Gone a long way, Kingston and Surbiton’s Ed Davey – all the way to the Millennium Hotel, Mayfair. As the Energy and Climate Change Secretary he has acquired lots of wealthy associates, and so the Liberal Democrat’s constituency fundraiser on 6 June was held at a posh hotel in central London instead of a dreary local restaurant. My snout with the back of an envelope calculated 40 tables at £1,500 a pop must’ve raised £60,000 as heads of the power industry paid homage to the cabinet minister. Nick Clegg cracked a gag about Davey working in a pork pie factory and the porky minister scoffing them ever since, before an auction that included tea with Paddy Ashdown and a copy of the ConDem suicide pact signed by Clogg.
TUC bigwigs are wriggling to get off the General Strike hook after private advice from the lefty lawyer John Hendy, QC that “one out, all out” would be an unlawful action against the ConDem government. To protect union funds from sequestration under draconian laws banning political walkouts, the participating workers would each need to take a day off. “The General Holiday” isn’t a blood-curdling threat likely to vex Cameron.
A telling little right-wing moment outside a TV studio, involving Justine Greening and Nigel Farage. The International Development Secretary introduced herself to the Ukip leader instead of Farage greeting Greening – illustrating how, on the right of politics, it’s Ukip calling the shots over the Tories.
So, the Daily Express political hack Patrick O’Flynn will be standing for Ukip, as this column predicted, at next year’s Euro elections. The likeable if frighteningly Europhobic O’Flynn tortured a Fellowship of the Ring metaphor in his coming-out speech at a Ukip bash in Surrey. Tolkien is not an uncommon obsession on the right-wing fringes, but it appeared lost on Little Britain’s O’Frodo that the Fellowship was a coming together of peoples from diverse backgrounds in Middle-earth.
The servants’ quarters in the ancestral pile of Richard Drax MP – or, to give his full name, Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle- Erle-Drax – offer another insight into the world of Cameron’s toffs. Drax and his wife won an employment tribunal against a lesbian housekeeper. But the number of gossiping Tory MPs who were freely naming Drax in Westminster bars before then, while reporting restrictions were still keeping his name secret from voters, exposed the class war in a party split between the strivers and the inheritors.
Trade union anti-austerity buses will start touring Britain from 17 June to mobilise opposition to spending cuts and lower living standards. Unite is running two buses, with one each scheduled by the TUCs in London, Wales and Scotland. You wait ages for a union bus and then five come along all at once.
Kevin Maguire is the associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror
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