Gaffe-prone David Lammy has done it again.
For more than a year, he was Foreign Secretary, Britain’s diplomat in chief on the world stage. Now the Justice Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister, he was sent out by Downing Street to defend the shambles over the drone attacks on RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus.
Lammy said: ‘We will do everything we can to protect our airbase… but also to support – alongside our allies, I should say, because Cyprus is part of Nato – the French, the Germans and others have also sent frigates to the base.’
Never the sharpest tool in the box, on BBC Celebrity Mastermind he was asked which monarch followed Henry VIII to which he replied ‘Henry VII’, instead of Edward VI
He added: ‘It’s not just a base that serves the United Kingdom, it serves the region, and of course we work very much with our allies because Cyprus is a Nato country.’
Except it isn’t a Nato country. There are 32 countries in the defensive alliance, including many European states near Cyprus such as Greece. Cyprus, however, is not one of them.
But then Calamity Lammy has form for getting his facts wrong.
Never the sharpest tool in the box, on BBC Celebrity Mastermind he was asked which monarch followed Henry VIII to which he replied ‘Henry VII’, instead of Edward VI.
As for who won the 1903 Nobel Prize for physics, he said ‘Marie Antoinette’, not Marie Curie.
So what would the creator of one of our most beloved barristers, Rumpole of the Bailey, make of David Lammy’s decision to cut trial by juries? Penny, widow of Sir John Mortimer, a barrister and Labour Party member who created TV’s Rumpole, says: ‘He would have been truly appalled. John would often repeat the saying, “Trial by jury is the light that shows that the lamp of freedom burns”.’
A little too late, Josh
Josh Simons quit as a Cabinet Office minister last month before he was sacked after paying a PR firm to smear journalists.
He ordered the £36,000 report into the background of journalists after they revealed his think-tank Labour Together had broken election law by failing to disclose £730,000 in donations. So you’d expect him to be fastidious about his own personal declarations.
Yet he accepted a total of £2,500 in two donations – in October and December – from Sir Trevor Chinn, a big Labour Together backer. They were declared 100 and 33 days late respectively.
On his Rosebud podcast, Gyles Brandreth asks Dame Mary Archer about the low points of her 60-year marriage to novelist Jeffrey Archer. ‘I like to say to Jeffrey that the marriage vow is “For richer for poorer, for better for worse, in sickness and in health”,’ she says. ‘And I feel we’ve explored the further extremes of that more thoroughly than most couples.’
Following Donald Trump’s criticism of Sir Keir Starmer’s dithering and dallying over providing bases for American war planes, former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie observes: ‘The reason Starmer doesn’t wear braces? He has no backbone.’
Kemi Badenoch denounced the Greens for electioneering in Urdu at the Gorton and Denton by-election. But where does that leave Welsh Conservatives? They campaign as ‘Ceidwadwyr Cymreig’.
To the Carlton Club for a packed reception to meet the impressive Canadian Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. He was invited by Tory peer Lord Hannan who called him in Canada and said: ‘Do you support free speech?’ Poilievre said: ‘Yes, of course I do.’ Hannan said: ‘Good, come to the Carlton Club and make one.’
