Steerpike

Some sad news to bring you from the literary world. Those who have saved up £25 for Nadine Dorries’ upcoming The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson, will have to keep waiting a little longer. Publication day for the explosive real-world political thriller has today been pushed back from September to November to allow 'the required legal process needed to share her story' to take place, according to HarperCollins. The book has netted the author a £60,000 advance and was originally intended to be published in time for October's Conservative party conference, in order to cause as much collateral damage as possible to Dorries' bête noire Rishi Sunak.

Hackney Council taxpayers, breathe easy. The fight against global climate change will be fought hardest, not on a global or even national level, but, er, by the emergency responders at the local council, apparently. The local authority's apparatchiks are advertising for a 'climate change director' to enact their 'climate action plan: a five-point action memorandum that Hackney hopes will turn heads in big pollutin’ states like the US, China and India. The incentive for the right candidate? A whopping £145,193 salary. Mr S imagines this to be reflection of the scope and depth of Hackney’s climate response. After all, that’s £30,000 more than Graham Stuart, the Minister for Climate Change and Net Zero, will be banking this year, the national effort somewhat tame by comparison.

Oh dear. The latest figures for Scotland’s alcohol-related deaths are out and it’s not good news. Deaths registered in 2022 have risen by 2 per cent from 2021 to total 1,276 mortalities overall. Strikingly, Mr S notes that the rise in deaths is attributable to women, with 440 deaths tragically recorded last year. With alcohol-related deaths at the highest levels since 2008, these figures are a damning indictment of the SNP’s self-proclaimed ‘world-leading’ minimum unit pricing policy. ‘We will need to better understand the reasons for this increase in deaths,’ said drugs and alcohol policy minister Elena Whitham. You can say that again – though perhaps leading on transparency would be a start.

Who says Britain no longer produces quality telly? Mr S this weekend thoroughly enjoyed the sight of Nish Kumar – a man who identifies as a comedian – being put firmly in his place by TV presenter Lowri Turner on women’s rights. Invited on to Jeremy Vine's Channel 5 show, Kumar waxed lyrical on the subject, declaring that: I believe that the transgender community deserves our love and support. But there is a bizarre fixation with it in the British press. I don't know what's going on. It feels like everyone in the British media has like caught some sort of brainwaves about the subject. It is a community that people have a pathological obsession with. I just think: live and let live.

It’s only been a day since Nadine Dorries announced her resignation as an MP – in a scathing letter released to the Mail on Sunday blasting Rishi Sunak’s premiership. But it seems that the former culture secretary still has plenty of ammunition left over. Dorries appeared on TalkTV this afternoon to explain why she felt she had to resign now, and to take another pop at the Prime Minister for good measure. In the interview, she claimed that she had actually told Cabinet Secretary Simon Case last summer that she planned to resign, but that ‘there was a huge amount of pressure not to go’ from her colleagues. She held out this long, she said, because she didn’t want to force the Tories to fight a by-election on her patch that they would likely lose.

Nadine Dorries is off – and this time it's for real. Following weeks of criticism, the former Culture Secretary has finally announced that she will be quitting the Commons when parliament returns from recess on Monday 4 September. That will trigger a by-election in her Mid-Bedfordshire constituency, helpfully timed to coincide with Tory party conference. Dorries first declared she would leave the Commons at the same time as Boris Johnson and Nigel Adams back in June but has hung on ever since, giving the Lib Dems in her constituency time to organise. In a scathing letter published on the Daily Mail's website, Dorries says Sunak has 'squandered the goodwill of the nation,' 'discarded' levelling up, and put 'personal ambition above the stability of the country'.

Following Labour's shock defeat in the Uxbridge by-election, Keir Starmer suggested that Sadiq Khan 'reflect' on his Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) crusade. A month on from that result, how exactly is the reflection going? Tuning into LBC today, Mr S was amused to discover that the London Mayor has found the answer to why Ulez is so unpopular: tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorists. Asked by host James O'Brien, that fearless seeker of truth, if he was surprised by the level of opposition, Khan replied: I didn't expect for there to be people linking my policies to cleaning up the air with conspiracy theories. I did expect people to have genuine concerns, and I have been listening to those genuine concerns.

Very few people came out well of the Nigel Farage banking scandal – which saw the former Brexit party leader lose his Coutts bank account over his political views. In the end, Farage managed to claim two scalps over the affair, with both NatWest’s and Coutts’ CEOs forced into humiliating resignations. Still it may be that all is not lost for the NatWest chief – with reports today that she may be in line for a huge payoff. Despite resigning over what Dame Alison Rose herself admitted to being a ‘serious error in judgement’ – including sharing the personal banking details of the former MEP with a journalist – the bank has announced today that it plans to pay her for the duration of her notice period. The total could amount to £2.

Oh dear. It seems that, in their earnestness to make capital out of tragedy, Labour have slipped up again. The party yesterday sought to exploit Lucy Letby's refusal to attend her sentencing, tweeting that 'Rishi Sunak has dragged his heels over changing the law to make criminals attend their court sentencing. We believe victims deserve better than this. Agree? Add your name below.' What Labour should also have known, if it didn’t already, is that nearly two hours beforehand Alex Chalk, the Secretary of State for Justice, had tweeted a few hours earlier that the government was already 'looking to change the law so offenders can be compelled to attend sentencing hearings.