LABOUR hopefuls are battling it out to be the party’s candidate for Kensington. Tory Felicity Buchan only won by 150 votes in 2019 and faces a battle to hold on next time.
The seat’s left-wing ex-MP, Emma Dent Coad is a frontrunner. She is well respected in the community for her support for the victims of Grenfell tower, having won the seat in a surprise result in 2017. However, last year she said that Keir Starmer’s Labour was “toxic” and didn’t know what it stood for.
Dent Coad is up against Mete Coban, a councillor in Hackney liked by Sadiq Khan, and Joe Powell, who works at the Open Government Partnership, an organisation founded by Barack Obama . Also running are Stephen Cowan, head of Hammersmith and Fulham Council, former bus driver and now local Labour deputy leader Kasim Ali, and Salman Shaikh, founder of The Shaikh Group, which aims for better dialogue in the Middle East and North Africa. Applications were due in last week, with a longlist annouced in the coming days.
The seat was once called a “jewel in the Tory crown”, and was held by Michael Portillo and Malcolm Rifkind. Then it had different boundaries, and was called Kensington and Chelsea.
Other seats including Camberwell and Peckham and Finchley and Golders Green are also selecting Labour candidates this month. A poll last week showed the Tories could lose all their seats in London at the next election.
Nighy styles it out at festival
Bill NIGHY put fashion first at a festival showing of his new film Living last night. The actor danced on stage to join co-stars Alex Sharp and Aimee Lou Wood but then said his neon green mic didn’t match his outfit, so swapped with screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro. Nighy, who is often spotted out and about in London, explained the film was about one of his hobbies, procrastination, which he does at an “Olympic level”.
Nobel-prize winning author Ishiguro wrote the film in between his novels. It is a re-imaging of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru transposed to 1950s London, complete with suits and bowler hats. Ishiguro said the film was a metaphor for the human condition, and it’s his theory that “we’re all English gentlemen, secretly”. Nighy more than most.
Cleese returns to the screen
BELOVED comedian turned scourge of the woke, John Cleese, right, is returning to TV screens. Not with Monty Python, but as a talking head on Right-wing channel GB News. Cleese, 82, broke the news on Radio 4 today. He has previously said political correctness has had a “disastrous effect” on comedy, and its likely his contribution to the anti-woke broadcaster will be in that same vein. Laugh-a-minute?
Nobel winning streak in jeopardy?
WRITERS with Fitzcarraldo press have a one in three chance of winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. That’s the joke in literary circles after French author Annie Ernaux won last week. Svetlana Alexievich and Olga Tokarczuk have won it before. But the small press still struggles to get books to the EU since Brexit, telling us issues are “not resolved”. Get them sorted soon so the winning streak continues.
Timmy’s rom com shocker
Timothée Chalamet was on the Southbank with co-star Taylor Russell on Saturday for new film Bones and All. The film, directed by Luca Guadagnino of Call Me By Your Name fame, is no normal rom com: Timmy’s on screen love interest is a cannibal. Jodie Turner-Smith was there for black comedy Bardo, while Jennifer Lawrence flew in for her film Causeway. Last night Dame Judi Dench and Jennifer Saunders watched their movie Allelujah. Earlier, Florence Pugh was at a screening of The Wonder at Soho House.
