The voters in last week’s local elections delivered a bloody nose to Sir Keir Starmer, and he’s now been humiliated in his own political backyard.
I’m told Starmer’s local Labour Party were planning to move into a new office building in his Holborn and St Pancras constituency. But the proposal was met with stout opposition from the prospective new neighbours: Camden Disability Action.
Had the charity, which shares the same building, taken exception to Labour slashing £5billion from the welfare bill? Very much so.
Pat Stack, chairman of the charity’s trustees, said: ‘We run an advice service for people on benefits. We would have clients distressed about what’s happening walking through the same doors as the people who had actually introduced the cuts.’
Labour decided against the relocation to avoid a stand-off. The charity has invited Starmer and Tulip Siddiq, the Labour MP for his neighbouring constituency, for a meeting about the cuts. Neither has taken up the offer. Funny that.
- After Reform won the Runcorn by-election by six votes, without a single visit to the constituency from the PM, a Labour MP was overheard in the Commons coffee queue saying: ‘Just as well Starmer stayed away – otherwise it would have been a Reform landslide!’
Sir Keir Starmer has been embarrassed in his own constituency following last week’s humiliation at the polls
One of my favourite BBC presenters, Jeremy Vine, is now the proud owner of a tattoo – at the tender age of 60.
His daughter, Alice, tattooed her arm for her 18th birthday with the song lyrics, ‘For there are brighter sides to life’, taken from the Still Ill by The Smiths. Her father’s arm now bears the next line: ‘I should know because I’ve seen them.’ When is too old for a first tattoo?
More evidence Ed Miliband’s mad dash to Net Zero is alienating his own party: Terry Jermy, the Labour MP for South-West Norfolk, is opposing plans for a 4,000-acre solar farm on his patch.
He grumbles: ‘Renewable energy does not fall evenly across the country – Norfolk is flat, so it’s easy to get solar panels into the ground.’
In other words, Not In My Back Yard, Ed.
Sir Tony Blair’s call for Labour to row back on its ‘doomed’ Net Zero plans did not impress David Clark, a former special adviser to Blair’s first foreign secretary Robin Cook.
‘It says everything about how Blair has spent his retirement that my first thought on hearing this was to wonder which fossil fuel interest paid him to say it,’ Clark mused.
I was surprised to see Keir Starmer beaming alongside actor Ross Kemp at a charity event last week. Last summer the former EastEnders hard-man revealed he was backing Tory MP Mark Francois at the general election.
Loose Women presenter Kaye Adams recalls trying to interview Margaret Thatcher inside No 10 as a student journalist.
‘I was so nervous. She ushered me in and she started to brush fluff off my shoulders and straighten my collar in a very sort of granny-type fashion.
She said something like: “You don’t want your mum to see you on the telly with fluff on your jumper.” It was very kindly, but it established the power dynamic in a subtle but effective way. I was putty in her hands.’
