Londoner's Diary
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and leader of the opposition Keir Starmer are both testing the patience of their party memberships, it seems.
A new survey of Conservative Party members, out last night, shows the PM hitting rock bottom with a minus 25 net approval rating.
The survey for the Conservative Home blog, in which the Tory grassroots rank members of the Cabinet, shows Sunak third from bottom, his lowest showing yet.
In last month’s survey James Cleverly topped the leaderboard but now he has dropped considerably to eleventh from bottom. As Home Secretary Cleverly hasn’t been wowing Tory members, who are generally thought to be more Right-wing than many Tory MPs. Kemi Badenoch has shot back up to first place with a 63.4 point approval rating.
Meanwhile in Labour, angry left wing members noticed over the weekend that Starmer’s leadership pledges have disappeared from the party's website.
Starmer ran for Labour leader in 2020 on a Left-wing programme of ten pledges which included nationalising utilities, defending free movement of people and overhauling the benefits system.
Starmer has contradicted many of his pledges since he won the Labour leadership in April 2020 with 56 per cent of the vote. Now the pledge page has been replaced with a “404 not found” error message.
He has taken flak from Left-wing critics in the party for his promise-breaking. The defence given by Starmer’s supporters is that circumstances have changed notably since the spring 2020 leadership election, for example with the covid-19 pandemic and Ukraine war, forcing a change in the party’s priorities.
Now seems an appropriate time to drop the pledges. Over the weekend, Starmer enraged a number of party members and some MPs when he praised former prime minister Margaret Thatcher in an article for the Telegraph. He praised her for “setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism” and implementing “meaningful change”.
The Thatcher controversy swamped this other reverse-ferret away from Starmer’s old Left-wing platform.
Rayner on tour
Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner had a happier time over the weekend. Back home in her native Manchester, she enjoyed a night out at the Warehouse Project. The club was hosting a homage to the defunct Hacienda Club and Ian Brown of The Stones Roses headlined. At the club night, Rayner ran into TalkTV host Julia Hartley-Brewer and got a picture.
