Wes Streeting is to hire a Labour activist as an impartial civil servant to the Department for Health’s “10 Year Health Plan” team. Tom Kibasi, former director of hard-left think tank IPPR, is the newest crony appointment…
Kibasi, who ran IPPR from 2016 to 2019, helped direct Starmer’s leadership bid – hosting meetings, directing the key advert, and writing lines. He was passed over for a job once the race was over in 2021 and subsequently turned on Starmer’s ‘hard on Corbyn’ approach…
The left-wing wonk has long publicly backed Labour with a history of support for gargantuan tax hikes by taxing capital gains and dividends at income tax rates. Now he’s helping to direct health policy as a supposedly non-partisan civil servant. He can join some of Streeting’s other crony appointments…
City Hall’s standards commissioner has said that Khan is under investigation over October’s Taylor Swift controversy. A GLA spokesman says: “The monitoring officer has reviewed the complaint against the mayor and will not be investigating three of the four allegations. An investigation will now take place to establish if the mayor exercised an appropriate level of caution in deciding to accept the tickets.” Susan Hall initiated proceedings by making a formal complaint after details were revealed in the press…
Khan took free tickets for an August Swift concert and later altered the declaration of their value. The three allegations referred to there relate to a late declaration of the tickets, the factual errors in the initial declaration, and whether there was a live contract with agency LS Events (who supplied them). Khan’s spokesman says “the mayor’s office will continue to ensure all the right processes are followed, and looks forward to explaining the approach that was taken in this instance.” Freebies may not worth it for all the blowback…
Hilariously Angela Rayner has just declared yet another £3,550 of free clothes from Lord Alli in the parliamentary register. They were previously declared as “office support.” Can’t stop the gravy train…
Another day, another Labour sleaze scandal. Guido is told Labour MP for York Outer Luke Charters recently handed a cushy job to Owen Trotter, a Labour donor who’s coughed up over £55,000 to the party since 2019. Trotter, who chucked nearly £8,000 Charters’ way just this summer for his campaign – all properly declared – now conveniently finds himself as the MP’s Parliamentary Office Manager. It seems Charters has followed in the footsteps of others in the party with donors elevated to plum positions…
Unsurprisingly, local Tories are furious. Chris Steward, Leader of the Conservative Group on York Council, said:
“Luke Charters is the latest Labour MP to throw his morals down the toilet. Why on earth has he given a job in Parliament to a man who handed him almost £8,000? Luke urgently needs to clarify whether Owen Trotter is being paid by the taxpayer in his role as Office Manager. We also need to know what process was followed in appointing him to this role and whether the job was fully opened up to other candidates.”
Trotter certainly has a lot on his plate outside his new role. He’s already a Managing Partner at Key Capital Partners, a Leeds-based private equity firm involved in private healthcare, and also serves on the governing body of the University of York. He also stood to be the Labour candidate for North Yorkshire Mayor in 2023, though clearly didn’t make the cut. He’s finally made it into the walls of Westminster now though…
Guido contacted both offices of Luke and Owen for a comment.
Ellie Reeves has ‘updated’ the Commons on rule changes Labour is pursuing in the ongoing freebiegate scandal. Reeves blames the Tories for an anodyne discrepancy between ministerial declarations and MP declarations…
Reeves says the government will close Tories’ “freebie loophole” with a new version of the register of ministers’ gifts and hospitality – to function on a “broadly equivalent” basis to the MP register. The ministerial register is only different in that the value of gifts is not declared and it is published every quarter as opposed to every fortnight. Altering that system does nothing to address Labour’s rank hypocrisy over months of freebies revelations…
Seeing as the Tories managed to get an Urgent Question in Shadow Paymaster General John Glen asked Reeves for a few clarifications, including:
Reeves launched on the Tories in response and said she’d “take no lectures” as Labour backbenchers are rolled out to list historic Tory freebie-taking. Pressed on Swiftgate, Reeves stuck to the line that the top-level security motorcade was an “operational matter” for the police, despite the fact that the Attorney General, Mayor of London, Sue Gray, and the Home Secretary all personally got involved in lobbying the Met. Labour’s lines on the latest freebiegate scandal are going as well as all the last ones…
The row over Taylor Swift’s concert freebies has been hilariously extended for another day. Labour was forced to defend lobbying the police for a motorcade for Swift while accepting freebie tickets from her record label…
The optics weren’t as bad as they could have been yesterday seeing as everyone clarified that Home Secretary Yvette Cooper hadn’t taken freebie tickets to the concert – of the two, only Sadiq Khan had. Sky News’ Sam Coates reported last night that Ed Balls had though – and brought his wife along…
Now it’s clear that both Khan and Cooper received free premium tickets and pressed security services to do Swift a favour. Cooper didn’t declare them at the time as they fell under the threshold, though she now has. Was probably worth fessing up to when the first story broke…
Jonathan Reynolds is up on Good Morning Britain soon to answer an interviewer’s questions. Guido can think of just the man for the job…
UPDATE: Nandy yesterday, of course, was briefed that Cooper “didn’t attend the concerts.” Top quality briefing that…
Former leader of the SNP in Westminster Ian Blackford told Times Radio why he believes Nicola Sturgeon’s claim that she spent no time in the kitchen and therefore didn’t see any of her husband’s purchases:
“She doesn’t have a passion for cooking.”