Steerpike

Is there any greater anthropological experiment than the Lib Dems' annual conference? Britain's third party has not had such a jamboree since 2019 and the delegates are determined to make the most of it. Mr S certainly saw some sights at last night's disco, where Munira Wilson and Wendy Chamberlain were among the MPs to man the decks. 'You say Brexit, I say bollocks' was one of the chants of the night, as young hopefuls mingled with old veterans. Never has the Cha Cha Slide been conducted in quite the same way before, with many of the same party animals looking forward to tomorrow night's Glee Club. As one attendee put it to Mr S: 'It's much like the Truman Show – there are so few characters, you keep bumping into the same faces at these things.

It’s the first day of conference season and the Liberal Democrats are keen to make the most of it. This year their slogan is ‘For a fair deal’. But is renegotiating the Brexit deal really what they’re all about? Ahead of this weekend’s conference Sir Ed Davey was keen to put such talk to bed, claiming that rejoining the EU was ‘off the table’ and that his party wanted to instead focus on issues of greater concern to the public. Not all of his front bench seem to have got the message though. Speaking on the first day of the party’s annual conference in Bournemouth, the Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman Layla Moran told a fringe event: ‘We want to rejoin. We want, as part of it, to get back into the single market.

Just when we thought we had seen the last of John Bercow on our screens, the news has broken that the former speaker of the House of Commons is joining the line up of the US version of the hit game show The Traitors.  Currently being filmed in Scotland, the show will see Bercow join the likes of Love Island’s Ekin-Su and a whole host of other reality TV stars to be divvied up into ‘traitors’ and ‘faithfuls’. The traitors will have to kill off the faithfuls one by one to get to the hefty £205,000 cash prize, while the faithfuls do their best to root out the traitors at a nightly interrogation. Mr Steerpike is certain some of Bercow’s former colleagues in Westminster may have ideas about which team they’d like to see him on.

Big news from the media world. Rupert Murdoch is stepping down as Chairman of Fox and News Corp as of November, with his son Lachlan succeeding him as sole chair of both. Murdoch will assume the title of Chairman Emeritus of each company, after seven decades in the print and broadcast industries. The Sun king, aged 92, wrote in a note to employees that: Our companies are in robust health, as am I. We have every reason to be optimistic about the coming years – I certainly am, and plan to be here to participate in them. But the battle for the freedom of speech and, ultimately, the freedom of thought, has never been more intense.

So there we have it. Rishi Sunak's big announcement this afternoon was, er, a not entirely unreasonable five-year delay in the ban on petrol cars and gas boilers. Snap polling suggests it has gone down well with the public, who back the measure by 50 to 34 per cent. But judging from some of the more extreme reactions on Twitter/X, you would think the Prime Minister's decision to bring the UK into line with the EU on a 2035 ban for internal combustion engines amounted to a massacre of the firstborn. Below are five of the more excitable responses to Sunak's announcement today... 'Totally evil' For calm and reasoned moderation, we can always depend on that bastion of common sense, Jolyon Maugham KC. His reaction to the PM's shift in policy?

The Russell Brand revelations have prompted much soul-searching in recent days from hand-wringing hacks fretting about the norms of the noughties. Leading the charge today is Marina Hyde, the toast of centrist dads everywhere. She has written in the Guardian about her angst concerning the infamous ‘Sachsgate’ episode of Brand's career. Back in October 2008, Brand and his Radio 2 show co-host Jonathan Ross phoned Andrew Sachs – Manuel from Fawlty Towers – and left lewd messages on his voice machine, boasting about Brand's past sexual relationship with Sachs’ granddaughter, Georgina Baillie. Battle lines were drawn. Charles Moore was so appalled at this that he said he refused to pay his TV license until Brand had been fired.

With the polls pointing to a Tory thrashing, how many of the 2019 Red Wallers will win their seats next time? One who isn't hanging around to find out is Dehenna Davison, the 30-year-old MP for Bishop Auckland. She announced back in November that she was standing down from parliament and today she has also declared that she is quitting her post as a junior minister for Levelling Up. In her resignation letter, Davison said it was 'impossible' to stay in the job while battling chronic migraines and that she wants to spend more time on constituency work. She now intends to focus her efforts on campaigning for one punch assault victims; her late father died after a single punch in a Sheffield pub.

If only more politicians were like Rory Stewart. That is pretty much the gist of his book Politics on the Edge. While Stewart is the man called into politics to serve the people, the same isn’t true of his colleagues. Stewart’s memoir has a short list of ‘goodies’; namely, himself. But there is a long list of ‘baddies’ who, by Stewart’s account, have brought British politics into disrepute. Mr S has read Stewart’s book so you don’t have to – and here are seven of the worst people on Rory’s naughty list: George Osborne: There’s no love lost between Stewart and Osborne. The former chancellor, who is now doing his best to single handedly solve the labour market crisis, is painted as a cynical Cameron stooge who can’t be trusted. Mr S is shocked!