Steerpike

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has shown an increasing willingness to venture into political debates lately. In June, during the Black Lives Matter protests, he suggested that portrayals of Jesus as white should be reconsidered in English churches. And ahead of the December election last year he accused Boris Johnson of pouring petrol on a divided Britain. Clearly not content with the controversy about his new role as a political consultant, Welby decided to go a step further this evening, when he willingly joined the most hellish fight in politics: Labour’s eternal civil war.

Evgeny Lebedev, owner of the Independent and the Evening Standard  – and son of the former KGB spy Alexander Lebedev – has been nominated for a peerage by Boris Johnson today. The appointment has certainly raised eyebrows in Westminster, and perhaps suggests that Boris will be hoping for slightly more positive press in the tycoon's papers in the months and years to come. Perhaps the appointment is not too surprising though. The Prime Minister attended a lavish party thrown by Lebedev in Regent’s Park the day after winning the 2019 election, as well as attending one of the media owner’s Italian parties in 2018.

Another Labour leader, another role for Lord Kerslake. The former head of the civil service has been appointed to lead a review into the Labour party's organisational structure. Bearded Bob has been charged with transforming Labour into a more 'agile, cohesive and purposeful' organisation to ensure the party can 'fight and win the next general election in 2024', according to a leaked letter from Starmer's new gen sec David Evans. That would be the same Lord Kerslake who so successfully transformed Jeremy Corbyn's office in the run up to the 2019 general election... The problem, as Mr S has pointed out on numerous occasions, is that Kerslake is a crossbench peer, and as such is supposed to remain 'non-party political'.

Much of Westminster is now off for the summer, but it seems someone forgot to tell the noble lords of the upper chamber. Earlier this afternoon, the Labour peer Lord Rooker took aim at the PM, accusing the Tories of taking suspect Russian donations. Lord Rooker had initially asked about UK-Russian trade following the release of the Russia report last week. When  the international trade minister Lord Grimstone updated the house on the latest figures, Lord Rooker shot back:  Will those figures be improved by the Prime Minister prostituting himself and his office in the interests of getting Russian money through the London laundromat into Tory party funds?

Poor Grant Shapps. Having hopped on a flight to Spain on Saturday morning, the transport secretary discovered that his family's holiday hotspot would be placed on the government's Covid quarantine list from midnight. Shapps tells the Sun that he has spent the last 48 hours of his summer hols locked in emergency calls with industry bods and transport officials to try to ease the disruption. No doubt to the annoyance of Mrs S... Now Shapps has announced that he will be returning the UK on Wednesday to better deal with the burgeoning crisis, presumably from the comfort of his own home given the newly imposed 14-day quarantine rules.

#BorisFarewellTour. That’s the hashtag that has been trending on Twitter all morning as the Prime Minister headed north of the border to try and salvage the Union. His journey around Scotland began this morning in the Northern Isles of Orkney to a less than enthusiastic response. So how does a leader go about a tour to ‘save the Union’ in a country where your net approval ratings are -100? Mr S thinks Boris’s team has found the answer: https://twitter.com/BurnBanksy/status/1286259141858799617?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Find safety in the serene (and empty) countryside of Orkney to deliver his press conference.

If anyone thought the Labour party was through with the psychodrama of the Jeremy Corbyn years, they would have been bitterly disappointed by proceedings at the High Court this morning. In court, the Labour Party officially apologised for its own treatment of whistle-blowers involved in a BBC Panorama investigation into the party’s handling of antisemitism cases, which aired in 2019. In an apology read out at the High Court, Labour said it ‘acknowledged’ that previous statements it had made about the whistle-blowers – including accusing them of having ‘political axes to grind’ and being motivated by their opposition to Jeremy Corbyn – were ‘untrue and we redact and withdraw them and undertake not to repeat them’.

Why might a top medical adviser be dropped from the government's daily coronavirus press briefing? This was the question that MPs were keen to answer after England’s chief nurse gave evidence to the public accounts committee on Monday. Ruth May, who was interrogated by the committee chair Meg Hillier, failed to appear at the daily Downing Street presser on 1 June – days after the Dominic Cummings lockdown controversy. Instead, Matt Hancock was joined by epidemiologist John Newton from Public Health England. But those looking for a simple answer to the question of her sudden disappearance may be disappointed. She told the committee: 'It is indeed true I was dropped from a briefing but that happens to many of my colleagues as well.