Wasting no time is windmill tilter Ed Miliband. The high-powered boss of a renewable energy company grumbled he and rival chiefs were given only three and a half minutes each to pitch to Keir Starmer’s Energy Secretary, who has been recycled from the Gordon Brown era. That’s barely long enough to boil an egg, never mind plug in to Green Ed’s grid. Another muttered the speed-dating could end in divorce between eco-electricity generators and a Labour former leader reborn as an environmental evangelist.
Trying to grow a beard is Darren Jones, who makes Tony look like a Corbynista when it comes to high Blairism. The Treasury chief secretary’s downy chin was mocked by Andrew Mitchell, the Tory shadow foreign secretary, reminding Jones how Thatcher banned beards in her cabinets. Starmer is more liberal. Durham Coalfield lad turned Business Secretary Johnny Reynolds sports a well-manicured beard. One junior minister suggested unkindly that the hair had slid down Reynolds’ face from a thinning head.
With almost as many leadership contenders as there are Tory MPs, the field is crowded to succeed limbo-land Rishi Sunak, who can’t wait to be out of the party’s top job. Talk of a caretaker to oversee the contest surfaces whenever two or more dazed Tories gather. Action man David Davis is the latest to be touted alongside Jeremy Hunt, Iain Duncan Smith and Oliver Dowden. The broken-nosed former SAS reservist would ensure a clean fight. Pipped to the crown in 2005 by David Cameron, Davis hisses he was recently told a poll asserting Lord Dave was more popular was actually invented.
Concern over Alan Milburn’s commercial interests torpedoed moves to appoint him chair of NHS England, whispered a well-placed snout. Health secretary in the Blair years, he has banked a fortune from private health firms. The upside for Wes Streeting is that critics won’t be able to claim a predecessor is pulling his strings.
Ruthless Starmer played rough, I discovered, hammering Sunak for cracking a trans joke while, he asserted repeatedly, the mother of the murdered teenager Brianna Ghey watched from the public gallery. Esther Ghey told me she was walking up the stairs so didn’t hear it, and is unconcerned by the row. Sunak never had an answer to Starmer’s jibes. Turns out he didn’t need one.
Old hands are keen to read how much GB News pays Nigel Farage now he’s required to register outside earnings. Reform UK’s self-appointed leader will miss votes if he’s presenting a show three evenings a week. Labour using its landslide to ban most second jobs for MPs might be a division Farage would wish to attend.
[See also: Anneliese Dodds’ long shadow in the cabinet]
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This article appears in the 17 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The American Berserk