8 January 2025

No-fear Keir sidesteps naming Musk

Your daily dose of gossip from around Westminster.

Keir Starmer courageously sidestepping actually naming Elon Musk in his condemnation of the “lies and misinformation” disseminated on X was a dodge that perplexed Labour ministers and MPs. One usually loyal red boxer nervously clocked the omission before concluding it may have been a simple oversight. A more sceptical backbencher interpreted the unuttered words “Elon” and “Musk” as fresh evidence a herbivorous Starmer is terrified of triggering a war with Trump. No 10 insisted everybody knew who the PM was referring to, so there was absolutely no need to name the Tesla boss. Buy that Downing Street line and for £1,000 you can purchase the Tower of London which, “cough”, is mine to sell.

Bowler-hatted Labour battleship Alan West, a former first sea lord, was dismayed to discover his desk had vanished when revisiting a yesteryears berth. The room in the old War Office on Whitehall is now a suite in the five-star hotel Raffles, where a night’s board and lodging exceeds by some margin the peer’s £361 tax-free daily allowance. Lord West of Spithead designated the missing work surface as furniture of historic significance. When waters were choppy with the CIA, the ermined seadog reminisced within earshot of a radar-lugged snout, Brits would defuse American ire by telling them John Profumo and Christine Keeler had sex on that very desk.

Musk ending his bromance with Nigel Farage united Westminster in a guessing game about who could head Reform UK if the Clacton cuckoo suddenly flew the nest. Ill-tempered deposed leader Richard “The Hairdresser” Tice might fancy another go, and ex-Southampton Football Club chair Rupert Lowe, nominated by Musk, noticeably didn’t rule himself out, while “30p Lee” Anderson has never knowingly been short of ambition. Grooming himself is Matthew Goodwin, a reactionary Boswell to Farage’s beery Dr Johnson, with his own show on the Reform TV channel formally known as GB News.

Daughter of a Catholic migrant father from an EU republic over the water, Tory ex-cabinet minister Nadine Dorries is reportedly the latest Brexiteer contemplating applying for an Irish passport to restore personal freedom of movement – a right she and others stripped from tens of millions of Britons. Do as I say, not as I do?

Red prince Hamish Falconer, foreign minister son of Labour peer Charlie, was assured by officials that Syrian rebels would not topple Bashar al-Assad a week before the tyrant fled to Moscow and HTS Islamists rolled into Damascus. The Foreign Office styles itself as a Rolls-Royce ministry. More a clapped-out Clio, sniffed a Westminster veteran.