Monday
Keir Starmer’s decision to appoint Sue Gray as his chief of staff has tipped many Tories over the edge. Just under a year ago, Gray was being praised for the fair-mindedness of her report on Partygate. Now, the same Conservative voices are spitting blood. Friends of Boris Johnson are even claiming Labour and Gray collaborated to remove him from Downing Street.
Let’s just think this one through. Here’s what would have needed to happen for the plot to have worked. First off, Starmer and Gray would have needed to WhatsApp one another during lockdown to make sure No 10 held plenty of parties. Then they would have needed to make Boris attend the parties and make sure Downing Street staff were daft enough to take pictures of themselves getting pissed, throwing up and having sex.
Next, Starmer and Gray would have needed a whistleblower to inform them of the parties they had organised so that they could go public. Then they would have needed to ensure Gray was appointed to write the Partygate report. Finally, Starmer and Gray would have needed to have been behind the decision of 60 ministers to resign over Boris’s handling of the Chris Pincher affair. It’s all quite bonkers.
The only reason Johnson was forced out was that his behaviour had become too much even for the Tories. After all, it’s not even as if the Gray report mentioned the most damning evidence. The Abba party in Johnson’s flat. If anything, Gray went easy on Boris. Indeed, Gray’s reputation in the civil service was as someone who stopped things from happening – cleaned things up – rather than who got things done. Time will tell if these are the qualities Labour needs.
Tuesday
The royal family’s well-earned reputation for being the country’s prime source of light entertainment remains undimmed. We have King Charles announcing he will only have six choirs at his coronation because he wants to keep things simple. How many choirs would he ideally have had? Ten? Twelve? The king is also busy shuffling junior royals around some of his houses. First, Harry and Meghan were going to be kicked out of Frogmore Cottage so that Prince Andrew had somewhere he can fit his extra-large bath. Then they would be allowed to stay – possibly sharing with Andrew – if they came to the coronation.
Do none of the royals have any self-respect? They’ve all got plenty of money to afford a home, so why don’t they just buy one? Then they wouldn’t have to spend their lives wondering when they were going to be moved on. Which brings us to Harry, who has subjected himself to an hour-long livestreamed therapy session with a shrink called Gabor Maté. Me neither. Any decent therapist would have turned down the gig. Still, it was an opportunity for Maté and the duke’s narcissism to be thoroughly indulged. Maté pronounced Harry to be suffering from every known psychological disorder on the basis of a quick chat, while Harry merely revisited his childhood and adult wounds and demanded love and attention. Most sane people will have given the encounter a miss.
Wednesday
When Boris Johnson was forced to resign as prime minister, I wrote a lighthearted piece about his likely resignation honours list. In it, I speculated he would give his father a hereditary peerage so that he could one day inherit the title. Turns out that if the leaks are accurate, I wasn’t so very wide of the mark. There again, you can never go far wrong thinking the worst of Boris.
It appears that Stanley Johnson could be given a knighthood – if Rishi Sunak signs off on the list that is thought to contain a record-breaking 100 names. Quite what Stanley is being recognised for is unclear as he hasn’t really ever done anything remarkable. Other than hitting his wife and being accused of inappropriately touching at least two women. Not achievements that usually attract an honour. But when you are a former prime minister’s father, I guess the normal rules don’t apply. Obviously the honour doesn’t show Boris in a great light, but nor does Stanley emerge with great credit. Because he doesn’t have the self-worth to turn down the knighthood. Anyone with any self-respect and integrity would refuse an honour that was so obviously devalued. We wait to see the rest of the honours list. Perhaps we’ll find that Carrie is to be made a baroness. For services to covering up Abba parties in the No 10 flat during lockdown.
Thursday
Glory nights? Not so much. You’d have thought that a football team that had recently been unceremoniously dumped out of the FA Cup by a club from a lower division would have sweated blood to make good a one-goal deficit in the return home leg of a Champions League knockout tie. Just not Spurs, apparently. On a cold night at White Hart Lane – I refuse to call the new ground by its real name – the team bowed out with barely a whimper. There were no heroics against a fairly average AC Milan side. Spurs looked beaten even before kick-off. The boos at half- and full-time were deserved. It felt like the end of days. The manager, Antonio Conte, looks set to leave. No great loss. Harry Kane could also go. And no one would blame him.
Friday
I was in Downing Street when Rishi Sunak gave his first speech as prime minister. He promised to govern compassionately with “integrity, professionalism and accountability” and he sounded as if he meant it. After the sleaze of Johnson and the chaos of Liz Truss, it felt like some kind of normal Conservative service had been resumed. That hasn’t lasted long. Sunak never enjoyed a new leader bounce in the opinion polls and his ratings flatlined from the off. So now he’s reinvented himself as a rightwing populist by appealing to the worst instincts of Tory voters with his illegal migration bill. So called because the bill is illegal.
It was slightly surreal to see Rishi sitting next to Suella Braverman in the Commons on Monday with a forced grin on his face as she announced that her own legal advisers had found that the government had a less than 50% chance of winning a challenge against the legislation in the courts. Sunak even gave a press conference behind a “Stop the boats” lectern. Straight out of the Australian playbook. This was cynical, dog-whistle politics. He has no detention centres in which to hold migrants and no returns agreement with third countries to deport refugees. He knows the bill is going to fail, but he just doesn’t care. And he’s prepared to trash the UK’s reputation on human rights by repeatedly being shamed in international courts.
I continue to believe Britain is better than this. A friend of mine, Pete, has inoperable pancreatic cancer. Like me, he is a lifelong Spurs fan – he and I did one trip to Juventus that involved driving though a snowstorm and sleeping in the hire car at Nice airport – and yesterday he was invited to the training ground where the whole team, including the manager, chatted to him, showed him round and posed for photos. Spurs may not be that good at football at the moment. But they can still do human.
