Steerpike

For Sir Ed Davey, sorry seems to be the hardest word to say. Three weeks ago, the embattled Lib Dem leader was asked to apologise for his role in the Post Office scandal but refused to do so ten times in an interview with ITV. Yet now, with his party plummeting in the polls, the former cabinet minister has thrown in the towel and uttered the forbidden word beginning with 's'. Writing in the Guardian, Davey, whose business minister role from 2010 to 2012 involved oversight of the Post Office, said officials had initially advised him to not meet Alan Bates, who led the campaign into the unjust targeting of post office operators.

Even Nicola Sturgeon's enemies agree that the former first minister is a formidable politician. But at the Covid Inquiry, Sturgeon appears to be struggling to keep it together. Asked whether she was the 'right' person to lead Scotland following her earlier criticism that Boris Johnson was not up to the job, Sturgeon broke down in tears: 'I was the first minister when the pandemic struck. There's a large part of me that wishes I hadn't been. But I was, and I wanted to be the best first minister I could be during that period. It's for others to judge the extent to which I succeeded.' NEW: Nicola Sturgeon breaks down in tears about whether she was the “right” First Minister to lead Scotland after her earlier criticism that Boris Johnson was not up to the job. @SkyNews pic.twitter.

Angela Rayner has had better starts to the week. The Labour deputy leader appeared on Good Morning Britain today, ostensibly to talk about her party's plans for housing and town centres. But if the MP for Ashton-under-Lyne MP thought she would get a soft-soap interview, host Richard Madeley quickly proved her wrong. Following her heckling by Palestinian activists last week, he asked Rayner: Last time there was a vote on a ceasefire in Gaza, you abstained. A lot has happened since then, there have been a lot more deaths in Gaza. If there was a vote again today, would you abstain or would you agree to a ceasefire? Stuttering, the politician replied: 'I mean the challenges that are happening in Gaza... No one can look at the TV and see what is happening.

At £120,000 a year, George Freeman was in the top 3 per cent of earners as science minister – but he says that is why he stood down two months ago. His mortgage went up and his pay – £75,000 after the tax increases of his government – suddenly wasn’t enough. He had many reasons to quit, he says on his Substack, but one was ‘because my mortgage rises this month from £800pcm to £2,000, which I simply couldn’t afford to pay on a ministerial salary.’ So he stood down and was free to top up his MP’s salaries with consultancy.  Chris Skidmore has shown how Tories can slip into consistent work and make serious money. But isn’t £120,000 a year serious money? Freeman seems not to think so. ‘That’s political economy 2.0.

Oh dear. Every time Labour looks just about electable, up pops one of Keir Starmer's MPs to help make that harder. Today it is the turn of Kate Osamor, one of the hard-of-thinking Corbynites who populate the opposition backbenches. She shot to fame back in 2018 when she threatened a Times reporter with a baseball bat after he had the temerity to ask her about her son’s conviction for drug offences. Nice, eh? This weekend, Osamor has brought her famed diplomatic talents to the sensitive subject of Holocaust Memorial Day. She used the occasion to, er, call for the Israeli military action in Gaza to be remembered as 'genocide', in a message to party members in her Edmonton constituency.

It’s the race that has had all of Westminster gripped. No, not the Republican presidential primaries in New Hampshire; nor the mayoral contest between Susan Hall and Sadiq Khan. Instead, all eyes this week have been on Rochdale, where the local Labour Party today met to decide their candidate for the forthcoming by-election. The contest is being held following the sad death of the incumbent Labour MP Tony Lloyd, who won it in 2019 with a majority of 9,968. The three-man shortlist for the Rochdale selection attracted particular interest from the parliamentary lobby after it was revealed that longtime member Paul Waugh had thrown in the ring.

It looks like the ructions over Labour’s Palestine position aren’t ending anytime soon. Since the horrifying Hamas massacre on October 7th last year, Labour leader Keir Starmer has refused to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, instead making the case for a ‘sustainable ceasefire’ – which would involve Hamas handing over the remaining Israeli hostages and stopping its rocket fire into Israel. That position has been met with predictable outrage from the left, which has accused the Labour leadership of colluding in a genocide. Now it looks like the row is spilling over into MPs’ constituencies. According to a video posted by Manchester Palestine Action, activists interrupted a Labour fundraising event in Stockport this week.

No wonder so many SNP politicians deleted their WhatsApp messages: they really are rather damning. In today’s Covid hearings, former Nicola Sturgeon aide Liz Lloyd is being grilled by the bulldog-like Jamie Dawson KC. If the Dear Leader’s liberal cussing wasn’t bad enough, the Inquiry has now unearthed some startling admissions… Throughout the pandemic, the-then First Minister sought to present herself as a unifying ‘national’ figure above petty party politics. But back in November 2020, Sturgeon discussed a UK government proposal with one of her closest confidants. She begrudgingly admits that ‘on this, I (reluctantly) think there’s merit in UK-wide position’. Whatever happened to fostering constructive cross-party relations...

So, who is the Conservative Britain Alliance? Westminster is virtually swamped these days with an alphabet-spaghetti-esque collection of different acronyms, ranging from the CGG and CSG to the the NRG and ERG. But the CBA is both the newest and most secretive entity of them all, with little known about the Alliance, other than its name and tendency to commission polls that are unhelpful to No. 10. But tonight a little more light has been shed on the group. First, Sir Simon Clarke did an interview with the BBC in which he admitted that even he did not know who was behind the group. And now, the Alliance has unveiled its latest recruit, straight from the heart of government himself.