Partygate dragged on, with Boris and Rishi receiving absurd fines for attending a meeting that had supermarket sandwiches for Boris’s birthday – a revelation initially made without the bat of an eyelid at the time in that week’s Sunday Time’s long read. It didn’t help the Partygate inquiry that it emerged Sue Gray’s Queen’s Counsel advisor for the report was a card-carrying anti-Brexit, anti-Boris Labour member…
As Ukraine slowly faded from the splash of every day’s front pages, our relations with another country came into the spotlight: Rwanda. In April, Priti Patel signed a new deal with the African nation, set to provide a major disincentive to people wanting to illegally enter the UK by shipping off asylum claimants to be processed abroad. Months later and it’s precisely zero migrants have departed.
The lack of any progress on this major Home Office policy will have delighted the department’s hard-left, anti-democratic civil servants. Six days after the policy was announced, Guido revealed that Home Office civil servants used an officially organised online consultation to discuss how to block the move, comparing themselves to Germans “only obeying orders” and proposed going on strike to jeopardise the plans. Sadly Rishi’s scrapped plans to sack thousands of civil servants. Guido knew a good place to start…
Meanwhile, rows in the Commons dominated much of Guido’s most-read coverage, not least ‘Growlergate’, the row sparked by the Mail on Sunday about whether Angela Rayner was using Basic Instinct tactics to distract the PM during PMQs. The claim – eventually revealed to have come from Rayner herself while drunkenly chatting to a group of Tory MPs – sparked an almighty row, with Ofcom receiving 6,000 complaints and being condemned by Labour politicians. Quite a different reaction to what was said at the time…
In media news, April saw the launch of TalkTV, the exciting, glossy competitor to GB News. Unfortunately, eight months on and the channel flatlined. Guido relentlessly kept track of Piers Morgan’s viewing figures, after his launch episode – an interview with Donald Trump – did rather well and saw relentless boasting from Morgan about the views. Unsurprisingly he failed to keep the viewers’ interest beyond his big-name guest interviews, dropping to around 10,000 an episode. Guido’s first reporting of the BARB figures quickly saw him unfollowed by free speech-loving Piers*…
Meanwhile Sky News also suffered embarrassment after Guido published screenshots showing Inzamam Rashid – the northern correspondent who was suspended in 2021 for attending Kay’s lockdown-breaking party – complaining that the channel’s coverage of Ukraine had been “very white”. His culture war-stoking complaint was particularly offensive to his fellow reporters given a Sky News colleague had only recently been shot and wounded in the line of duty. The Telegraph also had an awkward moment after Guido revealed that Sir Lindsay had stripped one of their hacks of a parliamentary pass following a drunken moment in the Commons bar.
Extinction Rebellion – and the emerging Just Stop Oil – started hitting the headlines, with Guido’s favourite moment going to the clip of a climate loon gluing himself to an LBC microphone mid-interview. Julia Hartley-Brewer slamming an eco-activist Question Time audience member proved particularly popular…
Honourable mentions:
Headline of the month: Guido Backs #BallsForWakefield
*It probably didn’t help that Guido pointed out more people have seen Piers in Nazi uniform than watched his show in the opening days…
