4 December 2024

Battle of the charity single jingles

Your daily dose of gossip from around Westminster.

Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Frequent flyer “never here Keir” dressing in white tie and tails to love-bomb Trump at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet – a rare foreign policy speech on home soil from a PM regularly abroad – was a walk in the park after an earlier uncomfortable encounter with Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely. The diplomat, a hard-liner from wanted man and accused war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, similarly praised Trump and, in front of Starmer, the last UK Conservative regime at a Labour Friends of Israel reception while pointedly offering zero warm words for the current government. My snout at the Park Plaza Hotel bash noted Starmer’s face could’ve won a poker game.

Throwing Louise Haigh under a bus she was regulating threatens to be a car crash for Starmer. Driving the now former transport secretary and voice of the left in cabinet off the road over a spent, relatively minor conviction before she was even an MP – which Starmer was informed about in opposition before appointing her – deepened general dismay on the Labour benches. Half suspect popular Red “ripping up the very roots of Thatcherism” Lou was scrapped for political rather than criminal offences. The other half worry the dismissal bar was dropped so low only Munchkin ministers will survive.

Differing figures from the Treasury and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) on the impact of even a feather-bedded inheritance tax deal for farmers and landowners raises questions about how much or little Whitehall silos communicate. Or, more pertinently, Chancellor Rachel Reeves and hubby Nicholas Joicey, second permanent secretary at a Defra. Environment Secretary Steve Reed claims he was blindsided after months of reassuring revolting Old MacDonalds that their wealth was protected. A harassed Labourite with a rural constituency groaned institutional Chinese walls left him pinned up against a dry stone wall.

Lib Dem stuntman Ed Davey faces festive competition in the Christmas charity-single charts from Labour songstress Carolyn Harris. The Swansea crooner’s “Everyone Deserves a Christmas” is up against his “Love Is Enough”. Harris is raising funds for food hampers, Davey for carers. Both tracks are appealing yet Noddy Holder’s £500k in annual royalties appears safe.

Stones and greenhouses and all that, but No 10 giggled that a weekend report, ahead of Starmer’s Labour reboot, claimed chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and cabinet office enforcer Pat McFadden “drank tequila” was a mishearing of a briefing they “drank to Keir”. Merry Christmas!