Free Gear Keir needs to clean up his act fast or the real grasping sleazebag Tories will be back

As the Tory Conference looms into sight like a rusty old tanker sinking on the grey horizon I’ve been ­reminiscing about the good old days.

How, back in the 90s, I was a regular at these true blue shindigs, my brief being to show Mirror readers that they were saddled with the sleaziest tribe of leaders since the pimps who ran Sodom and Gomorrah.

I would gate crash Young ­Conservative balls and report back on coked-up, chinless goons, mooning on the dance floor before screeching at low-paid ­waitresses for more champagne.

I would pester MPs accused of taking backhanders in brown ­envelopes, married ministers having affairs or enjoying “three-in-the-bed” romps, thus making a mockery of John Major’s vow to get “back to basics”.

We witnessed the return of sleaze in the dying years of this latest rabble with Partygate, tractor porn, sexual harassment, breaking their own Covid rules to seduce mistresses or visit castles and the handing of eye-popping contracts to their own donors.

And after 14 years of believing they were untouchable the disgusted ­electorate booted them out, handing Labour a landslide.

So who would have thought, three months after Labour were elected on a pledge to serve no one but the people, the message from their first party conference would be drowned out by sleaze allegations.

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Who’d have thought that new Prime Minister Keir Starmer would have Sky’s Beth Rigby telling him how bad his seemingly insatiable appetite for freebies looks, and asking if he’s “a continuity Johnson” as he sat in New York supposedly trying to stop World War Three.

And, sadly, Labour hasn’t got a designer-clad leg to stand on.

When we should have been talking about early achievements like the Hillsborough Law, improved workers’ rights and Great British Energy, the only topic is why the new PM needed a seven-week stay in an £18million penthouse and his refusal to buy his own clothes or pay for Taylor Swift concert tickets.

Starmers’ list of freebies, like those of senior Cabinet colleagues, may have been declared, and is ­comparatively not scandalous, but it leaves a government largely elected in the belief they were the antidote to political cronyism wide open to ­accusations of hypocrisy.

Next week in Birmingham every Tory speaker will gleefully hammer home the jibes about Free Gear Keir and how the British electorate were conned by a shower of freeloaders. And it will be hard to put up a defence.

The worrying thing is this image of Labour being on the take has come after such a brief time in power, whereas under the Tories it came at the end of their days. On the positive side, it gives Labour’s ministers a chance to prove they are indeed a government in the service of people, not themselves, long before they need to seek re-election.

This early shot across the bows is a sobering reminder of the brutality of life at the centre of power and offers them a chance to clean up their act. They need to grasp it quickly.

The self-styled “grown-ups” need to maturely ask themselves how every personal decision might look when it comes out in the wash.

Because the next election will soon come around and I can’t face once again being saddled with the true party of grasping sleazebags.