The taxpayer shouldn’t fund the prime minister’s photographer

John Rentoul asks who should pay for Boris Johnson’s court photographer

The PM’s photographer, Andrew Parsons, leaves 10 Downing Street (Getty Images)

Andrew Parsons works part-time and is paid the full-time equivalent of £100,000 a year as a special adviser. In other words, he is a political appointee as a temporary civil servant, one of 116 in government, 51 of whom work in the prime minister’s office. 

He is a photographer – a good one – employed to record Boris Johnson at work. Many of the photos of the prime minister you see on media websites or in the newspapers are his, and anyone can browse them all on the No 10 Flickr account. 

Parsons has worked for the Conservative Party and its leaders for a long time. In 2010, the new government of David Cameron employed him in the same role he holds today – only there was such a fuss about the prime minister employing a “vanity photographer” at public expense that he was taken off the payroll and his salary was met by the Conservative Party. 

Now he has been back on the public payroll since at least the election, and there has hardly been a murmur in the media about it.  

I am a firm believer in the value of special advisers: I think it is more democratic, and more likely to produce better decisions, if ministers have strong political support in addition to the civil service.  

I also enjoy Parsons’ work: the access he gives to the inner workings of No 10 is especially valuable when journalists can’t go there themselves (although we are told that the new media briefing centre is ready and waiting for us, vaccines permitting). But I am not sure that I should be paying his salary. Yes, there is a White House photographer – there is probably a gaggle of them, if that’s the right collective noun – but the US system is different, with a larger layer of political appointees at the top of it.  

There is a line between political advice and party propaganda that can be quite hard to draw. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, has a cultivated online profile, sometimes on Twitter featuring his own signature as a logo, at other times featuring the Tory party’s tree. The Treasury has a Flickr account too, although the photos of Sunak don’t say who took them. One of Sunak’s special advisers, Cass Horowitz, has been described by Tatler magazine as “doing a slick job marketing Rishi”.  

But I think in Parsons’ case, David Cameron was right, and his salary should be paid by the Conservative Party.  

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator