This week in Westminster has been dominated by accusations of sleaze and scandal and – in unrelated news – the latest update of the Register of Members’ Financial Interests is out. The big winner from this update is Matt Hancock, who’s just declared his £48,000 serialisation fee from the Mail and £320,000 I’m A Celeb holiday pay. That works out to £17,800 for every day he spent away from his constituents…
Jeremy Corbyn is also not doing so badly. The grifting grandpa raked in £78,000 more from his legal fee war chest – funded by the many for the few – as he also took home £50,000 in a donation (again for legal fees) from one Wael Kabbani. After Jez settled his case, an update to his gofundme claimed he was liable for £900,000 in legal fees. He’s currently raised about half of that and, by Guido’s calculations, has declared just over £260,000. With Kabbani’s £50,000 on top, he’s still got a long way to go. It seems Jeremy might have to go Russian cap in hand for a while longer…
If there’s a major upset at the next election, at least Emily Thornberry can rest easy knowing there’s always showbiz to fall back on. Lady Nugee earned £250 from her singsong stint on Matt Forde’s podcast. Man of the people, Lee Anderson is also living up to his salt of the earth credentials. He received a donation of £15,000 from… the Carlton Club.
Amongst other new declarations that might be of interest:
- Jess Phillips received £2,700 from her Paper Review slot.
- Ed “we need greater transparency” Davey raked in £7,500 from Lib Dem donors.
- Liz Saville Roberts and Chris Stephens brought in a collective £63,000 in union funding for their work as union committee chairs.
- Anthony Mangnall had a successful fundraising event, raising £8,000.
- Steve Baker received £10,000 from Neil Record.
- John Healey got £43,000 in funding to support his work as Shadow Defence Secretary.
Co-conspirators can read the full register here.
Emily Thornberry has rounded off the year with one final, festive flourish. Appearing on Matt Forde’s Political Party podcast, Thornberry gave Angela Eagle a run for her money by belting out her own rendition of 12 Day of Christmas in front of the packed audience:
“In the twelve years of shitmas, the Tories gave to me:
Twelve lockdown parties, eleven percent inflation, Number 10 in meltdown, nine jobs for Barclay, eight feuding factions, seven minted Chancellors, six percent fixed rates, five failed PMs, four ethics chiefs, three Grant Shapps, two Jungle Jerks, and a crashed economy….”
Ho, ho, ho…
“What an honour to be at this despatch box facing the next Prime Minister as she awaits her call from the Palace”…
Some of us remember that Thornberry ran for the Labour leadership herself. She failed to even make it on to the ballot…
Responding to 2019 accusations that she was a ‘champagne socialist’, Shadow Attorney General hit back saying she is, in fact, a “blue vodka and oyster socialist to you mate”. Now she’s going about proving it…
Taking to Instagram, Thornberry showed off her lovely father’s day breakfast spread from this Sunday, replete with pastries, juice, flowers, bread… and a £28 bottle of vodka.
Guido’s sympathetic to the stresses of family life, though breakfast might be a tad early for Emily’s coping strategy…
Whatever you think about Lady Nugee, she is at least a good sport – though one anecdote on her latest interview with Iain Dale suggests she may be slightly too keen to play footsie with the electorate. She recounts that during an EU election campaign, while heavily pregnant, she was stopped by a voter who asked for a photo… of her feet.
“I was hugely pregnant and about to pop, and I was asked to do some leaflet delivery. So I was going down a particular street and I couldn’t get my feet into anything because I was just enormous, so I had these birkenstocks. I’m waddling up and down the road with these leaflets for the European elections and this guy goes by on a bicycle. Anyway I carry on and he comes back again and he stops.
Eventually he comes over to me and he says ‘hello, who are you’ and I say ‘hello, my name’s Emily’, and he said ‘what are you doing?’ and I said ‘got these leaflets for the European elections’ and I explained to him what the elections were about and why and who you should vote for; and then he said ‘I see… would you mind if I took your photo?’ and I thought ‘right, another vote, ok’ so I sort of stood there and smiled.
He said ‘no, no, of your feet’. I swear he took a photograph of my feet and then he gave me a card and on it there was this website and I look it up on this website and he’s got a series of portraits of women and he goes like ‘Candy, met on Camden Market, she was buying fruit for her aunty’, ‘Emily, canvassing for the Labour Party’ – a picture of my feet!”
Before you ask, Guido has been unable to find this website, though regrettably stumbled across another seemingly popular website for people with said preference, where Emily’s feet have been ranked just 2.5 stars by users. An unpleasant browse through other female politicians revealed this is relatively low as a ranking, though does beat Mrs T’s paltry 2 stars:
- Priti Patel – 4.5⭐️
- Penny Mordaunt – 4.5⭐️
- Nicola Sturgeon – 4⭐️
- Andrea Leadsom – 3.5⭐️
- Angela Rayner – 3.5 ⭐️
- Lisa Nandy – 3⭐️
- Caroline Lucas – 2.5⭐️
- Thornberry – 2.5⭐️
- Thatcher – 2⭐️
Guido sincerely hopes this squalid investigation staves any co-conspirators off trying to find the website themselves…
A bit of a tortured metaphor from Emily Thornberry last night as she attempted to dismantle the government’s new British Bill of Rights, publishing this morning. Appearing on Newsnight to criticise the Tories for “just choos[ing] the bits they like and the bits they don’t” over plans to detach UK courts from the European Court of Human Rights, Thornberry revealed what she thinks is “really going on” with the announcement:
“Do you know what I think is really going on? They’re just behaving like some sort of drunk when the pubs are throwing out, and they’re in the car park, and they’re rolling around and they’re going ‘fight me, fight me!’ They’re just trying to think of anything that they can take on at the moment in order to distract us all from what’s really happening, which is their inability to govern. They’re trying to pick another fight.”
Right…
