Londoner's Diary
Lord Cameron seems to be enjoying his new House of Lords perch. In his maiden speech yesterday afternoon, he took the opportunity to mock fellow ex-PM Boris Johnson, who famously compared himself to the Roman general Cincinnatus when he left office. “I have not been sitting, like some latter day De Gaulle at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises waiting to be asked, how shall I put it, to Take Back Control,” Cameron joked, “Nor am I Cincinnatus hovering over my plough. I leave all classical allusions, and indeed illusions for that matter, to another former prime minister with whom I shared a number of educational experiences.”
The pair have been rivals since Eton, so how are the scores looking now that both men are approaching their seventh decade? Oxford was an early Cameron win: he got a first-class degree while Johnson managed an upper second (ever after branding Cameron a "girly swot"). In the Nineties, Johnson had more public-facing success as a star journalist while Cameron worked his way up the Tory party as a backroom boy. Both entered the House of Commons in the same election year, 2001, but Cameron became Tory leader and PM while Johnson made do as London mayor.
Brexit sent things haywire but Cameron seems to have clawed back a clear lead as a longer serving prime minister and, now, a peer of the realm. All of this will no doubt be encouraging Johnson to make his forthcoming GB News show the most exciting programme on television. And it might serve handily as a place to air old grievances. So perhaps this old rivalry is not quite done.
Not another one
Is British politics going back to the future? After the return of former prime minister David Cameron to the front line, it seems that another dated David might soon be drafted in by Labour. Last night, David Miliband, the former foreign secretary, joined Left-wing think tank IPPR to praise the “radicalism” of Keir Starmer and refused to rule out a return to the House of Commons as a Labour MP.
“I’ll make my professional choices on the basis of where I can do most for our values and where I can support my family, which is really important,” Miliband said in response to a journalist’s question about his political ambitions. Miliband ran for party leader in 2010, losing out to his brother, Ed.
He then left parliament in a huff in 2013 to head the charity International Rescue Committee in New York. Despite the fact he wrote most of Labour’s winning manifesto in 1997, Miliband welcomed change and warned against “ancestor worship”.
Out and about
The great and good of journalism packed out the Rosewood Hotel in Holborn for the British Society of Magazine Editors’ Awards last night, hosted by Vick Hope with help from Laura Whitmore. The pair joked that their affection for magazines stemmed from reading articles about sex in Glamour magazine as teenagers. Spectator editor Fraser Nelson was wearing a kilt as he picked up the award for best current affairs magazine. At the new branch of Raffles at the OWO hotel on Whitehall, Lady Cameron, founder of the Cefinn clothing label, attended the Harper’s Bazaar At Work summit.
