Career diplomats should go on strike over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Ambassador to Washington, and Donald Trump should refuse to accept his credentials because of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Elsewhere in the peerage, Thangam Debbonaire will soon be a Minister, but her ennoblement and Thérèse Coffey's are interesting admissions that they stood no chance of regaining their Commons seats. For the foreseeable future, the Conservatives have conceded Suffolk Coastal to Labour, while Labour has conceded Bristol Central to the Greens. But the lack of ermine for Liz Truss indicates her delusion that one day she will be back on the green benches and thus as Prime Minister. Note that Jacob Rees-Mogg is also content to remain plain Sir Jacob. The DUP started nominating Peers once it had five MPs, so was Reform UK just not asked, or did it not propose anyone, or were all of its suggestions rejected by the Appointments Commission? Any one of those would be a story, and one of them must be true.
Congratulations to my former colleague, Toby Young, who becomes a second generation Peer of the Realm, in succession to the author of The Rise of the Meritocracy. But does anyone know which party Luciana Berger was now in? Does she? She has been saying for five years that she was on the cusp of having this site closed down. There is more chance of the abolition of her latest chamber.
And were there not supposed to be citations for new appointments to the House of Lords? Does anyone have them for today's 38? Perhaps we should compose them? In both cases, I only found out some years later, but twice in my time, I have been on the very, very, very long list for the Upper House, once when Blue Labour was at the peak of its influence over Ed Miliband's Leadership, and again in the heady early days of Jeremy Corbyn's. There were no citations in those days.
Badenoch made some excellent appointments not least Toby Young and Professor Nigel Biggar, the anti-woke priest and Cambridge academic who wound up the leftwing cabal of Cambridge dons by defending British colonialism.
ReplyDeleteIf they are taking the Tory Whip, then they have both sold out.
DeleteNo, they’ll probably end up in Reform UK.
ReplyDeleteOh, no, they are hardly failed Tories.
DeleteDebbonaire had a go at you on Twitter for being rude about Berger.
ReplyDeleteI was not rude. I stated a well-known fact.
Delete“they are hardly failed Tories”
ReplyDeleteReform UK is the real Opposition-it’s the Tories that have failed of course.
Andrea Jenkyns, a Boris Johnson fangirl who had lost her parliamentary seat, was able to walk into Reform and just announce herself as a Mayoral candidate. Not only on the same day. In the same speech.
DeleteObviously because she’d been negotiating that with Reform for months before she publicly announced it which is how it works (if you know anything about politics). How silly of Reform to pick a high-profile former member of the last government for their mayoral candidate as opposed to a candidate no one has ever heard of with no experience in running things? Do you know anything about politics?
ReplyDelete"High-profile"? In your world, perhaps.
Delete