Steerpike

Oh dear. It seems that the sage of Hackney has blundered once more. Having lost the Labour whip last year for an asinine antisemitism letter, Diane Abbott is doing little it seems to try and win it back. She took to Twitter yesterday to criticise Wes Streeting, the Shadow Health Secretary, for daring to suggest that a Labour government would use private healthcare to cut the NHS backlog. 'There is no principled case for using the private sector,' she sniffed. 'Just as the “spare capacity” in private health Wes talks about does not exist. Only #NHS doctors, nurses and the £million contracts Wes will give them.' So it was left to Streeting, a comprehensive state school boy, to deliver the obvious retort to Abbott, who famously sent her own son to the elite City of London School.

Back to Scotland and Humza Yousaf’s controversial new hate law. The First Minister’s Hate Crime Act has left an already overstretched and under-resourced police force swamped with trivial complaints. Of the over 7,000 reports made in the first week, only three per cent of these were actual crimes. And now the spotlight is on the rather strange public information campaign released by the Scottish government. Not only was it pretty ineffective at communicating exactly what a hate crime is (hence the low crime to report ratio), it has now transpired that it cost the taxpayer nearly, um, £400,000. Crikey.

Angela Rayner appears unable to shake off questions about her tax affairs — literally. And now in an interview with ITV Granada, even Sir Keir Starmer’s confidence in his deputy doesn’t seem to be watertight. The media attention on his second-in-command continues after weeks of speculation about whether Rayner avoided capital gains tax on her council house and broke electoral law. The deputy Labour leader has refused to make her tax details public and Starmer hasn't even seen the legal advice she received on the matter himself.

Try as she might to duck questions on her tax affairs, the issue just keeps following Angela Rayner around — literally. On a campaign event today in Teesside, the deputy Labour leader was met by three men in high-vis jackets, one of whom was later identified as local Tory councillor John Coulson who took part in the protest alongside other Conservative councillors. The men were carrying an ominous black banner that read: ‘Angela Rayner Tax Dodger?’ Where Rayner walked around Yarm, her unexpected guests went too. In fact, so hot on Rayner’s tail were the protestors that the shadow levelling up secretary eventually had to leg it out the back of a pub she'd just walked into. Not like Labour to about turn...

The honeytrap scandal is the talk of the town as politicians, staffers, advisers and even journalists working in Westminster have been targeted by the sexting scammers. First to publicly admit he had engaged with the phishers was the Conservative MP — and until last night, vice chairman of the 1922 Committee — William Wragg MP. Wragg admitted last week that he had received rather salacious messages on Grindr, before confessing that he had in fact reciprocated with an explicit image of his own and even handed over the numbers of other parliamentarians.  Dr Luke Evans MP was the second politician to admit that he had been sent explicit images by a suspicious number on WhatsApp, in a video he posted to Facebook.

Uh oh. Labour is once again facing dissent from its own supporters over the Israel-Gaza conflict. Things came to a head this afternoon when a group of renegades targeted Labour HQ in London by — you guessed it — dousing the building in spray paint. While other protestors held a march in central London, the vandals stormed the building that houses Labour HQ, covering both outside and inside walls with red paint. The lefty activist group Youth Demand has claimed responsibility for the vandalism, posting a video of the graffiti artists up close and in action on Twitter. In its tweet, the group fumed: ‘Labour has blood on their hands. They are complicit in the murder of Palestinians, and millions of people around the world, as they continue to drive genocide.’ Good heavens.

When you're in a hole, who gonna call? David Lammy! Yes, the Shadow Foreign Secretary was out on the airwaves this morning, chivalrously, if quixotically, riding to the rescue of his under-fire deputy leader. Angela Rayner is facing claims she may have wrongly avoided capital gains tax and broken electoral law, with the Mail on Sunday today publishing photos of her describing as 'home' a different property from the one she told the authorities was her principal residence. Whoops! So out went brave Lammy, the Talleyrand of Tottenham, to dodge and dissemble as best he can. He first appeared on the BBC, telling Laura Kuenssberg that Rayner 'has a blended family like millions of Britons' and asking 'Why do we land on this northern woman?