Steerpike

The Queen of Privacy is doing it again. After a brief hiatus from the spotlight, the Duchess of Sussex has appointed a PR guru to help resurrect her UK image. Mr S isn’t all that surprised the Sussexes are setting their sights back on Britain — they were, after all, dubbed ‘Hollywood’s biggest losers’ at the end of last year. Meghan has employed an as yet unnamed professional public relations exec to help overcome her ‘popularity problem’ in the UK. The job role will also include time working on the Sussex’s not-for-profit Archewell Foundation. Eagle-eyed readers might remember this is the company that produced Meghan’s Archetypes podcast series which ran for a whole, er, 12 episodes, after being unceremoniously canned less than a year after Spotify funnelled £15.

As the dust begins to settle on Jeremy Hunt’s Budget plans, there’s one Tory MP who won’t be quite as keen to see the papers move on. Science Secretary Michelle Donelan is coming under increasing scrutiny after it emerged that not only had she got her facts wrong and lost a libel case — she’s making the taxpayer pick up the tab. While Penny Mordaunt rode to Donelan’s defence in the Commons yesterday, Gareth Davies MP struggled to sell the government line. The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury stumbled his way through an interview with LBC’s Nick Ferrari this morning, apparently deciding that the best way to answer his questions would be to, er, not answer at all.

Another one bites the dust. Theresa May has today become the 60th Tory MP to announce she is standing down at the next election – and easily the most high-profile. The Maidenhead backbencher, who served as prime minister from 2016 to 2019, generously gave the scoop to her local newspaper. In a statement, she told the Maidenhead Advertiser that since returning to the backbenches she has championed: Causes close to my heart including most recently launching a Global Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking. These causes have been taking an increasing amount of my time. Because of this, after much careful thought and consideration, I have realised that, looking ahead, I would no longer be able to do my job as an MP in the way I believe is right and my constituents deserve.

It looks like more bad press is headed Michelle Donelan’s way. The Science and Tech Secretary had to issue a humiliating apology on Tuesday and retract false accusations she made about an academic after not checking her facts properly. It also transpires that Donelan received legal advice about tweeting her letter of complaint before she made it public, though the government won't say what exactly that advice was. But to make matters worse, Donelan is letting the taxpayer pick up the tab. She agreed to pay the damages, but it soon emerged that the Science, Innovation and Technology department would cover the costs — a sum of £15,000. Cue predictable outrage. And now, to add insult to injury, Penny Mordaunt has made a quite baffling contribution to the saga.

Jeremy Hunt is facing a day of reckoning after announcing the Budget on Wednesday. The Chancellor framed his statement as a tax-cutting package, but has faced considerable blowback for taxing by stealth. He was even dubbed the ‘fiscal drag queen’ on the Radio 4’s Today programme – watch out Ru Paul. This was no election-winning Budget There’s been a mixed response in today’s papers. The Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph both lead on the issue of national insurance and its possible demise: the Telegraph reports that Hunt confirmed last night that abolishing NI was ‘our ambition long term’, while the Mail quotes Treasury minister Bim Afolami: ‘We want to eliminate that double tax on work.

If Jeremy Hunt didn’t have enough on his hands with post-Budget tensions rising within his own party, he’s now got the wrath of Dominic Cummings to contend with. Not long after the Chancellor announced the Spring budget, Cummings took to Twitter to issue some timely reminders… If [Boris Johnson] had stuck to the deal…you’d be about to watch Vote Leave massacring NPC-Starmer in an uncompetitive election with [the] UK on a totally different trajectory…instead of farce old Tories disintegrating everything they touch and breaking every promise from 2019 while pissing about with trivia like today. Ouch.

What a week for TV broadcasters: it’s been non-stop breaking news about, um, themselves. After BBC Verify’s debacle yesterday, it’s TalkTV that is making headlines today. The television channel, launched to much fanfare in 2022, is moving entirely online from this summer. Staff were informed by email on Tuesday, just a month after the channel’s most famous presenter Piers Morgan announced that his shows would be broadcast solely on YouTube. The station has struggled with fluctuating viewing figures for some time, and it racked up 2 million viewers in December 2023 – significantly less than BBC News’s 11.4 million and falling just behind its main competitor, GB News, which reached 2.87 million.

Following an ill-timed interview with the BBC, Londoners have been reminded of the existence of the capital’s underwhelming ‘night czar.’ Amy Lamé has a claim to being Sadiq Khan’s worst mistake in office, having presided over a disastrous decline in London’s nightlife since taking up the post in 2016. Since then, her pay has been hiked by a whopping 40 per cent, with Mr S revealing last year that her annual salary is now almost £117,000. Talk about money well spent. Lamé’s re-emergence this week has sparked a campaign on social media, with Londoners sharing their #LameLondon snaps to highlight her failures in the job.

They say opposites attract but the battle brewing between Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn is evidence to the contrary. The pair have become embroiled in a war of words and now Jezza has got the long arm of the law involved. Last night Corbyn took to Twitter to announce that he was planning to sue Farage. The GB News presenter, he complained, had made ‘a highly defamatory statement’ about the Independent MP, who went on to rage about the ‘disgusting and malicious lies’. Corbyn’s spokesperson has alleged that Farage accused the former Labour leader of ‘subscribing to an antisemitic conspiracy theory’ on his GB News show on Wednesday 28 February. It appears to all come back to a rather strange Facebook comment left by Corbyn in 2012.