Sooner or later, every broadcaster has a marmalade-dropper live on air. For Patrick Christys, it came this morning, when Britain’s Got Talent star Francine Lewis appeared on GB News to discuss how she lost £90,000 to con artists. The interview was going smoothly enough until the last few minutes, when Lewis dropped the bombshell allegation that she’d caught her husband cheating last night:

“There’s so many scams going on all the time, but you know what’s ironic? I stuck with my husband through this whole thing, and last night I found out he was cheating on me with his best friend’s girlfriend…”

Watch as Christys practically scoops his jaw off the floor in possibly the most hysterical moment in GB News history…

If the government is really promising to cut £5.5 billion in waste over the next year, the public sector obviously hasn’t got the memo yet. In the last few weeks, HMRC, Homes England, and UK Research and Innovation have all published new job listings for ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ managers with salaries starting at £43,523, and rising all the way up to £72,202. Take comfort in knowing when the taxman / woman / person / gender outlaw raids your pockets, they’re doing it in a diverse and inclusive way…

In 2020, Homes England – which until now, Guido assumed was responsible for building more houses – published its inaugural Equality, Diversity and Inclusion report, which included a list of the diversity team’s achievements in its first year. Here’s a taste of what their new hire will be building on:

• Introduction of gender neutral toilets in some of our offices.

• Creation of external networks to improve inclusivity within the property and construction industries

• Contributing to the development of a diversity calendar to drive ongoing engagement with colleagues.

Forget the housing crisis: at least some of the Homes England offices have gender neutral toilets.

“Taxpayers are sick of paying for diversity non-jobs. These latest hires by unquenchable quangos simply add insult to injury. Government bodies should scrap these unnecessary posts.”

Some politicians live to rile up their opponents, others get on with hard policy. Kwasi Kwarteng has succeeded in both today as he celebrated International Earth Day, the day every 22^nd April used to “demonstrate support for environmental protection”. Despite ongoing protests from the eco loons over the Extinction Rebellion, and their threats to ramp up the frequency of them, how did the UK energy secretary mark the day? 

I welcome @bp_UK's plans to develop the Murlach field in the North Sea.

The transition to cheap, clean power can’t happen overnight. We'll need oil and gas for decades. That’s a matter of fact.

I’d much rather we source more of our gas domestically.https://t.co/ZeOmyRgedg

— Kwasi Kwarteng (@KwasiKwarteng) April 22, 2022

By celebrating yesterday’s announcement from BP of plans to develop the Murlach oil and gas field in the North Sea – a project expected to recover 25.9 million barrels of oil and 602 million cubic metres of gas. A very happy Earth day to all co-conspirators…

The fallout from Priti’s Rwanda policy continues in earnest over in Woke Whitehall. After Guido revealed Home Office civil servants had slammed the immigration plan as “racist” on a private forum with Permanent Secretary Matthew Rycroft – with some mandarins even threatening to “organise and resist” – this morning both the Times and the Guardian follow up with claims that Rycroft erupted at staff for leaking the discussion to Guido and told them to get on with the job. Rycroft even had to remind them what that actually means: ministers decide, and officials implement. Unelected bureaucrats don’t have the authority to dictate policy based on what their liberal friends will think of them.

One of the four supposed ‘core values‘ of the civil service is impartiality. All staff are supposed to “serve equally well governments of different political persuasions.” Yet time and again, stories emerge of Whitehall mandarins hosting radical, anti-government activists, sending departments on pointless woke workshops, and insisting staff add pronouns to their emails. It’s not just that Whitehall is wasteful; there is a deep ideological rot within it that, for all the ministerial talk, still hasn’t been addressed.

A civil service source warns Guido of the extent of the problem, claiming there is a “complete institutional capture” throughout, and that while not every employee is a lentil-munching Guardianista, the “mouthy ones are“. Those who are sceptical of the woke orthodoxy, particularly at a more junior level, often stay quiet just to avoid landing on “the wrong side of peers and superiors“. The Home Office debacle is just the tip of the iceberg – this is a bigger problem that will only get worse unless ministers take it seriously, and quickly. Universities are pumping out woke-minded graduates who are taking the warped mores and norms of the student union into the civil service…

There was some consternation and amusement when word went round Guardian towers that Ben Riley-Smith, The Telegraph’s political editor for the last year, had applied for the vacant political editor’s position at The Guardian. Audacious and unprecedented…

It is a tribute to the unhappiness at Telegraph towers that a senior hack would apply for a job transfer to their polar opposite rivals. Asking around colleagues as to whether he would fit in with the somewhat different editorial stance, the memorable line quipped to Guido was that Ben is an “Etonian shapeshifter” who would more than cope. The Guardian could certainly benefit from some journalistic political insight with more Eton-influenced sympathies…

A senior source said the “Telegraph is a horrible place and you’re always on death row” under editor Chris Evans’ reign of terror. A more junior source citing Riley-Smith’s “byline banditry” says he won’t be mourned if he moved. Guido wishes him luck…