Steerpike

It's blue Monday today for Tory MPs as they read the findings of the Daily Telegraph's mammoth new poll. The paper splashes today on a YouGov survey of 14,000 people – the biggest such poll since the 2019 election. It points to the Conservatives suffering an electoral wipeout on the scale of their 1997 defeat by Labour. It forecasts that the Tories will retain just 169 seats, while Labour will sweep to power with 385 – giving Sir Keir Starmer a 120-seat majority. Every Red Wall seat won from Labour by Boris Johnson in 2019 will be lost, the poll indicates, and the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, will be one of 11 cabinet ministers to lose their seats. By comparison, 'just' seven cabinet members lost their seat in 1997 when there was the infamous 'Portillo moment.

For all the talk of a Tory ‘war on woke Whitehall’, more examples just keep cropping up. In an article for Fathom Journal, Anna Stanley, a former civil servant, this week painted a vivid picture about the kind of counter-terrorist training which is being given to her colleagues. Stanley writes that she recently attended a Kings College London (KCL) course called ‘Issues in Countering Terrorism’. It was, in her words, a ‘deeply, existentially depressing experience.’ Examples were reportedly cited on how such educational institutions are delivering what Stanley called ‘politically biased, anti-government training, amounting to indoctrination’.

It would be fair to say that Sir Ed Davey has had better weeks in politics. Having missed PMQs this week due to family commitments, the Lib Dem leader decided that the best way of putting questions to bed over his role in the Post Office scandal to bed would be a time-honoured TV interview. Unfortunately his car-crash performance with ITV (who else?) means that they won't be going away any time soon. In the interview, released today, Sir Ed was repeatedly asked to apologise by Paul Brand for his inaction when the Horizon issues were brought to his attention, yet repeatedly declined to do so. 'I've said time and time again that I deeply regret that I was lied to on an industrial scale,' he said.

They say it’s a difficult change of gear when you leave government. Still, it seems Zac Goldsmith has had no problem keeping his foot on the pedal since he resigned last year, after complaining about Rishi Sunak’s ‘apathy’ towards environmental issues. Today, the former environment minister and eco-champion was temporarily banned from driving after being caught speeding on four separate occasions. Appearing in Westminster Magistrates’ Court, Goldsmith pleaded guilty to the four counts of speeding in Chelsea, Paddington and Twickenham between April and August last year. In April, he was caught doing 29 in a 20 zone on Chelsea Embankment. In July, he was 8 mph over the limit in Kensington.

Lee Anderson kicked off today's session of PMQs with a jibe at the Lib Dems' leader's expense. The Red Wall rottweiler rose from his seat to suggest that, in light of his failure to act on the Post Office scandal, the under-fire Ed Davey take his own advice on resignations from public office and 'Clear his desk, clear his diary and clear off.' Today's Times carries a similar call from the usually-sympathetic columnist Danny Finkelstein. Davey's absence from parliament for family reasons meant he was not tasked with responding to the subsequent Urgent Question on the Post Office. Shortly after Kevin Hollinrake had spoken at the despatch box, an email arrived in Steerpike's inbox with a response from the lucky Lib Dem assigned that honour.

Bright young things mixed with old survivors at the Reform Club tonight. From the backbenches to the cabinet, the great and the good of the Tory left were out in force at the One Nation Conservatives’ new years’ drinks. With the Rwanda Bill returning to the Commons next week, all eyes are on the group in their battle with the Tory right. And doing his bit for Conservative relations was Matt Warman MP, who began the night with a few jokes at the expense of certain colleagues. He told the 200-strong audience that, unlike other factions, the One Nation caucus doesn’t have to pretend they’re ‘five families’ to ‘make ourselves look bigger than we are’.

Labour might be ahead in the polls but it’s not all plain sailing. With an election looming later this year, members of the shadow cabinet have been reticent about setting forth their policy platforms for fear that the Tories either trash or nick their ideas. And a perfect demonstration of the perils of a flagship policy was demonstrated yesterday by Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, when she appeared on GB News. The Sunderland MP was keen to talk up Labour’s plans to levy VAT on independent schools. Such a move, she claims, will raise between £1.3 to £1.5 billion – money that can be invested in funding further mental health support for children in state schools.

There's nothing so ex as an ex-Prime Minister. But while the likes of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and David Cameron are busy off respectively writing columns, making speeches and, er, running the Foreign Office, Theresa May has been content to quietly reside on the backbenches. As MP for Maidenhead, she has spent much of the past year promoting her new book – Abuse of Power – which proved to be the best-seller at October's party conference. But such a low-key approach continues to reap dividends. For recently-published accounts show that in the year up until March 2023, the former PM’s eponymous company declared more than £1,540,000 in net assets – some 30 per cent up on £1,186,000 that she registered in March 2022.

A new year brings with it fresh headaches for Rishi Sunak. Chris Skidmore, a former energy minister, has announced he will stand down as an MP in protest at plans to issue more oil and gas licences. Parliament is expected to vote on Monday on the government's flagship bill to guarantee annual licensing rounds in the North Sea. Tory strategists had hoped that the legislation would exploit Labour divisions on green issues. But it seems to have prompted the opposite effect, with Skidmore taking the very rare step of not just resigning the party whip but quitting his seat in protest – triggering a contest in his soon-to-be-abolished Kingswood seat. Skidmore did not find another seat, so he was anyway leaving parliament. He has now bolted early.

Sir Keir Starmer was up this morning in Bristol, giving a big speech on the importance of transparency. The Tories, he gravely intoned, had wrecked Britain, with their relentless sleaze and cronyism. So it must have been, er, sub-optimal then for the Labour leader to have his big speech blown off course when Jim Pickard of the Financial Times threw him a curveball in the Q&A. Back in June, the paper published the contents of an internal JP Morgan report which laid bare the extent of Jeffrey Epstein’s contact with Peter Mandelson that describes repeated meetings between the disgraced financier and the politician he knew as 'Petie'.

President Gay, we hardly knew thee. Six months ago, the political scientist was appointed the head of Harvard University to much fanfare: hailed as a trailblazer, Gay was the first black woman to hold such a role. Now, after weeks of damning headlines, she has a new claim to fame: she is the shortest-serving president in four centuries of Harvard history. Girl boss! Gay's downfall came after a disastrous appearance last month at a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism. Throughout the grilling, she and her counterparts at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology repeatedly sidestepped the question of whether calls for the genocide of Jews violate the school's conduct rules.