Lord Cameron has kicked off his maiden speech with jokes aplenty as he speaks in the Lords for the second reading of the CPTPP Bill. The “infamous” shepherd’s hut got an early mention from Cameron. Thus killing the joke forever…
Cameron said he wasn’t waiting to come back to politics like a “latter-day De Gaulle… asked to take back control“, or a “Cincinnatus hovering above the crowd” and that he leaves “all classical allusions, and illusions for that matter, to another former prime minister“. It took a while to warm the crowd up, though they got there in the end…
Charlotte Owen, Boris’s former staffer and later Downing Street SpAd, has become the youngest life peer in British history at the age of 30. No doubt the chorus of voices celebrating Keir Mather’s election last week will be pleased to hear another young voice in parliament…
Never say that Guido’s graduate training programme doesn’t lead to places. Five years ago Ross Kempsell was a reporter. He was a pretty good reporter and his copy was as grammatically precise as you would expect from someone with a double-first from Cambridge. He went from Guido to become TalkRadio’s political editor, then to Downing Street as a Special Adviser, with a sojourn at The Times, before going to CCHQ to run the Conservative Research Department – honing it into a war-room with a focus on attacking the opposition and driving the news agenda. When he was Prime Minister, Boris Johnson valued his loyalty and advice highly. Hence he rewarded Ross with a peerage.
On the red benches Ross will no doubt be an energetic and articulate advocate for liberty. Congratulations, M’Lord.
It’s been a busy week for the House of Lords Commissioners for Standards, as inquiries have been opened into two big names. The Shadow Leader of the Lords, Baroness Smith, and Lord Ed Vaizey both face probes for their registers of interests. Baroness Smith is being investigated for two breaches – related to an incorrect register entry – whilst Ed Vaizey is being looked into for the non-registration of interests. This now brings the total number of cases on the Standards Commissioner’s in-tray to seven. To be fair to our noble friends, keeping an up to date register of interests can’t be easy for the old and infirm.
Starmer is drawing up plans to stack the House of Lords with “dozens” of new peers if Labour win the next election… despite previously claiming the upper chamber is “indefensible” and vowing to abolish it entirely just months ago. U-turn number 32 already on the horizon…
According to The Times, Labour is worried that with 122 peers in the Chamber to the Tories’ 263, they’d somehow struggle to implement their agenda – and most of their current peers are ancient anyway. A shadow cabinet minister said:
“We will need to appoint dozens of them, at least. The current cohort aren’t getting any younger, and there’s so few of them doing the actual work that they are increasingly knackered.”
Why Labour is so concerned isn’t clear. It’s a longstanding convention that the Lords doesn’t block the governing party’s manifesto. And if Labour are serious about abolishing the whole chamber, stuffing it with “dozens” more peers isn’t the way to show it. Just weeks ago, Angela Rayner called Boris’s resignation honours list “a carousel of cronies”. Those Starmer ‘flip-flop’ flip-flops are still for sale…
It turns out it’s quite useful to be a luvvie of the chattering metropolitan classes. Despite being found guilty of breaching sleaze rules in the Lords a couple of days ago, you’d be hard-pressed to have read anything about Lord Barwell’s standards breach in the mainstream press. Guido would know – he completely missed the report’s publication…
On the February 2nd, a Lords Standards investigation into Theresa May’s former Chief of Staff concluded he broke the House’s rules on declaring potential conflicts of interests, after a complainant pointed out he’d failed to publicise his ‘Gavin Barwell Consulting Limited’ personal service company on his register of interests.
When responding to the Standards Commissioner’s initial email, Barwell explained he was told he only had to “voluntarily declare” the service, “but only if I did so for all my clients”. Interestingly he chose at that point to declare he was in the process of applying for a leave of absence from the House, which he has now taken…
The investigation was cut and dry. The Commissioner concluded Barwell broke paragraph 12 of the Code of Conduct owing to him not ensuring his entries in the Register of Interests were correct and up to date.
“While the context of Lord Barwell’s discussion with the Registrar of Lords’ Interests about the registration requirements in November 2021 is not completely clear, he did express a clear intention to register all his clients at that time but failed to see through that intention.”
“In the circumstances, as well as correcting his entry in the Register of Interests, I proposed that a letter of apology to Baroness Manningham-Buller, Chair of the Conduct Committee, would be sufficient remedial action in this case. Lord Barwell has since written to Baroness Manningham-Buller (see Appendix 1) and updated his entry in the Register of Interests.”
At least now he’s taken a leave of absence he can focus his attention on persuading his paymasters at Clarion to stop screwing over tenants…
UPDATE: The day after the Standards Commissioner concluded Barwell broke the House’s rules on declaring potential conflicts of interests, Lord Barwell registered a new firm and gave his occupation as “Public Affairs Consultant”.
