Steerpike

He may be leaving the political stage but new figures show Nigel Farage won’t be short of a bob or two. Just hours after announcing his retirement from frontline politics on Saturday night, the former Brexit party leader said he was joining fan video app Cameo — where viewers pay celebrities to record personalised video messages. With 141 members of his ‘fan club’ and a price of £75 per vid, Farage looks set to rake in the takings for his burgeoning media empire under the auspices of Thorn In The Side Ltd. But should his Cameo career take a while to come together, Mr S suspects Farage will do just fine. https://twitter.com/Nigel_Farage/status/1368625149264748545?

It’s pretty hard to dispute that the EU’s vaccine procurement scheme has been nothing short of a shambles this year, with the bloc failing to strike deals quickly enough with pharmaceutical companies, leading to dosage shortages for member states. The disaster has led to even the Continent’s most ardent Europhiles, from Guy Verhofstadt to the German press, praising the UK’s post-Brexit vaccine procurement. Amazingly though, it appears there are some in the UK who still feel that Britain should have joined the EU’s woeful vaccine scheme. On Politics Live today, Layla Moran, the Lib Dems’ Foreign Affairs spokeswoman, suggested instead of striking out on our own, we should have used our negotiating expertise to help the EU strike better deals.

Rishi Sunak's Budget has been greeted fairly favourably. The Chancellor has succeeded in avoiding sparking uproar on the Tory backbenches. And Labour's response was muted. But not everyone is happy. Step forward Caroline Lucas. The Green party MP, beamed in to the Commons from Brighton (where else?), found a fatal flaw in Sunak's announcement: 'I say in all seriousness, our nation's health and prosperity would be better served by a Chancellor who cared rather more about hedges and hedgehogs and less about hedge funds' Mr S is glad to finally hear MPs sticking up for the issues that matter...

Today – after the deputy First Minister John Swinney was threatened with a no-confidence vote in the Scottish Parliament – the SNP finally agreed to release its legal advice from Alex Salmond’s challenge against the government. Mr S can see why Nicola Sturgeon wanted to keep the advice hidden... The documents concern Salmond’s successful legal challenge against the Scottish government, after it botched an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct made against him (Salmond was later acquitted of these charges in a criminal court). In January 2019 he won his case and the Scottish government was forced to pay out half a million in costs.

It's not the crime, it's the cover-up: just as Watergate exposed the workings of the Nixon White House the Salmond inquiry is giving the world a glimpse of how the SNP works in Edinburgh. And how the SNP-led committee investigating Nicola Sturgeon is shameless in its determination to rig the system. First, the committee tried not to publish Alex Salmond’s full evidence against Nicola Sturgeon citing legal reasons. That defence fell apart when The Spectator went to the High Court. Then, outrageously, the Crown Office (Scotland’s state prosecutors) told the committee to censor Salmond’s evidence. Leading to a question: what on earth was it playing at by interfering with parliament?

For most of the past year, Alex Salmond has been engaged in a vicious and high-profile war against his successor, Nicola Sturgeon, with Salmond suggesting that the Scottish establishment has conspired against him to keep him out of public life and have him jailed. Now it appears that Salmond has been waging war against a Scottish newspaper as well. Today the press regulator Ipso published details of a complaint made by Salmond against the Scotland on Sunday, sister paper to the Scotsman. Salmond had taken issue with an article published by the paper in April in the aftermath of his criminal trial – at which the former First Minister was acquitted on all counts.

What's the phrase? Poacher turned gamekeeper? Boris Johnson was once the arch poacher — a journalist at the Telegraph before taking on the editorship of Mr S's own illustrious publication. Now it seems Mr Johnson has discovered what it feels like to be at the other end of public scrutiny.  On a press trip to a south London school, the PM mourned the fact journalists are 'always abusing or attacking people'. Instead, he explained to a slightly bemused school child, that 'a lightbulb went off in [his] mind' and that instead, he decided to give politics a go. Nothing to do with childhood dreams of being 'world king' eh?  https://twitter.com/DanielHewittITV/status/1364192217850650627?

After Boris Johnson’s Commons speech today outlining the government’s roadmap out of lockdown, he was met with a fiery response from his predecessor as Prime Minister, Theresa May. On behalf of her constituents in Maidenhead, the former PM laid into the government’s plans for the aviation sector, pointing out that simply publishing a review of international travel in April would not give passengers and the sector enough time to plan for the summer. A fair question, of course. But why did the former PM decide to focus on aviation in particular? One reason, May explained in the Commons, is that she was concerned about the economic hit to her constituency, which is close to Heathrow.

Two regular faces have been rather absent from Sky News of late: morning anchor Kay Burley and political editor Beth Rigby. The pair were taken off air – Burley for six months and Rigby for three – after they were accused of breaching social distancing rules at Burley's birthday bash.  So, Mr S was intrigued by Matt Hancock's appearance this morning on Ridge on Sunday. When Sophy Ridge put to the Health Secretary that many people were confused as to why all adults would receive the jab by the end of the July but they couldn't book a holiday, Hancock replied: 'Well I know that everyone at Sky News is keen to be able to get back to having parties and all of us understandably want to get back to normal.' What ever could he be referring to?

Boris Johnson today hosted a virtual meeting of the G7, with representatives dialling in from around the world to discuss the equitable distribution of vaccine doses. But while the group may claim to represent almost half of the world’s GDP, it’s clear the heads of state are still struggling with Zoom as much as everyone else. At the meeting, Boris Johnson’s opening remarks were interrupted by a chatting Angela Merkel, leading the PM to call for the German Chancellor to be muted.  Mr S isn't sure that will go down well in Berlin... Watch here: https://twitter.com/ITVNewsPolitics/status/1362787480659976194?