Steerpike

Another one bites the dust. Mhairi Black today becomes the sixth SNP MP to announce she is standing down at the next election. It’s a rather big deal given Black is the Westminster group’s deputy leader. She famously pushed Labour’s Douglas Alexander out of his seat at only 20 years of age, with her entry to parliament symbolising the party’s landslide victory in 2015.  Black follows in the footsteps of former Westminster group leader Ian Blackford, onetime party treasurer Douglas Chapman, Peter Grant, Angela Crawley and Stewart Hosie in quitting the Commons. Currently Mr S calculates that 13 per cent of the SNP group will not be standing as MPs in 2024.

King Charles III is all set for his ‘Scottish coronation’ in Edinburgh tomorrow. Yet despite the royal fervour north of the border, Mr S hears that the nationalists are still not satisfied. Alex Salmond of the pro-independence Alba party and Green co-leaders, Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater, have all snubbed the royal invitation. Quelle surprise. ‘This ceremony is entirely wrong-headed and neither fish nor fowl,’ raged Salmond, after revealing he has declined the monarch’s invitation to what he called the ‘artificial and second rate ceremony’. According to Salmond, ‘Charles is being poorly advised by a group of courtiers who have a great love of pomp and no understanding of circumstance.

Talk about getting your priorities right. As ministers battle to get inflation down from the double digit highs of earlier this year, it seems not all at the Bank of England are preoccupied with this struggle. For it has today been revealed that staff at Britain's central bank – whose main job is to keep inflation at just two per cent – have been spending their time drawing up new, right-on pregnancy guidelines. The main takeaway? People of any gender identity can become pregnant, apparently. In its submission last year to Stonewall (who else?), the Bank of England boasted about how its new 'family leave' policy, introduced in June 2021, included the phrase 'birthing parent' to mean mother.

Sue Gray did break the Civil Service code, according to a Cabinet Office investigation released by the government. The Partygate prober-in-chief has today been found to have breached the guidelines which she did so much to uphold during her six years as head of the government's, er, Proprietary and Ethics team. Gray began negotiations with Labour in October of last year and thus violated the rules whereby individuals must declare all relevant outside interests to their line manager as soon as they arise. Government advice states that individuals 'should err on the side of caution when considering what to declare but the onus is on the individual to consider what might be relevant and declare it.

The Court of Appeal’s rejection of the government’s Rwanda plan spells trouble for Rishi Sunak in his bid to ‘stop the boats’ – but at least one man is happy about the verdict. Step forward, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.  The celebrity chef was on Question Time last night, telling viewers he is ‘delighted’ about the apparent end of the scheme to send asylum seekers to Africa. He said: ‘I was flabbergasted to hear Suella Braverman say that most Britons are disappointed by this decision. I’m absolutely sure that most people in this room are delighted by this decision.’ Mr S is surprised to hear Fearnley-Whittingstall thinks the Question Time audience speaks for Britain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Will Partygate claim yet more scalps? For a fortnight now, Sir Bernard Jenkin, the Privileges prober-extraordinaire, has refused to comment on claims that he attended a lockdown-breaking bash for his wife in December 2020. But will that silence continue to hold, given fresh revelations from the Guido Fawkes blog about other attendees at the aforementioned shindig? Sir Bernard was not the only parliamentarian at the drinks gathering, according to the website's intrepid sleuth-hounds. They report that the MP for Ynys Môn, Virginia Crosbie, was the co-host of the Anne Jenkin birthday drinks party, held in Deputy Speaker Eleanor Laing’s parliamentary offices during the pandemic.

Breaking: Sadiq Khan is a big fan of grass – and not the kind you can decriminalise. The Mayor of London and the Greater London Authority have been forced to shell out a whopping £200,000 to re-turf Parliament Square Gardens – a site often favoured by the unwashed masses of eco-protestors like Extinction Rebellion. City Hall cited the impact of 'continued high footfall' as one of the reasons why the grassed area struggled to recover last autumn, alongside the 'hot weather and hose pipe ban' that summer. A breakdown of figures in response to a Freedom of Information request seen by Mr S showed that the re-turfing of Parliament Square cost £183,000 alongside a further £16,000 due to 'the complex logistics of working in a sensitive central London location.