Congratulations to Corbyn who, as ever on foreign policy issues, has put out this absurd take regarding last night’s AUKUS agreement:

Starting a new cold war will not bring peace, justice and human rights to the world. #AUKUS

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) September 16, 2021

Accusing the agreement between the US, UK and Australia of being akin to actions during the cold war is an argument straight out of the CCP’s ‘lines to take’, who this morning said AUKUS should “shake off their Cold-War mentality and ideological prejudice.” It would be fascinating to know how Corbyn thinks ignoring China’s domestic and foreign human rights abuses – from the Uighurs to Hong Kong – can result in “peace, justice and human rights”, as Corbyn calls for. Guido supposes sharing anti-western attack lines is precisely the sort of borderless egalitarianism of which Marx would have been proud…

After cancelling plans for a tv channel earlier this year after concluding it was not “commercially viable”, it appears News UK has now reversed that decision. The company will now launch a channel, talkTV, early next year. More details are to follow, however a certain Mr Piers Morgan has been tweeting and Instagramming hints of an impending new job announcement all morning:

It couldn’t possibly be connected, could it?

UPDATE: News UK releases further details:

“The channel will be streamed live and made widely available on all platforms including linear TV and OTT with content available across social media as well as News UK’s own broad inventory of websites and apps. Everyone in the UK will be able to access the channel, live or on-demand, either on their television or on any personal device. 

talkTV will offer a mix of programming from News UK’s stable of household brands. There will be proper hourly news bulletins, sports and entertainment shows as well as current affairs, debate, opinion and documentaries. 

New format shows will be introduced using talent from our own brands – talkRADIO, talkSPORT, Virgin Radio, Times Radio, The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times. 

News UK will hire some exceptional new talent to join a schedule of prime time programming for the evenings.”

UPDATE II: Piers’ move confirmed. He’ll join News Corp and FOX News Media in a global deal, that will see him

• Presenting a new weeknight TV show broadcast in the UK, US and Australia
• Two weekly columns online for the New York Post and The Sun
• HarperCollins will publish a follow up to the Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller, Wake Up
• Presenting a series of True Crime documentaries

It’s a good thing he wasn’t too badly injured – he’d have never got an ambulance…

UPDATE: Humza has commented that while he’s “all for media scrutiny & never [shies] away from it”, he doesn’t like the fact this video is doing the rounds:

All for media scrutiny & never shy away from it. Just not sure there is need or purpose to tweet out a video of me falling over while injured. If anyone else had fallen over while on crutches, a knee scooter, or in a wheelchair would your first instinct be to film it & tweet out? https://t.co/sM7ue70CDg

— Humza Yousaf (@HumzaYousaf) September 16, 2021

Which is an odd argument given he didn’t have such quibbles over potential injury when joking about Douglas Ross “decking it” while refereeing in 2018

Best moment of the 2nd half - Douglas Ross MP decks it a belter! Can't wait to see the meme...

— Humza Yousaf (@HumzaYousaf) May 19, 2018

He can dish it out, he just can’t take it…

The usual suspects were aghast at Nadine Dorries’s appointment as Culture Secretary yesterday: James O’Brien – whom she once labeled a “public school posh boy f**k wit” – is appalled; Anna Soubry thinks it shows “everything that’s wrong and rotten” with Boris’s leadership; Jolyon’s already threatened to send a judicial review pre-action protocol letter (obviously). She’s been in the job for 17 hours and is already annoying all the right people… 

Given Jess Brammar’s appointment as executive editor of BBC News yesterday, Guido thought it’d be worth reminding her about the person she’ll now be dealing with at the top of DCMS. In 2014, Dorries advocated for reforming the licence fee, having added her name to a bill amendment that would’ve decriminalised its non-payment. Writing on her blog, she said:

“The BBC as an organisation has become too big, too badly designed and consistently badly managed. Over-promoted television producers, it turns out, cannot run a large organisation efficiently or effectively. Who would have guessed?”

