Lady Nugee is “calling out” Donald Trump for his intervention in Venezuela this morning – which will leave Delta Force quaking in their boots. The Labour chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee is at odds with the Prime Minister…
No10 is trying not to offend Washington further by taking a muted position on the operation to lift Maduro out of the country. Meanwhile, Thornberry writes in the Mirror:
“Is Trump allowed to do that? Well no. You really aren’t allowed to walk into other countries and arrest the leadership, then take them off to be tried in your domestic court. Where would it end? Anyway, it’s not really about drugs, it’s about oil. If it was about drugs, there are many other countries that are much bigger sources of illicit drugs, Venezuela is a long way down the list.”
Thornberry has a curious record on Venezuela, having failed to call for a change to the Maduro regime when she was Shadow Foreign Secretary under Corbyn. In 2019 she refused to recognise Juan Guaido as the country’s interim president, defying the US, European countries, and UK government. Labour’s position on the issue has long been Caracas…
The ex-Labour leader laid a wreath in Islington with his old pal and snubbed ministerial hopeful Lady Nugee yesterday. At least Thornberry’s still in Labour…
Corbo was characteristically scruffy for the solemn event. Looks like a Shadow Cabinet meeting of old…
Emily Thornberry has found something new to moan about other than being snubbed from grabbing a Cabinet position – the next US President. When asked about her previous remarks calling Trump a “racist, sexual predator,” Thornberry doubled down, responding with a straightforward “Yes, well, he is. But he’s also President of the US.” Lady Nugee said on the Today Programme:
A reminder: she’s the Labour chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. Somehow she’s still mystified as to why she’s not sitting in the Cabinet…
Of all the plum jobs in the Commons, Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee (FASC) is the sweetest. It gives the incumbent a strong media platform, endless global jollies, and the chance to quiz David Lammy, which should be nothing if not entertaining…
When Emily Thornberry was brutally but hilariously binned from the incoming Labour Government, she launched a hardcore lobbying campaign to become FASC chairman. Lady Nugee ‘put the thumbscrews on’, said one Labour MP, pressuring her parliamentary colleagues to back her and help her recover from the embarrassment of not getting a front bench role. There’s a little local difficulty however, which is being talked about on the Labour benches…
Thornberry is best friends with scandal-wrecked Lord Alli. She lived on the same street as him in the 1990s, and is credited with actually introducing Alli to the party in the first place: ‘Lord Alli was encouraged to join Labour by his next-door neighbour, Emily Thornberry‘. As Guido revealed, Alli has some exotic foreign policy preferences, joining figures such as Jeremy Corbyn as one of the very few British parliamentarians to go into bat for – checks notes – Bashar al Assad. As he boasted himself in a Lords debate: “I have visited Syria on a number of occasions and held talks with President Assad on several.”
And which Shadow Foreign Secretary caused outrage in 2018 when they praised Assad’s “depth and breadth of support” which is greater “than is recognised in the west”? Only Lady Nugee herself. An eyebrow raising coincidence making Labour MPs nervous about her chairmanship…
75 days have now passed since Starmer appointed his army of ministers and reporters are still prompting Emily Thornberry whether she’s upset that she wasn’t put in Cabinet. Or any government job for that matter…
Most of the country will probably have heard the shtick by now as Kay Burley this morning asks Thornberry how she felt:
“Oh I was very disappointed, yeah. I was very disappointed. I’d continually been a member of the Shadow Cabinet for eight and a half years so I think I was the longest serving Shadow Cabinet member. So I had expected to be in the Cabinet and I’d spent a long time in Parliament sort of talking and now you’re in government you get a chance to actually do something, and my political heroes are people who actually achieve things, so I was really hoping to have the opportunity of doing that – but it wasn’t to be.“
Hopefully Emily will be too busy with her new job as chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee to keep the moanathon going for too much longer. She today offers incisive analysis on the US election by claiming that if Trump became president he would “just say to Putin: ‘Well, okay, you’ve won.’ We can’t allow that to happen, we can’t allow Putin to move into Kyiv.” Heavy-hitting stuff…
Backbench MP Emily Thornberry has been chatting to Iain Dale on the latest For The Many podcast. Dale offered his commiserations over the job snub: “There were a couple of spaces being made and, OK, Starmer wanted a different person as Attorney General fair enough but the fact that he didn’t give you one of those other positions, I thought it was terrible.” Emily had another opportunity to say how upset she was…
Ever the optimist, Thornberry gave a concise pitch for herself:
“I’d been the longest serving Shadow Cabinet member you know I did eight and a half years continually and then I had done a couple of years before that… I would really like to have a chance to do something. I mean, I can do talking, I can do holding people to account, I can do that and I’ll do it well. But I would like to do something.“
Believe it or not, she’s not even fussed about the position:
“I didn’t mind not being Attorney General… but I would like to have done something else… I’d like to have the experience of being a minister. I mean actually I’ve been in Parliament for nearly 20 years and I haven’t. So I was a bag carrier in the last government for Ed Miliband but I was never actually a minister.“
Thornberry rounded off with an innocent observation: “I certainly really enjoyed being Shadow Foreign Secretary.” Guido is convinced by the pitch and would like to declare his support for E.T. The time has come for Lammy to do the decent thing and step aside…
Sarah Pochin at Reform Scotland’s manifesto launch event: “I really wanted to come on in a Reform tartan burka, but apparently I wasn’t allowed… One day let’s do one of these events not live-streamed. We’ll do all the naughty stuff…”