to his manager that if he didn’t spend the budget now then they simply wouldn’t get it next year. Over two and a half months, I would be surprised if I did more than two and half hours’ work.

And this sort of thing really should enrage you. When more than half the country really doesn’t have a clue how it’s going to pay its bills, government departments are very obviously indulging not just in a bit of occasionally justifiable largesse, but in waste for waste’s sake.

Labour reckons it is going to respond by setting up an Office for Value for Money, which will check that no one in government is going to carry on doing what absolutely every government, in almost every country in the world, has always done.

It’s a nice idea, but before they go through with it, they might want to have a quick re-read of the Book of Tony: page 516, paragraph 5, to be exact.