Steerpike

It's a day ending in 'y' – which means there's more bad news for the BBC. Now the government has taken aim at the broadcaster, with Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy slamming the Beeb today in a parliamentary statement. In the scathing text, Nandy wrote of how she is ‘deeply shocked and disappointed’ about the Hamas documentary revelations and noted pointedly that she is not yet convinced similar slip-ups won’t happen again. Last week the corporation apologised for the release of a Gaza documentary in which the child narrator was later found to be the son of a Hamas minister. AND the Culture Secretary is far from impressed by how the BBC has handled the whole thing.

The western world might be collapsing but here in Westminster it is business as usual. In one of parliament's dusty old committee rooms, Kim Leadbeater's Assisted Dying Bill continues to slowly make its way through the legislative process, one agonising line at a time. But if you hoped that this exercise would be a Socratic discussion of open minds, you might be left somewhat disappointed. Virtually all of the amendments proposed have been struck down by the pro-Bill majority on the committee, by near-identical margins. Today it was the turn of the amendment on Down's Syndrome. The committee voted by 13 to 8 to exclude specific provision on the face of the bill for support for those with Down's syndrome when initiating conversations on assisted suicide and death.

When you've got a majority of 167, how do you keep control? The answer, it seems, is jobs for the boys (and girls). Another round of government appointments made a week ago has seen yet more new MPs promoted. Alex Barros-Curtis, Joe Morris and Jack Abbott are among the 2024 intake who ascended the first rung on the ministerial pecking order by being named parliamentary private secretaries (PPS). But it was the appointment of Mark Ferguson as a bag carrier at the Ministry of Housing which caught Steerpike's eye. The Gateshead Central MP gushed on LinkedIn that he is ‘especially excited to serve our Deputy Prime Minister and my friend Angela Rayner, who is driving forward change at pace’.

Well, you can't say they don't try. With Europe still reeling from Donald Trump's oval office bust-up with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday, over in Scotland the SNP have piped up to make their feelings known about the American President. Never ones to miss a chance to try and stay relevant, the party's leader John Swinney took to the airwaves to insist that Prime Minister Keir Starmer retract the invitation of a second state visit for Trump to the UK. 'I cannot see how a state visit can go ahead for President Trump to the United Kingdom, if President Trump is not a steadfast ally of ours in protecting the future of Ukraine,' Swinney told the BBC. Swatting away the SNP's clamouring, it appears Starmer is having none of it.

Dear oh dear. Just as positive polling had lifted the spirits of the Scottish Nats, news of their membership exodus will bring them crashing down. As revealed by the august paper that is the Scotsman, the SNP has lost more than 5,500 members in six months alone. It’s hardly what you want to hear when you’ve an election to fight in a year, eh? The Scottish journal revealed that, as of 31 December 2024, the party had just 58,940 members – down from some 64,525 in the summer months. Not that SNP figures are strangers to an exodus, however. In 2019, the party had a staggering membership base totalling 125,000. This decreased to 103,884 in 2021.

The Beeb is better at becoming the news than making it these days. The last fortnight has seen the corporation come under fire after a rather controversial Gaza documentary – whose child narrator was, er, the son of a Hamas minister – was first released and then pulled from streaming services. Now Steerpike has had sight of a rather interesting email sent by the corporation's CEO, Deborah Turness, about the whole affair… Writing to staff about the doc, titled 'Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone', Turness first admitted that these were 'turbulent times' for the corporation, before tacitly reminding her staff that when it comes to news stories, 'we have to get it right'. Talk about stating the obvious, eh?

These days, it's rare to find an MP who is consistent in his politics. So Mr S was delighted to discover on a trip to the archives that there is an exception to this usual rule. Rupert Lowe has served as the no-nonsense Honourable Member for Great Yarmouth since July 2024. Prior to his election as a Reform MP last year, Lowe was an MEP for the brief-lived Brexit party in 2019, which topped the European elections and toppled Theresa May. But, two decades before that, Farage and Lowe were candidates for rival Eurosceptic parties at the 1997 election: the former for Ukip, the latter for Jimmy Goldsmith's Referendum party. Steerpike has done some digging and found that some old leaflets of Lowe exist in the Special Collections of Bristol University.