Mosley’s Labour gifts hit £500,000 in one year
Labour deputy leader Tom Watson has received donations worth £500,000 from the former motor racing boss and press standards campaigner Max Mosley in less than a year, according to the latest official records.
Mr Watson this month registered a donation from Mr Mosely worth £300,000, received via the party, to support his office as deputy leader and shadow culture secretary. It follows a similar donation registered last June as being worth £200,000.
Mr Watson said: “I’m proud to call Max Mosley a friend and I’m delighted he has made a financial contribution to Labour.”
It isn’t every day that a senior frontbencher seeks to impress the House of Commons by performing a hip-hop dance routine. Yet this, believe it or not, is what happened at yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Questions.
As Jeremy Corbyn resumed his seat, still quivering from a lengthy and impassioned harangue about NHS funding, Tom Watson moved to congratulate his leader. He did this not, however, by patting Mr Corbyn on the back, or by shaking his hand, or by whispering encouragement into his ear. Instead, he thrust out his left arm, as if to punch an unseen assailant in the throat, while lowering his head to his right forearm, as if to sniff it.
Up in the press gallery, parliamentary correspondents blinked, looked at each other, and then peered back down at the chamber – where they found Mr Watson sitting as normal, a vision of imperturbable dignity. No, they must have imagined it. It couldn’t have happened. The very idea was ridiculous.
Afterwards, though, video footage confirmed it. The Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, really had done The Dab. Thought to have originated in the hip-hop clubs of Atlanta, Georgia, dabbing has in recent times become a craze, sweeping both the US and Britain. Until yesterday, however, the move was more commonly performed by rappers, sportsmen and teenage schoolchildren, rather than 50-yearold Members of Parliament for West Bromwich East attending Prime Minister’s Questions.
It was a peculiar moment. Yet, unusual though Mr Watson’s actions may sound, he isn’t the first British statesman to display a talent for hiphop dance manoeuvres.
Gladstone, for example, marked the passing into law of the Elementary Education Act 1880 by body-popping across the Table of the House, accompanied by the eighth Duke of Argyll on beatbox. At the 1952 Conservative party conference in Scarborough, Anthony Eden dazzled attendees with his masterly onstage performance of the electric boogaloo.
Harold Macmillan, meanwhile, celebrated the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis by announcing his intention to hit the stanky leg. “Bitch, I’m wild,” he confirmed, in a statement to the House of Commons. “When I hit da dance flo’, I be do da stanky leg.” Historically minded MPs, therefore, will have been delighted to see Mr Watson revive this grand parliamentary tradition. In particular, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Conservative MP for North East Somerset, whose aptitude for B-boying during his time at Eton College earned him the sobriquet Snoop Moggy Mogg. Even today, masters recall with awe the virtuosity of his krumping.
Mr Watson’s efforts aside, yesterday’s PMQs was an unremarkable affair. As is often the case when the subject is the NHS, debate swiftly disintegrated into a bewildering back-and-forth of statistics (“Twenty-five thousand fewer hospital beds!” “Eighteen hundred more midwives!”).
Theresa May was angrily defiant. “I will not take any lessons,” she shouted, “from the party opposite!” Maybe she should. I hear that her Harlem Shake leaves much to be desired.