Keir Starmer has cancelled Rishi Sunak’s £40m helicopter contract in a rare display of common sense.

As prime minister, Sunak enjoyed using private jets and helicopters to carry him around the UK – so much so that he used them more than the previous three UK premiers; in his first seven months in office, he used RAF aircraft for domestic flights an average of once every eight days.

The contract was worth around £8 million a year – that’s £22,000 per day – and led to criticism for the prime minister who begrudged giving migrants £40 per day, an amount that could fit into the cost of his choppers 3,835 times.

This Site, reporting the cost, said that if you don’t like migrants, think what else this cash could fund, rather than plumping up Rishi Sunak’s ego: the NHS, sickness/disability benefits, investment in the economy – the possibilities are endless.

And Sunak even intervened to prolong the contract after the Ministry of Defence was set to stop renting two private helicopters to him in September 2023.

So we should acknowledge the sense in what the Labour leader has done, as reported by the BBC:

A Labour source said that the “Tories’ VIP helicopter service” was a “grossly wasteful” symbol of their government that was “totally out of touch with the problems facing the rest of the country”.

“It’s only right that this service is brought to an end,” the source added, claiming that the government is “getting a grip of the public finances.”

They said: “It tells you everything that, on top of the £22 billion black hole that the Tories were blowing in the public finances, Rishi Sunak’s priority was keeping his VIP helicopter service.”

It’s all for publicity, of course.

The contract has been cancelled on the day Keir Starmer made a speech about the return of Parliament being far from “business as usual”, with a “painful” Budget on its way in October.

One might see it as an attempt to show that Labour will do its best to fill that now-infamous £22 billion “black hole” in the public finances by attacking Tory waste.

But it may also be true to say – as the Conservatives have – that Starmer’s speech is an attempt to “distract the public from the promises Starmer made that he never had any intention of keeping”.

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