IS THIS A BOOK I SEE BEFORE ME?
‘TOMORROW, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,’ laments Macbeth in his haunting final soliloquy. It could apply to the long-awaited book by Boris Johnson on William Shakespeare, for which he was paid an £88,000 advance in 2015.
Publication was due in 2016 but it has still not reached the shops. His father Stanley is even slower, it seems. after a trip last summer across china with his son Max, Stanley revealed: ‘I have just finished writing a book about the explorer Marco Polo.’ When did he start it? ‘about 62 years ago.’
They had some memorable clashes across the dispatch box. Now Tony Bair and William hague have been reunited on a podcast in which Blair admits: ‘he did rather too well for my liking at Prime Minister’s Questions.’ As for hague, he told the Political Thinking podcast:
‘It was a total waste of time for me. It was fun but got me nowhere.’ he can say that again. hague’s four years as Leader of the Opposition ended at the 2001 election with the Tories gaining just one seat. True, Blair’s Labour lost a few seats, but breezed through with a second landslide.
AS FORMER Prime Minister Liz Truss delivered a speech launching her new Popular Conservatism group, Kwasi Kwarteng announced he was quitting at the next election. Kwarteng, who entered the Commons in 2010, the same year as Truss, was her Chancellor in her short-lived government until she sacked him over the disastrous mini-Budget. Kwarteng wasn’t invited to the Truss conference. surely he didn’t time his resignation to try to steal her headlines?
TORY MP Michael Fabricant is one of many to highlight President Biden’s latest memory lapse confusing two leaders of France: ‘Mitterrand, Macron. Both are French and begin with ‘M’ after all . . . Easy mistake to make.’
MOST Labour frontbenchers are grey dullards, but the Party’s transport spokeswoman Louise Haigh is an exception. In the Commons last week, she was sporting a vivid new hair colour. Haigh, previously a copper-top, has gone for something markedly brighter. Scribes in the Press gallery consulted a colour chart and described the new Haigh ‘do’ as something between mango-tango, halloween, holland tulip and radioactive tangelo. Deep down, however, she is still a pinko.