What’s essential about being chauffeured to a football game?

Being chauffeured in a car paid for by the taxpayer to watch your favourite football team is all part of the job of a politician. Or so they tell us.

Once again, we’re back discussing the issue of politicians accepting freebies.

Aberdeen fan Neil Gray – the health secretary – was driven to Hampden in his ministerial car to watch major cup ties against Celtic, Rangers and Hibs on three separate occasions.

Now as a football fan, I think I speak for most of us when I say that we would be more than happy to accept VIP tickets to watch our team play in major matches.

But only a select few have the privilege of being chauffeured there in a ministerial car funded by the public.

READ MORE: 

Health Secretary chauffeured to Hampden in ministerial car 

Was John Swinney ‘f***ing stupid’ to have endorsed Kamala Harris? 

‘Fear for women across the world’ under Donald Trump’s presidency  

Taylor Swift and more: What is Keir Starmer paying back? 

‘I was in the queue’ Gray admits Oasis ticket hunt 

It’s not just Gray who has done this. Remember Keir Starmer’s first few months as Prime Minister was plagued with news of freebies to Taylor Swift gigs and Arsenal football games, and of course, designer suits donated by a Labour peer.

There is no wrongdoing in this. Politicians are able to accept gifts for these types of excursions as long as they are openly declared, which in both Starmer and Gray’s case, has been done.

But what kind of work is being done at these events? And is it essential, as the Scottish Government tell us it is? 

In registering these gifts, Gray listed the work as discussing the “social impact investment in sport”, and on another occasion simply “sport”.

Health Secretary Neil Gray (Image: PA)

Watching your team play football is definitely covered by “sport” – but what “essential” government business did he discuss with the Scottish Football Association, who gifted him the tickets?

Official minutes, if there are any, were not released.

His ministerial colleague, Gillian Martin, came out in defence of the health secretary. He was, she understands, just “doing his job” as cabinet secretary for health and sport.

“He would use a ministerial car to get somewhere where he was doing a ministerial event and that’s pretty standard,” she told the BBC.

Presumably during the 90 minutes of the football game, very little government business would have been discussed.

Unless official notes or ministers are published to show the “essential” business, the public will rightly be outraged.

It comes at a time when budgets are massively strained and when people have having to make cutbacks in the own lives because of the cost of living crisis.

Health stats also show concern over the future of the NHS, with little signs of improvement.

Politicians, like us all, deserve to watch the sports they enjoy. That’s not up for debate.

But the bigger question, and the reason for the uproar, is around the issue of public money being used to facilitate this.

Taxpayers will want their money to go to solving these crises, not chauffeuring politicians around to football matches at Hampden.

Gray is one of the most senior ministers in Scotland, on a salary of £126,452. There is no doubt he could have afforded a train ticket or even a taxi out of his own pocket.