13 November 2024

Donald and Nigel’s day by the sea

Your daily dose of gossip from around Westminster.

Back to school for Treasury bean counter Darren Jones after fluffing a TV simple test. Talk is that the chief secretary is to receive media remedial training to avoid blundering into avoidable traps following an unfortunate mishap on Laura Kuenssberg’s Sunday chat show. She asked if employers raging about National Insurance rises should “suck it up” and he, after a preamble, answered: “Yes, it’s been designed that way.” Kapow! What is known as the “yes mistake” to a question triggered hostile suck-it-up headlines despite Jones never uttering the words. Lawyer Jones holds a bioscience degree and lists Cambridge and Harvard among his alma maters on his LinkedIn page. The brainiest, grumbled a colleague with barely two GCSEs to rub together, lack common sense, and so require hand-holding.

Woodrow Wilson visited Carlisle, Jimmy Carter Washington in Sunderland, Bill Clinton Coventry and George W Bush Sedgefield. Is Donald Trump going to Clacton-on-Sea? Nigel Farage’s entourage insist the Reform UK leader is on a promise from the US president-elect. One jester quipped Trump could show the local MP the way to the Essex resort.

Trade union comrades are sniggering that there is finally a strike that Unite firebrand Sharon Graham won’t champion. It’s by her own workforce. Unite staff represented by the rival GMB Union are voting on industrial action over alleged failures to address bullying accusations and claims of victimisation. The panto season would arrive early should Graham need to work from home to avoid crossing a picket line outside Unite HQ in London’s Holborn.

Despite computerised seat reservations crashing for ordinary passengers, seats at the front of an LNER service to London King’s Cross were kept free for Rishi Sunak, who clambered aboard with his brood at Northallerton. My first-class snout heard chortling as the train decelerated to a crawl through Grantham before picking up speed. “Perhaps Rishi asked it to slow so he could pay homage to Maggie,” wisecracked a fellow traveller. After leading the Tories to a historic thrashing, Thatcher’s ten-foot bronze statue in the town is more likely to handbag her successor but five.

Much travelled, elected and defeated George Galloway is hanging up his fedora. “I will be looking at the next general election from a beach somewhere in retirement,” the ex-ex-ex-ex-MP told an interviewer. The gorgeous one didn’t rule out, however, standing in a by-election before the 2029 national contest. Galloway boasted he’s the same 77kg weight aged 70 as he was at 32 when first elected for Glasgow Hillhead. Going into more parties than Liam and Noel Gallagher must be a political fitness regime in itself.