Steerpike

It’s a fun night on Tory WhatsApp tonight. Sir Simon Clarke – a cabinet minister under Boris Johnson and Liz Truss – has tonight issued a call in the Daily Telegraph for Rishi Sunak to resign. But over on the Tory WhatsApp group of MPs, there is little sign that the parliamentarians are bolting just yet. Jackie Doyle-Price, a stalwart supporter of Liz Truss, was first to row in, writing on the group that the ‘one thing that the public expects of a Conservative government more than anything else’ is ‘behaving like grown ups.’ Noting that ‘the best thing any of us can do about tonight’s report is not engage with it’ she continued ‘for heavens sake, we are engaged in military action.

Poor old BBC. It’s been another torrid year for the Corporation after being embarrassed by Gary Lineker, lambasted over Richard Sharp and humiliated over various Hamas howlers. And now, even the mild-mannered Culture Secretary is having a pop at them. Lucy Frazer – never the most natural of culture warriors – was out on the airwaves this morning, discussing plans to give Ofcom more of a role in regulating the Corporation’s content. Frazer warned on Times Radio that audiences now increasingly feel that the Beeb is failing to be impartial. She said that ‘there was a perception among audiences’ of a problem, after complaints about bias jumped by more than 50 per cent last year.

So. Farewell then Ron DeSantis. The Florida Governor tonight bowed to the inevitable and announced he was dropping out of the race to be the Republican nominee for the White House. In a four-and-a-half-minute long address on Twitter/X, DeSantis declared that 'it's clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance'. 'Following our second-place finish in Iowa, we’ve prayed and deliberated on the way forward,' he said. 'If there was anything I could do to produce a favourable outcome, more campaign stops, more interviews, I would do it. But I can’t ask our supporters to volunteer their time and donate their resources. We don’t have a clear path to victory. Accordingly, I am today suspending my campaign.

It seems the renegade royal has run away again. All of Fleet Street was eagerly anticipating the mother of all media showdowns this month, with Prince Harry due in court for his libel trial with the publishers of the Mail on Sunday, Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL). The MoS is the biggest selling Sunday in the land while the Prince smelled blood after his Christmas triumph against the Mirror. Harry's claim concerned a February 2022 article about his publicly funded security arrangements when visiting the UK.

He's at it again. Like those unscrupulous bosses he professes to despise, Sir Keir Starmer enjoys taking the credit when things go right – but is rather less keen to take the blame when things go wrong. A prime example of this was offered today in an interview today with ITV, when he was asked about Rishi Sunak's PMQs jibe about his legal record and his tenure as Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013. Sir Keir replied that: If they want to attack me for decisions when I was Director of Public Prosecutions… we had 7,000 staff, we made nearly a million decisions a year. Will there be mistakes there? Of course, there will. But there’ll be no smoking gun, no skeletons in the closet.

Oh dear. It seems that the right-on Member for Walthamstow is wrong again. Watching the Rwanda Bill debate this afternoon, Mr S was struck by an exchange between Stella Creasy and former Home Secretary Suella Braverman. The latter was in full flow, decrying the indignities of Westminster's subservience to Strasbourg's judges when Creasy rose to intervene. Braverman duly paused her remarks on the importance of respecting the 2016 referendum result to graciously give way. So, what was the point that Creasy urgently needed to make? That, er, the ECHR was just like the defence alliance Nato: I just wonder if she could clarify, because she's got a concern there about a "foreign court". What does she think Nato is?

No. 10’s latest effort to convince Tory rebels to vote for its Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill has collided with that regular ministerial inconvenience, the independence of the judiciary. According to a report in Tuesday’s Times, ministers plan ‘to move 150 judges from the first-tier tribunal to the upper tribunal, the body that will hear appeals under the new legislation’. The newspaper said there would be additional training and extra pay for judges sitting on evenings and weekends. ‘This is designed to fast-track the process of considering individual legal appeals lodged by migrants,’ the paper explained. But there are judges in London and the Judicial Office speaks for them.

A tough week for Rishi Sunak just got even more difficult. For Lee Anderson, his own deputy party chairman, has tonight gone public to confirm that he will be voting for the rebel amendments on the Safety of Rwanda Bill on Tuesday. The red wall rottweiler took to Twitter/X after 24 hours of speculation about his intentions to confirm simply that: The Rwanda Bill. I have signed the Cash & Jenrick amendments. I will vote for them. These amendments seek to disapply international law from the Bill and curtail asylum seekers’ rights to appeal against flights to Kigali.