Steerpike is The Spectator's gossip columnist, serving up the latest tittle tattle from Westminster and beyond. Email tips to steerpike@spectator.co.uk or message @MrSteerpike
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Former Newsnight correspondent Paul Mason seems rather happy to be free of Auntie, especially since the Scottish independence referendum campaign sent the establishment to panic stations: ‘Not since Iraq have I seen BBC News working at propaganda strength like this. So glad I’m out of there,’ he writes on his Facebook page, to the consternation of
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Don’t they know there’s a war on? Given that the government has finally woken up to the very real threat of a ‘yes’ victory, Mr S was rather surprised to hear where the Secretary of State for Scotland has been. Spies report that Alistair Carmichael spent the day in London yesterday. Presumably someone had to
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A wincing Douglas Alexander told Newsnight last night that the tightening of the referendum polls ‘saw more £2 billion worth of value wiped off the stocks of Scottish companies.’ His pained expression revealed concern for ‘real people’s pensions and the threat to real people’s jobs… on the basis of a single opinion poll.’ Better Together
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Labour like to campaign with the slogan ‘our NHS’, but are they taking their claim of owning the health service a little bit too far? Dr Mark Hayes is standing for the party in Selby, Yorkshire yet remains head of the local NHS Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG). When questions were raised about a conflict of interest
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‘A secret plot to boot John Bercow out of the Commons is being drawn up by senior Tory MPs,’ reported yesterday’s Mail on Sunday. Apparently a plan is afoot to field ‘a “proper” Tory candidate against him’, something that would ‘drive a coach and horses through the convention at Westminster that sitting Commons Speakers are
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‘I don’t think Russell Brand has read much Orwell’, says the Catholic Herald, responding to the multi-millionaire revolutionary’s YouTube claim that IS are less of a threat than David Cameron: ‘Not just because he recently described Owen Jones as our generation’s incarnation of the left-wing iconoclast, but because yesterday he engaged in the kind of
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It was widely noted that the Prime Minister remained grinning in his seat after PMQs to hear a Point of Order directed to the Speaker from Tory MP Simon Burns. Burns wanted to know whether the Speaker would withdraw his letter of recommendation for Carol Mills as Clerk of the House. The letter is currently
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It’s what you might call a Millwall strategy: Mr S hears the Sun will be parking a very large, metaphorical tank on Ed Miliband’s lawn following the row over the Labour leader apologising for being snapped supporting the paper. The paper will be throwing a bash at the Labour Party Conference, despite delegates tearing up
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As Mr S predicted yesterday, the row between Times colleagues Matthew Parris and Tim Montgomerie has simmered on. And turning up the temperature in the Times’ Red Box email this morning, Parris seemed to be getting rather catty: ‘I was pleased to be singled out by my friend and colleague, Tim Montgomerie, in yesterday’s throwaway
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‘It was an utter humiliation’, says Bercow’s biographer, after the Speaker was openly mocked by MPs as he retreated in the row over who will be the new Commons clerk. listen to ‘John Bercow: ‘Modest pause’ in Commons clerk recruitment’ on Audioboo
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It’s open warfare at the Times between two leading lights on the right – the newspaper’s former Comment Editor Tim Montgomerie and longtime columnist Matthew Parris, who held no punches in his Saturday column in the paper: ‘My fellow columnist Tim Montgomerie could not have been more wrong when he wrote in yesterday’s Times Red
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Mr S could not help think that last night’s Scottish CBI dinner looked a little dreary and frankly a bit ‘budget’. The PM was coming to town; could they not have strung up some bunting at the very least? There was good reason the whole thing looked rubbish though: bureaucracy. The guest list was cut
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Andrew Norfolk, the Times journalist that blew open the Rotherham child abuse scandal, can sleep well in his bed tonight, for he has been completely vindicated now. Forget the Jay Report, and the resignation of the Leader of Rotherham Council. No, Norfolk has been blessed with great reward from a far higher power; from the
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This is no ordinary defection. It would be easy for the Tories to brush off a member of the old guard as a swivel-eyed headbanger, but Douglas Carswell is not only a darling of the grassroots, he’s also extremely popular in the House. And not just amounst Tories. As Mr S reported last year from
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So it turns out the revolution will be televised after all. ‘Brand’, a full length documentary about the comedian turned political activist Russell Brand, is heading our way next year. The multi-millionaire comedian—who is dating a scion of the Goldsmith family—used a recent appearance on Newsnight to call for the overthrow of the state, claiming
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One of the many blows landed by Alex Salmond during last night’s debate centred on Alistair Darling’s criticism of the Office of Budget Responsibility, set up in 2010 by George Osborne to provide independent economic forecasts for the Treasury. The OBR’s numbers have been key to the Better Together’s onslaught on the numerical black holes at the
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With the interventions of former Speaker Betty Boothroyd, ex-ministers — including Jack Straw, Malcolm Rifkind and Margaret Beckett — and the Clerk of the Australian Senate, Rosemary Laing, it is becoming increasingly hard for John Bercow to spin the fight over his choice for the replacement Commons clerk as a row with his ‘usual suspect’ critics. Yesterday’s Times leader
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It’s going to be the battle of the Georges in Bradford West at next year’s general election – and Mr S reckons it could be a worth keeping an eye on George Grant, the Tory candidate selected for the seat on Saturday. After helping to launch the Libya Herald, the country’s first post-Gaddafi English language newspaper, Grant was
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Calling in a favour from a comrade to help flog your new book is hardly a new trick, but Mr S wonders if Owen Jones really thought this one through: Thankfully, Russell ‘the revolution is coming’ Brand is not known for his outrageous hyperbole.
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Where are the Labour sisterhood this morning? Presumably they’re not listening to Woman’s Hour, where one of their Westminster colleagues blamed the ladies for Britain’s paralysis on the world stage. Outgoing Labour MP Austin Mitchell has—to say the least—a curious theory: ‘I think the problem is simply this, that parliament with more women is going