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…

Emily Thornberry fell into a bit of a depression during Politics Live after she was asked whether she was surprised at missing out on a Cabinet role:

“Yeah. Yeah, I was surprised, I didn’t know that was going to happen. Yeah I’m very sad about it, yes, I would have liked to have been in the Cabinet, you know, because I’d been in the Shadow Cabinet for eight and a half years continually and on the front bench for more than ten. I didn’t get offered any government job. Yeah, so it’s sad.”

Thornberry eventually mentioned that she wants to stand for chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee “which would be a great job.” Ex-chairman Alicia Kearns advised that “you have to be willing to scrutinise you own party in recognition that country comes first.” Don’t think Emily would have any problem with that…

Former Shadow Attorney General Emily Thornberry has finally broken her silence over finding out she is not now the Attorney General. She must have been waiting for a good enough consolation job…

Now she releases a statement:

“After eight-and-a-half unbroken years in the Shadow Cabinet, a longer record of service than anyone else in that time, I have always worked my hardest to keep the Labour Party united, support our candidates across the country, take the fight to the Tories, and put a positive case to the British people about what we would do differently, including – most recently – setting out our party’s policies to tackle every aspect of the fraud epidemic facing Britain, to support whistleblowers on sexual harassment in the workplace, to protect women in co-habiting relationships, and to treat the crime of stalking with the seriousness it deserves.

I am very sorry and surprised not to be able to continue that work in government, but I wish all my brilliant colleagues well, and I know that Richard Hermer KC – a much more accomplished lawyer than I could ever hope to be – will do an outstanding job as Attorney General. Nothing in the personal disappointment I feel can detract from the amazing and historic victory that all of us in the Labour movement worked together to win last week, and the chance that we now have to change our country for the better. I will continue giving my unstinting loyalty to our Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, as he leads that work, as I have done since he became leader, and I look forward to supporting his government in every way I can in the years to come.”

Starmer has gone ahead and appointed his own questionable Attorney General. Will Emily be a thorn in Starmer’s side from here on?

Last week Guido warned co-conspirators about the incoming deluge of US-style class action law suits under a potential Prime Minister Starmer. The party’s New Deal for Working People opens the door to massive legal actions against job creators and entrepreneurs to the benefit of specialist law firms, over issues such as the ‘right to switch off’ and industrial relations. The cases are highly political, and are used as a political weapon by left-wing campaigners. The UK is highly likely to go the way of the US, where businesses of all kinds regularly face lefty class actions, being dragged into political warfare…

Under Starmer, legal matters will be the province of Emily Thornberry as Attorney General. Co-conspirators will remember her proximity to law firms such as Leigh Day, which pursued an ambulance chasing campaign against British soldiers. As The Times elaborated on Guido’s reporting, Thornberry accepted multiple donations from the firm:

“Ms Thornberry accepted the cash from Leigh Day, which is facing an official tribunal over its handling of claims against British soldiers — some of which have been described as “deliberate lies” by the UK’s legal watchdog. The firm has been referred to the solicitors disciplinary tribunal over allegations that it overlooked a crucial document related to the £31 million al-Sweady inquiry, which ultimately found that torture claims against British soldiers were “completely baseless”.”

Now legal sources are nervous about the risks of Thornberry’s tenure as the government’s chief law officer. “Her sympathy to class actions is well known”, says one senior government legal source. Another raises the prospect of a “lawfare explosion” under Thornberry, highlighting her form with Leigh Day. British employers are largely yet to register the threat, given the one way traffic in the media on Labour and the Conservative short memory around Starmer’s incoming Cabinet. Guido co-conspirators have been warned…