The latest update to the Register of Members’ Financial Interests is now online. Suella Braverman is £100,000 richer after spending 200 hours handcuffed to Katie Price for Channel 4’s Celebrity Handcuffed. Elsewhere in her entry, a PR firm forked out £800 for 40 copies of her book, while the Prosperity Institute covered her £6,990 launch party…
Rishi Sunak’s diary is filling up nicely. Private equity firm Hg Capital paid him £113,104.76 for one speaking engagement lasting four hours. An hourly rate of more than £28,000…
Tom Tugendhat has found himself a pair of advisory roles worth roughly £79,000 a year. Washington’s Fortius Global wants eight hours a month for $72,000, and Paris-based Latour Capital is paying €30,000 for just 42 hours annually…
Sharon Hodgson, who chairs the APPG on Ticket Abuse, accepted £4,000 of tickets to An Evening with Barack Obama, an event she says let her meet people with “similar ticketing concerns”. Jim McMahon was also there, courtesy of the Co-op…
Rachel Reeves, who spent two years battering small businesses, farmers, young workers, the self-employed, and pensioners as Chancellor, accepted a £550 portrait of herself at the despatch box. At least someone looks back on those moments fondly…
Last but not least, Mark Pritchard’s trip to a security forum in Doha came with £18,218 of flights, paid for by the Soufan Center. Someone’s flying at the front…
As always, nice work if you can get it…
The Ministry of Justice is spending an average of £7.2 million per prison on heat pumps, solar panels, and heating upgrades. Anyone want to focus on building actual cells?
The costs came in a parliamentary answer to Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy, who asked about the Accelerated Houseblocks Delivery Programme – the scheme to add new wings to six existing jails. New barless windows contribute a further £1.7 million per project. Got to keep it homely…
The MoJ estimates each new prison place costs £600,000. So each project’s heating, solar bill, and nice window project costs the same as 15 new places. Across six jails that comes to over £53.4 million – enough for 89 additional places. Every little helps…
At the new HMP Welland Oaks planners demanded 29.4 hectares of ‘biodiversity net gain’, which is more than two and a half times the 10% legal minimum. Cells get underfloor heating and the rest of the prison gets 460 barless windows…
Back in 2018, state-owned Transport for Wales splashed out on a fleet of Class 398 tram-trains from Stadler. That cost more than £200 million of taxpayers’ money…
Three and a half years later, most of the fleet is still parked up in TfW’s new £100 million depot at Taff’s Well. They were meant to be fully operational by 2022, now that date has slipped to 2027…
As it stands, of the 36 tram-trains, 16 have passed their safety checks, and 20 are yet to complete the checks the rail regulator requires. 6 tram-trains, worth about £8m each, which can run both on urban streets and rail, are currently in passenger testing across the network. The King has ridden one for PR purposes. Keir Starmer has ridden one for PR purposes. Actual fare-paying commuters? Nearly zero…
TfW’s excuses are a full house on the bingo card: Covid, Ukraine (inexplicably), supply chains etc. TfW also bought a batch of temporary trains to fill the gap, at an additional cost to the taxpayer. According to TfW, they “got delivered earlier and the reliability was better”, so the old trams are more effective than the new ones. The project is the biggest infrastructure programme since devolution. More to come under Burnham’s relentless nationalisation push…
Years of sycophantic posts from senior Labour figures still up of course…
The Justice Secretary is posting about flying to New York and meeting the NFL on the same day that his department releases 650 prisoners early. The Norriswave…
650 offenders are leaving jails in England and Wales today in the third batch of Labour’s early releases. After serving one third of their sentence…
1,350 prisoners were let out by Labour in the first two waves of the scheme. It will be more than 2,500 by the end of the year…
Meanwhile the Ministry of Justice has today posted a video in which the Justice Secretary Alex Norris boasts about meeting the NFL in New York and how they provide opportunities for people to become coaches in Britain. He says he is a “big fan of” the NFL. Nice to know, pal…
Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy tells Guido:
“Labour are releasing 650 dangerous criminals today, but the Justice Secretary seems more concerned with bragging about his taxpayer funded trip to New York.
Today he should be focused on the victims who are living in fear thanks to his early release scheme, and his broken promise that all these criminals would be tagged.”
The dodgy tagging…
DCMS has spent nearly £400,000 since April on ‘security and facilities’ at Blythe House, the West Kensington museum store it has been trying to sell since 2022. £400,000 to sweep some cobwebs and guard an empty building…
Payments to Chase Services Group and Vertex Services Group have arrived every month, totalling £393,507. The Science Museum moved out in 2024, yet the building remains unsold. And DCMS has signed a new security contract running until January 2028…
Lucy Powell told Sky News that the Ed Miliband-Russell Brand interview happened in part because the ‘social media age’ had not begun by 2015:
“Look, I mean, he approached the Labour Party, he approached the campaign team, and we’re in very different times now. We weren’t in the social media age at the time – where you could maybe search things up and see allegations about somebody at the time. and as I say, if there was any suggestion at all, we were dealing with someone who was a known sexual predator at the time, then, of course, you know, no one would have done that. But as I say, he was a well known public figure. Lots of people from Hollywood to the BBC to many others gave this person a very, very powerful platform. And we didn’t know at the time, unfortunately. It was a different era.”