Steerpike

Once, Sir Keir Starmer liked to claim that the Welsh Labour government was the 'blueprint' the UK. Yet now, like so much else, he has u-turned even on that, declining to repeat the promise when asked repeatedly three months ago. And perhaps that's no surprise when one considers the record of Mark Drakeford's ragtime regime in Cardiff Bay, running an economy which grows slower than the cars on the Welsh 20mph-roads. With his country's NHS in crisis, the First Minister this week offered a revealing insight into his own priorities when grilled in the Senedd chamber. Drakeford will shortly be standing down from office, amid suggestions that he was 'squeezed out' by Starmer.

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.

Ding, ding, ding! It seems that James Cleverly took Downing Street’s instructions to get in some much-needed R&R over the holidays very seriously indeed. The Home Secretary was raring to go on this morning’s broadcast round, getting into several spats with the host of Radio 4’s Today programme, Mishal Husain. Cleverly was on air to discuss the Home Office’s claim that the asylum backlog had been cleared. He argued that ‘every single [legacy claim] has been processed’ but said it was ‘impossible to say’ how long it would take to clear the remaining cases, asserting that the aim is to get the overall number of applications coming down.

Sadiq Khan was hoping to project a message of ‘unity to the world’ with this year’s New Year’s Eve fireworks in London, which of course included the customary genuflections to the NHS, Windrush and inclusivity. But for all the highfalutin spiel about London’s place in the world, the mayor seemed rather less comfortable talking about the situation in the capital itself, when he was interviewed by Sky News shortly before the celebrations began. Asked first about recent figures that showed that knife crime was rising at the fastest rate in five years in London, and knife-point robberies rising by more than a third, Khan touted his ‘public health’ approach to knife crime, before quickly turning to blame national policies and the lack of public investment in services.

When Boris Johnson lost power, he didn't just blame Dominic Cummings. He thought he was victim of a wider plot to replace him with Rishi Sunak who, he suspected, was in cahoots with his former adviser. 'I heard that Cummings has said he started to plot to get rid of me in January 2020,' he told Nadine Dorries for her book, The Plot. 'The plot was always to get Rishi in. I just couldn’t see it at the time. It’s like this Manchurian candidate, their stooge.' Right in time for the paperback edition of The Plot, Dominic Cummings has now confirmed that he was approached by Sunak about making a comeback in a 'secret deal'.