William Hague has levelled his guns over the prisoner release scheme at… the Tories. Raising a few eyebrows there…
The former Tory leader says Labour has “a really good point actually” when it blames its predecessors, like everything else, while letting thousands of prisoners out early:
“The Conservative government failed to grasp either they either had to build more prison places or they had to let people out, and they didn’t want to face up to it either over a long period. That’s a real failure um and so this situation now does focus everybody’s minds on what are we going to do.”
Guido didn’t realise that releasing the wrong prisoners and letting them cheer Keir Starmer while driving away in their sports cars was the Tories’ fault. One Tory source tells Guido: “No wonder the Tories are so irrelevant when their former leaders row in behind Labour to defend mass prisoner releases.” Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood is uncorking the Gauke to lead a sentencing review – probably so she can blame another (former) Tory when it goes wrong…
Candidates are coming out of the woodwork in the running for Oxford University’s Chancellorship. Peter Mandelson has been confirmed today to be gunning for the role, after shadow campaigning for some time. Someone’s preparing for alternatives to those ambassadorial dreams…
Chris Patten has served in the prized role since 2003. Were Mandelson to win he would be the first card-carrying Labour member in the role. He’s up against Tory big hitter William Hague, who announced last week. This time the Chancellor’s Election Committee has said it will remove candidates from the election process whom it does not consider “suitable” and it will give “due regard to the principles of equality and diversity“. Oxford undergrads will no doubt look past Willy’s un-diverse characteristics in hope of an official Hagueathon were he to win…
Rory Stewart and Theresa May have ruled themselves out. Guido provides the definitive runners and riders below:
Oxford won’t release a full list of candidates until early October. 250,000 alumni worldwide are entitled to vote online on the 28th in the first internet-based election. It’s a wide field…
As new instances of the strife inside the Conservative party come to light on a near-daily basis, Anthony Mangnall has joined the frontlines of Tory warfare. The MP was speaking at a fundraiser in the exclusive Cavalry club in Mayfair, with William Hague as the main guest. In his remarks Mangnall made reference to Matt Hancock’s time in the jungle – reusing his old material from PMQs.
He then moved on to suggest other TV programmes where his colleagues might appear. For Kwasi Kwarteng he proposed Homes Under the Hammer – “given he has done so much damage to the housing market”. Jacob Rees-Mogg was assigned Antiques Roadshow. And for Liz Truss… Pointless.
William Hague tells Times Radio that Channel 4 privatisation could be a good thing…
“It partly depends what you do with the money. If this raises a billion pounds, and it’s meant to go to support Creative Industries, as part of our levelling up agenda. Well, if that’s spent effectively, that will be a good thing. It’s meant to remain a public service broadcaster, which means that there will be obligations continued to be placed on it, and it will be able to raise more capital as a private company, which does help it to compete in the future. So those are the arguments in favour of doing it. There are good arguments the other way, but on the whole I favour private ownership when possible.”
Guido hears it’s full steam ahead for the Museum of Brexit. Having gained charitable status in April, the museum has been busy collecting donations and amassing display items ready for the expected opening in roughly 18 months’ time. Whilst a final location is yet to be decided, the long list of over 30 potential sites has now been narrowed to 3 (all of which are outside London), and museum organisers are now waiting on key financial backers to visit the areas and give final approval. Once the decision has been made, it’s expected that building renovations will take at least a year.
Guido’s told the museum will be emulate the style of a US presidential library: a mixture of exhibitions, documents, and archival data. There’ll be a full-time curator to manage and preserve the inventory, which will be presented in a ‘balanced‘ way for posterity. Among the items will be hundreds of political cartoons and paintings from the Brexit Wars, original copies of Farage’s handwritten speech notes, and even a “William Hague Victory!” mug from 2001. A rare artefact indeed…
William Hague tells Sophy Ridge…
“I’m hoping to hear that before too long the great majority of restrictions on people can be lifted… I think if we are going to reach the point, perhaps in April, where everybody over the age of 50 has had the opportunity to be vaccinated and the number of cases of Covid is down to a very low level, the sort of level we last saw in the middle of the summer last year – if both of those things have happened by some time in April, then there wouldn’t be much justification for keeping most of the restrictions on people.”
