Londoner’s Diary
Green multi-millionaire and former Just Stop Oil backer Dale Vince is doing his best to stop the Green Party from winning a single seat on Thursday.
The activist-entrepreneur, who funded orange paint-spraying JSO activists until late last year, now says Labour is the real green option.
“I don’t feel confident enough in the outcome of the election to say, oh we can allow a few Green MPs,” he told us, “I know that’s what the Greens say: ‘why can’t you just let us have a few MPs, come on.’ Labour have a green manifesto. It’s a green government we’re gonna get!”
He says he has been visiting seats where the Greens have a chance and telling people not to vote for them. “It’s the only real choice — Labour or the Tories, and we know the Tories are very not green so I’m trying to encourage people to lend Labour their vote.”
We ran into Vince at Glastonbury where he was running the Just Vote campaign, its name a play on his former support for JSO. With banners, merchandise and a giant ballot box, the campaign encouraged festival-goers to vote on Thursday.
He suggested that Sir Keir Starmer could speak at the festival, just as Jeremy Corbyn did in 2017 when he drew the biggest crowd since the Rolling Stones headlined. “It would be cool for Keir to speak here,” Vince said. “Why not? Why can’t Keir come down? Keir on the Shangri La stage would be good.”
Vince stopped funding JSO last year and began sending money to Labour candidates. Now he says: “Just Stop Oil couldn’t stop the Tories, but you can if you get out on Thursday.”
Trust Me 2.0
History repeats itself, sort of, on today’s Evening Standard front page. Back in March 2021, when the country was crawling out of the miserable lockdowns, Rishi Sunak appeared with his red box telling us to trust him with the economy. If the polls are anything to go by, it didn’t quite work out. Today, with Labour possibly in government by the end of the week, the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has popped up on our cover with an almost identical message. “Trust me,” she begs in an exclusive interview with our political editor Nicholas Cecil. Will things go right for Reeves where they didn’t for Sunak?
