Steerpike

It has been an interesting year for onetime Rada star Laurence Fox. The former Lewis actor turned Question Time guest announced he was running for London mayor last month but has thus far barely managed to make a ripple ahead of polling day in just a week’s time.  A city-wide poll last week showed the culture warrior on just a miserly 1 per cent — the same number as self-proclaimed joke candidate Count Binface. Whereas the former boasts of having a £5 million war chest for his ‘Reclaim’ party, the latter has had to crowdfund the £10,000 deposit needed for his campaign.

France's vaccine rollout has had its difficulties in recent months. In early January, the Mail on Sunday reported the 'French are at better at torching cars than giving Covid vaccinations' after vandals burned 861 vehicles on New Year's Eve – more than twice the number of people inoculated over the last five days of December. Subsequent efforts to address rampant vaccine hesitancy were not hindered by President Emmanuel Macron, who claimed the AstraZeneca vaccine was merely 'quasi ineffective' with one poll showing just 20 per cent of French voters had confidence in the jab in March. Now though efforts have at last stepped up, with the country reaching a target of 10 million first doses a week ahead of its mid-April target.

Plans for a News UK channel to rival the BBC appear to be dead in the water.  Last year it was reported that Rupert Murdoch was planning to expand his news empire by launching a new channel in the UK that would take inspiration from Fox News in the US.  Alas it's not to be. The company's Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks has today emailed all staff to announce that broadcast executive David Rhodes is leaving the company at the end of June. It follows reports in February that News UK planned to focus on streaming, with Brooks telling staff that News UK had concluded it was not 'commercially viable' to launch a linear news channel. Instead the company is looking at on demand products. Over to GB News then..

The SNP tabled an urgent question in Westminster today, asking for an update on the ministerial code in light of recent allegations of impropriety – something of course their comrades in Holyrood would know all about. A potentially tricky outing for the government beckoned but up stepped Michael Gove, master of the sticky wicket, to bat away the opposition spinmeisters and dig his hapless captain out of trouble again. Fortunately for Gove some Tory MPs were on hand to provide softball 'questions' that were more of gentle underhand throw than a fiendish googly. A case in point was 2019-er Andrew Griffith, who lent his £9.5 million townhouse to Boris Johnson's campaign during the latter's successful leadership bid.

Much has changed in the world of politics since May 2015 but one thing certainly hasn't – former MP David Ward is still causing problems for the Liberal Democrats. The one term wonder achieved little in his year five stint in Parliament other than notoriety for a 2013 website post to mark Holocaust Memorial Day in which claimed he was 'saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps, be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza'. He was subsequently temporarily suspended from the parliamentary party five months later for questioning Israel's right to exist.

Three national newspapers last night splashed on No. 10 source claims that Dominic Cummings was responsible for WhatsApp leaks about Boris Johnson's government. Less than 24 hours later the former chief adviser has opted to return fire, unleashing a 1,091 blog post in vintage Cummings style.  It begins in typically combative style – 'the Prime Minister’s new director of communications Jack Doyle, at the PM’s request, has made a number of false accusations to the media' – going on to rebut reported claims in recent months.

When Boris Johnson announced he was running to be Tory leader in July 2019, few were more vociferous in their support than Johnny Mercer. The former Royal Artillery captain claimed at the time that 'Boris is the man of the moment' and 'a much deeper thinker than people assess him to be', being rewarded with a post as a junior defence minister. Fast forward nearly two years and Mercer has now left his post over the treatment of veterans who served in Northern Ireland after they were excluded from the amnesty in the Overseas Operations Bill. In a Times Radio interview this afternoon, Mercer let rip his frustrations, claiming that his spell in Whitehall was 'the most distrustful, awful environment I've ever worked in' – quite a statement from a Helmand veteran.