ANDREW PIERCE: Local elections reveal threat to Kemi’s top team
Kemi Badenoch’s Tories, reveling in Sir Keir Starmer’s mounting humiliation, are hiding a disturbing truth: the Tories remain dangerously vulnerable.
New analysis of the local election results that triggered the crisis in Number 10 shows that if the results are repeated in the general election, more than half of the Labor Party Cabinet will lose their seats and the Conservative Party will suffer major damage.
In Essex alone, six senior Conservatives, including Badenoch himself, shadow housing spokesman Sir James Cleverly, shadow foreign secretary Dame Priti Patel and chief whip Rebecca Harris, would be eliminated in a hemorrhage of votes for Reform.
Labour’s disastrous local election results helped the Conservative Party mask its own poor performance, writes Andrew Pierce
The cull would spread to the West Country, where shadow chancellor Sir Mel Stride would fall to the Liberal Democrats. Shadow Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho will lose in East Surrey, as will shadow Commons leader Jesse Norman in Hereford.
A senior Conservative Party insider told me: ‘We revel in Labour’s discomfort; especially because it distracts us from the fact that we are also in deep political trouble.’
There were 38 references to ending the ‘chaos’ of the Tory years in Labour’s general election manifesto. That’s another 38 broken promises?
Everything is shiny and the bike…
The new Archbishop of Canterbury seems like a pretty simple guy.
Like Boris Johnson, Dame Sarah Mullally refused to let higher authorities stop her cycling around London. He swaps his miter for a bike helmet and pedals towards the shops. At a supermarket checkout the other day, a shopper cornered her for a rather heavy-handed discussion about morality and abortion. It gave new meaning to the term ‘unexpected item in the bagging area’.
Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman aren’t the only old men returning to Whitehall. Original quangocrat Dame Helen Ghosh also returned. Ghosh was permanent secretary at the Home Office at the start of the coalition government before Theresa May showed him the door in 2012. He later faced a bruising stint at the National Trust, where he was repeatedly dragged into turmoil over his omission of the word ‘Easter’ from an egg hunt. Now 70, Labor gave him a comfortable four-year term as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Keir Starmer seems to be calling everyone and asking for advice. Angela Rayner’s partner Sam Tarry recently ‘received an unexpected early morning call from the Prime Minister’. He says: ‘While I was wondering what would happen in the coming days, I rushed to make coffee so that the lady could offer her advice to the Prime Minister privately.’ Rayner’s 1000-word challenge to Starmer has been revealed. The principle of ‘keep your enemies closer’ may have its limits.
If Andy Burnham fails to return to Westminster, Defense Secretary John Healey could emerge as Labour’s ‘sensible’ leadership candidate against EU fanatic Wes Streeting. So is Healey too boring for this job? The Washington Post suggested last week: ‘People who shared elevator rides with Mr Healey do not always say he is dazzling company.’
God! Black Rod’s red face
Thank goodness last week’s State Opening of Parliament went off without a hitch – because rehearsals certainly didn’t. During a rehearsal, Ed Davis, the Lords’ Black Rod, appeared without his own Black Rod. So when the door of the House of Commons was ceremonially slammed in his face, Mr Davis was unable to perform the traditional knocking action. The gatekeepers say ‘knock knock, who’s there?’ He had to improvise a parliamentary version of the question. before allowing the former Royal Marine to enter.