“The model of the BBC, which is in effect state run television, is outdated in this modern world of media and communication. Such a structure of payment and aggressive persecution would be more in keeping in a soviet style country.”

Her views on the TV licence remained the same several years later:

July 2017: “My issue is not what talented people paid but more that BBC hounded elderly on state pensions all way to jail #licencefee #BBCsalaries”

March 2018: “The public are paying a fee/tax for a biased left wing organisation which is seriously failing in its political representation, from the top down.”

She’s also had a few choice words for BBC management:

January 2018: “You are breaking the law paying women less than men and provided cover for despicable paedo Saville #UnfitForPurpose”

While yesterday may not have been great for Dominic Raab, at least he can take solace in the fact he had a better reshuffle than Robert Peston. ITV’s senile senior political reporter spent all day tweeting every thought process, speculation and briefing with the acumen and insight of a first-year politics student. Some of the highlights included:

• Assuming Dowden would be new education secretary. He became party chair.
• Speculating Mark Spencer would be DEFRA secretary. This isn’t just any cock up…
• Implying Priti Patel was going to get the sack.
• Claiming Dowden “may be the last member of the cabinet who campaigned against Brexit”. Apart from Sajid, Truss, Shapps, Spencer, Sharma, Wallace and Brandon Lewis…

Early yesterday afternoon, Peston’s show account asked ordinary Twitter punters for their reshuffle predictions, the replies to which proved only slightly less accurate than Robert’s own dribbling…

Peston’s incessant tweeting hasn’t been limited to the reshuffle, however. Co-conspirators will no doubt remember the time he admitted confusion over the concept of mirrors:

This is flipping weird. The phone cable should be visible in the mirror descending from @BorisJohnson’s watch, in this official Downing St picture. It’s not. What is going on? https://t.co/aRsrMSc0DT

— Robert Peston (@Peston) January 24, 2021

Or the time he couldn’t be bothered to call a press office, so just admitted to scientific illiteracy:

Can a scientist explain to me how the Lancet can identify an "adverse event classified as possibly related to a vaccine" in a person who was in the "control group" and therefore was given a placebo rather than the Oxford vaccine. Seems logically impossible

— Robert Peston (@Peston) December 8, 2020

Or the time he said DUP sectarianism would “drive unaligned voters to Sinn Fein”:

return NI’s biggest unionist party to religious sectarianism, and arguably thereby drive large numbers of unaligned voters to Sinn Fein, or will the new leader continue Foster’s drive to reposition the DUP as a centrist party of unionism? What happens matters not only to...

— Robert Peston (@Peston) April 28, 2021

Or the time he caused outrage by saying we were “paying teachers for not very much teaching”

The other important way of looking at this is that output was surprisingly robust in the first three months of the year - since much of the so-called inflation was (eg) the phenomenon of the government paying teachers for not very much teaching, when lockdown closed schools

— Robert Peston (@Peston) May 12, 2021

These are just the tip of the Twitter iceberg, into which ITV’s reputation crashes on an almost daily basis.

2012 Peston Twitter was more on the money…

Sparks flew on Newsnight yesterday as Charles Walker – who’d clearly had his Weetabix – turned up to defend Boris’s new cabinet against a Labour spokesperson and Anna Soubry. Some might say one and the same…

Nadine Dorries provided the biggest clash, as the eternally bitter Soubry ranted that her appointment “actually says everything that’s wrong and rotten about this prime minister’s stewardship of this country”. Charles Walker had some thoughts:

“Nadine Dorries has been a health minister, a minister of state, at an incredibly difficult time for the department of health; has been an extremely good minister for mental health; and really to come onto this programme and just trash her like that is just not a very nice thing to do to be perfectly honest”

Responding to Soubry’s claim that people don’t really care about reshuffles in the real world, Walker pointed out “Why is it the lead story on Newsnight, and why are you appearing on Newsnight?” Why indeed…