ANDREW PIERCE: Why won’t Sir Keir Starmer throw the book at Chris Bryant?
Veteran Labour MP and former Anglican priest Sir Chris Bryant is busy touring TV studios and bookshops plugging his new, holier-than-thou tome on sleaze, corruption and dishonesty in politics.
In Code Of Conduct: Why We Need To Fix Parliament, the high-minded Bryant — newly promoted to the frontbench as shadow minister for creative industries and digital — castigates MPs who refuse to set the record straight after misleading the Commons.
How strange, then, that he fails to mention his own outlandish claims about Nigel Farage.
In March 2022, Bryant confidently told the Commons the ex-MEP had taken ‘£548,573 from Russia Today in 2018 alone’, demanding Farage be sanctioned. (Bryant knew that, thanks to Parliamentary privilege, he could not be sued.)
There was just one problem: his claim wasn’t true. Farage had not appeared once on that TV station during 2018, while that hefty earnings figure was his total media income for the period.
In March 2022, Bryant confidently told the Commons the ex-MEP had taken ‘£548,573 from Russia Today in 2018 alone’, demanding Farage be sanctioned
Farage did appear on the Kremlin-financed, Putinite mouthpiece (banned in the UK and EU since last year) twice in 2017, for total earnings of less than £5,000.
No apology from Bryant in the book — and no attempt to correct himself for misleading the House.
Doesn’t Sir Keir Starmer expect higher standards from his frontbenchers, especially when they tout themselves as figures worthy of ‘fixing Parliament’?
In a BBC interview, Angela Rayner likened herself to fellow ‘ginger northerner’ Barbara Castle
In a BBC interview, Angela Rayner likened herself to fellow ‘ginger northerner’ Barbara Castle.
The formidable Baroness Castle overcame the endemic sexism of the 1960s and 1970s to run four major ministries for Labour.
She is profiled in Michael Cockerell’s excellent documentary The Red Queen tonight on BBC4 at 10pm.
The principled and outspoken Castle once said: ‘Women do have a terrible time in politics because we are supposed to always look nice.
‘But what you need in politics, more than anything else, is a fighting outlook and a killer instinct.’ Wise words — even if Rayner flatters herself with the comparison.
Baby-faced MP seeks wisdom
Keir Mather, the baby-faced Oxford grad who won the Selby and Ainsty by-election in July at the tender age of 25, is hiring. He insists his staff have at least a year of political experience — making them more experienced than him.
Keir Mather, the baby-faced Oxford grad who won the Selby and Ainsty by-election in July at the tender age of 25, is hiring
PS: Theresa May, who became an MP at the wise age of 40, said when promoting her new book, The Abuse Of Power: ‘I always say people who are interested in becoming an MP do something else first to get some wider experience of a different walk of life.’ So what was May’s horny-handed, working-class job before Parliament? Er, she worked as a financial consultant. Talk about wider experience!
Brainwave of the week: Ex-Sky News chief John Ryley recommends we kick the minor parties off the leaders’ debates ahead of the next election. ‘Does the electoral performance of the Lib Dems over the past ten years justify taking part?’ he asks. ‘No. Are the SNP able to nominate a UK prime minister? No.’ Instead, he argues, let Rishi Sunak go mano a mano against Keir Starmer. I hope TV bosses are listening.
Gyles Brandreth, once Tory MP for Chester, hopes the family name is still popular in his old stomping ground: his daughter Aphra is shortlisted to be a candidate in the new constituency of Chester South and Eddisbury. Brandreth recalls campaigning for her in a South London council by-election. When he told a voter that he was the candidate’s father, the cheeky response came back: ‘Are you sure she’s your daughter?’
Gyles Brandreth, once Tory MP for Chester, hopes the family name is still popular in his old stomping ground: his daughter Aphra is shortlisted to be a candidate in the new constituency of Chester South and Eddisbury
‘If you’d been travelling around the country during the early summer of 2016, the [Brexit] referendum result was not a surprise,’ says Laura Kuenssberg. ‘But for the political establishment, for the institutions that wield power in this country, it was an incredible shock.’
Might one of those power-wielding institutions have been the BBC, which miserably failed to grasp the public’s Euroscepticism? It might.
Which makes me wonder: who on earth was Auntie’s political editor at the time?
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