Steerpike

Back to Scotland, where parliamentarians are under scrutiny over questionable expenses claims – this time on heating their second homes. It transpires that between 2023-24 Scottish politicians claimed a whopping £36,000 in energy bills for their rented homes in Edinburgh, with the Nats and Labour lot making up £26,000 of the total cost. Alright for some! John Swinney's separatists were the biggest beneficiaries, as pointed out by the Scottish Daily Express, with almost half of the Holyrood group expensing energy costs. The Nats claimed over £25,000 from the public purse, while over £1,000 of taxpayer funds are covering Labour MSP Colin Smyth's utility bill.

They're the redoubtable men and women who keep our legislature safe. But is the thin blue line around the Commons looking a little bigger these days? Mr S has done some digging and found a Freedom of Information (FOI) request from the Metropolitan Police on fitness tests undertaken by the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection unit – the elite squad assigned to protect MPs. The Met sent The Spectator figures which show that the number of officers failing their JRFT – job related fitness test – doubled between 2019 and 2022. According to the Police Single Operating Platform, 771 employees took tests in 2018, of which five failed – a rate of 0.6 per cent. By 2022 the annual number of officers taking the tests had increased to 810, with twice as many failures (10) or 1.

After years of tweaking the tail of BBC bosses, it seems that Gary Lineker has finally had enough. The left-wing centre forward is reportedly stepping down from Match of the Day at the end of this season after 25 years in post. The 63-year-old is currently the Beeb's highest-paid star, earning more than £1.3m a year. So at least the accountants will be cheering eh Gazza? The former Leicester City star is likely to be spending more time with his millions, thanks to his wildly successful 'Goalhanger' series of podcasts. He will now be freed from the Corporation's impartiality rules meaning, at long last, we can finally know what Gary Lineker thinks about everything from Channel crossings to the West Bank. Phew! Must have been hard keeping all those thoughts bottled up for so long...

Labour ministers are very keen to be good Europeans. But could the cause of closer continental ties come at the price of Wes Streeting's smoking ban? Tobacco firms are perplexed as to how proposals to ban tobacco products for younger Brits will work in Northern Ireland. Under the terms of the UK's revised Withdrawal Agreement, EU law continues to apply in certain respects here. Among the provisions of EU law is the snappily-named TPD2 – the EU's second Tobacco Products Directive. This was implemented in the UK in 2016 and continues to apply now to Northern Ireland. Under the UK's post-Brexit deal, Article 4 obliges the government to give the same effect to provisions of EU law which are made applicable by the Withdrawal Agreement as they have in EU member states.

Football fans are known to get a little rowdy after a game, but the horror that broke out after the Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax game on Thursday night was an entirely different matter. As Jonathan Sacerdoti wrote for the Spectator today, hundreds of Jews were hunted and beaten by mobs after the game while videos of the violence quickly spread across social media, leaving users horrified at the Amsterdam attacks. Yet for some rather peculiar reason, mainstream broadcasters were not quite as fast to report on the matter as one might have expected – with the Beeb in particular notably slow to the news, with readers taking to Twitter to blast both the delay to the public service broadcaster's reporting and the language used to describe the attacks. Good heavens...

It's less than a week since he formally handed over the reins of power – but Rishi Sunak is wasting no time. On Wednesday, just five days after he formally resigned the leadership of the Conservative party, Sunak and his wife Akshata registered their latest venture on Companies House. The newly-incorporated 'Office of Akshata Murty and Rishi Sunak Limited' follows similar vehicles being set up by Sunak's four Tory predecessors. David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss all established their own eponymous outlets shortly after leaving office. Clearly Sunak, the Peloton-loving premier, is in something of a hurry. Cameron waited a month after quitting as an MP to set up an office while May, Johnson and Truss all took a month or more after handing over the leadership.