Steerpike

Good old Prince Harry has done it once again. In spite of all his strenuous efforts to avoid press intrusion, the renegade royal can’t stop making the headlines. The prince this morning lost his bid to have the Mail on Sunday (MoS) publisher’s defence to his libel claim thrown out of the courts. Lawyers for Associated Newspapers (ANL) slammed Harry’s case, saying it was ‘wholly without merit’ and ‘built on sand’. Ouch. The Duke of Sussex is suing ANL over an article published in 2022 on his legal challenge against the Home Office after his security arrangements were changed.

And back to the SNP’s Scotland, which is not quite the land of milk and honey that the Nats would like to make out. It turns out that former first minister Nicola Sturgeon and the majority of her ministers refused to use government-issued mobile phones during her time in office. Cover-ups? Surely not! Government officials confirmed to the Times that the former first minister and her most senior colleagues used only personal devices to call or text workmates. It reports that, in fact, only a quarter of those ministers in post between February 2020 and January 2022 were recorded as having official phones. Interestingly, 26 of the 30 ministers currently working under Humza Yousaf, the first minister, have government-issued devices.

It was Herbert Morrison who remarked that the corridors of the Home Office are paved with dynamite. Well tonight, they're blowing up. Just three weeks after Suella Braverman was unceremoniously fired from 2 Marsham Street, her onetime junior minister has now followed her out of the door. After two hours of speculation, it has now been confirmed that Robert Jenrick has quit the immigration brief, having made clear his objections to Rishi Sunak's newly unveiled Rwanda legislation.One person who found out the news the hard way was, er, Jenrick's colleague, Laura Farris. She was about to go on air with Andrew Marr on LBC before she was told the news.

It’s Christmas party season in Westminster and tonight it was the turn of the Adam Smith Institute to do the honours. The free market think tank turned to Penny Mordaunt for her now-traditional turn on the seasonal circuit. Steerpike’s sources tell him that the Leader of the House writes most of the gags that she deploys at Business Questions. And tonight was no exception as she expounded the merits of the festive goods available in parliament: We are well into the first advent week but it is not too late, folks, to get an advent calendar if you’ve not got one already. And I’m just going to give you a quick plug if you don’t mind of the House of Commons gift shop and what we have on special offer in there, because we do have some lovely discounted advent calendars.

He has served under four of the last five Tory premiers. So who better to address revellers at the ConservativeHome Christmas shindig than Michael Gove? This evening the Levelling Up Secretary took to the stage to deliver the canapé equivalent of a state of the nation address. And, in true Gove style, he began by heaping praise on his hosts. ConservativeHome, he noted, was founded in 2005 and as such has now ‘been going for more than 18 years – it’s older than many members of the House of Lords!

If things seem bad, they can always get worse. That's the message for poor Rishi Sunak in the latest ConservativeHome league table of party members. The Prime Minister today records his worst ratings ever, racking up a dire -25.4 among card-carrying Conservatives. It comes after a yo-yoing three months in which his negative ratings rose to 25.8 after the Net Zero speech before falling slightly to 7.1 after party conference season. But Sunak is now bottom of his own cabinet – one place beneath longtime-struggler Jeremy Hunt, whose ratings rise to 'just' -13.4. So much for that Autumn Statement bounce... The other big beasts around the cabinet table fare little better either. Lord Cameron's return is hardly a triumphant one, with the membership awarding him -4.

All great tragedies must have a villain. And who serves that role better at the Covid Inquiry than Matt Hancock? After weeks of damning testimony from his critics, the Casanova of the Commons finally began his long-awaited evidence session yesterday morning. Most of his defence has previously been set out in his much-mocked Pandemic Diaries – a work surely in breach of both good taste and the Trade Descriptions Act. But there was a moment of levity today when Hancock turned his attention to his old enemy, Nicola Sturgeon – one of the few politicians potentially more narcissistic and power-crazed than he is.