Steerpike

Labour got much of the lobby exercised last week with its latest wheeze: mysteriously rebranding its Twitter account as 'the GPC files' and sending out a link to 'theGPCfiles' to launch 7 a.m Monday morning. Sadly, for fans of the Global Powerlifting Committee eagerly expecting a string of revelations, the website in question focuses on government procurement cards. These allow purchases to be made directly against departmental budgets without going through regular invoicing procedures. Dozens of parliamentary questions and Freedom of Information requests have been tabled by Labour in recent months to try to find out what this money has been spent on.

We haven't seen much of Andrew Mitchell since his recent promotion and today was perhaps a reminder why. For more than ten years, the onetime Chief Whip languished on the backbenches post-plebgate, until last October Sunak appointed him Minister of State for Development and Africa. It was Mitchell's turn to do the government media round today but it proved to be a pretty tricky outing for the Old Rugbeian. His trenchant criticisms of Boris Johnson's policies came back to haunt him today when Mitchell was asked by the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg  about his punchy past statements on the decision to cut Britain's aid budget from 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income.

It seems Liz isn't the only Trussite returning to public life. Her former chief of staff Mark Fullbrook has returned to the world of political lobbying, fresh from masterminding her 49-day regime in No. 10. Fullbrook's previous activities in this field were a regular feature of news reporting during Truss's seven weeks in office. And now, undaunted by past controversies, he has returned to Fullbrook Strategies Limited – the firm he established and ran between spring and September last year. The onetime partner of Lynton Crosby heralded the move by writing on LinkedIn: Today FSL resumes business after my co-founders and I completed our “gardening leave”.

It seems the days of ex-prime ministers going quietly into the sunset of retirement are well and truly dead. By this point, it will come as no surprise to any readers of Mr Steerpike to learn that, in the six months since Boris Johnson left No. 10, he has been keeping well and truly busy.  Phew, it’s a wonder Boris has had time to pop to Kyiv at all! Now it seems that all that hustling is finally paying off for Boris. Strain your ears hard enough and you might just be able to hear the sound of cold hard cash raining down into the honourable member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip’s bank account.  A quick lift of the lid on the parliamentary register of MPs’ interests reveals that since 7 July 2022, Mr Johnson has earned nearly a whopping £5 million.

How can you tell a political movement is well and truly dead? Easy – the Times newspaper finally drops said movement’s advocates from its opinion pages. It’s a process that can take time, as we've witnessed with the painfully slow demise of Britain’s media Blairites. RIP. Steerpike was as sad as anyone to learn last month that David Aaronovitch has left the Times, having spent almost two decades farting out his centrist dad radicalism from the paper of record. We can all take comfort in that fact he will have a new Substack, natch, and he continues to be a voice for the voiceless on Twitter.

The Tory grassroots are revolting – and they clearly aren’t happy either. This weekend has seen two selection battles engulf different Conservatives associations. Local Tories are currently picking their prospective parliamentary candidates, ahead of the expected general election next year. For incumbent MPs, reselection is normally a formality: the sitting member is proposed and re-adopted by the party activists who live in their constituency. Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to have been the case for several sitting Conservatives. First, there was an unfortunate bun-fight for the new Penrith and Solway constituency.

To the Hurlingham Club, that seat of sporting privilege. Where better to host the 1922 committee’s centenary dinner? Tory grandees, MPs and donors piled in last night to raise a glass to King and cause. ‘In the 100 years of the ‘22’s existence,’ remarked Rishi Sunak, ‘we have had Conservative prime ministers for two-thirds of the time.’ The accompanying hearty roars were testament to the good spirits (and wines) in evidence last night. While the polls may predict grim things for the Tories come the next election, there was little sign of it within the hall It’s been a difficult few months for the Tories, with three prime ministers and a whole host of cabinet changes.

Labour are all too keen to present themselves as a completely new party these days. So Keir Starmer must be pretty annoyed at one of his more hard-of-thinking MPs for reminding voters that there are plenty of Corbynistas still sat on the Opposition benches. At Prime Ministers' Questions today, Kim Johnson – one of a handful of 'Corbyn's kids' selected under his leadership – used her 30 seconds in the spotlight to launch an attack on the 'fascist Israeli government' and its 'apartheid' policies. Surprisingly, Sunak did not use his reply to condemn this intemperate use of language. But plenty of others watching now have, noting that Johnson's language comes less than a week after Holocaust Memorial Day and caused barely a flinch on the Labour benches.