TORIES TO SMEAR KEIR
TROUBLED Tory MPs fretting he’s Superflop, not Superman, would concern a Prime Minister less arrogant than Boris Johnson.
Increasing murmurings on Westminster’s Tory benches about drift and lack of direction betray a creeping nervousness in party ranks – only a month after winning a thumping Parliamentary majority.
Friday’s orchestrated celebrations of a Brexit not yet done and Britain remaining in the single market and customs union during 2020’s dangerous £600billion trade talks will distract momentarily from the growing unease but prove no permanent diversion.
Wiser Tory heads worry that Johnson thinks Downing Street is a grander version of London’s City Hall, where as mayor he spent his time posing for photos and squandering public money on vanity buses and an unbuilt garden bridge – and stealing other people’s credit for the London 2012 Olympics.
Older Tory heads compare – unfavourably – Johnson’s early weeks,
Tipped for the axe as Tory chair next month, James “not very” Cleverly’s reward for an 80-seat majority may be a piddling ministerial job. The lapdog should’ve realised loyalty earns contempt from PMs.
A TALKATIVE Cabinet Minister told me excitedly that the Tories “can’t wait to get to work” on Keir Starmer if the frontrunner wins Labour’s leadership race.
The Conservatives’ Dirty Tricks Department is plotting to smear a decent public servant as a “terrorists’ friend” in an all-out attack.
“We’re going through every decision when Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions,” smirked the Secretary of State. “He won’t know what’s hit him.” Really? I trust that the including a fortnight’s holiday in Mustique, to the Labour bundle of energy that was Tony Blair here, there and everywhere on his 1997 debut. Early impressions count.
HS2, Huawei, climate emergencies and Whitehall upheaval are splitting a party incapable of remaining united outside election time.
Include a slouching economy, an ailing NHS given a plaster instead of the required transfusion, and another public is canny enough to separate fact from fiction on this, so these Tory fibs are bound to backfire.
Enemies on the Left disgracefully join the mudslinging, inventing false claims that Starmer pressured Sweden into pursuing Julian Assange. Starmer was a respected DPP and the working class lad made good who is named Keir after Labour’s founder should view their malice as a backhanded compliment. They are clearly frightened of him.
RACE Starmer in leadership bid round of school cuts... and the bleak picture that emerges is nothing like the pretty fiction Johnson painted last month. Add a dash of resentment over posh weirdo misfit adviser Dominic Cummings’ Mafioso act and the mix is political Kryptonite.
This Clark Kent with thinning hair isn’t the character he sold to the electorate. Folk in seats such as Sedgefield, Stoke, Redcar, Grimsby and West Brom are entitled to feel short-changed.
They’ll be taking back their loaned votes when they discover that Johnson is robbing their councils to bung to the diehard Tory gin-and-Jag Surrey set.
Slouched on his No10 sofa, Johnson’s boyhood yearning to be Prime Minister is finally realised.
But the cynical liar is happier playing at being a pampered Prime Minister than he is doing any hard political graft. Superflop’s idle arrogance will transform him into a supervillain.
Hounded former »
Commons Speaker John Bercow’s secret weapon is the three witness statements from people there at the time who swear he was no bully, I hear. Hardline Tories scheming to block the son of a taxi driver’s peerage are the real bullies.
The word in Labour’s nervous HQ »
is an Equality and Human Rights Commission probe will lacerate its early handling of anti-Semitism complaints. Jeremy Corbyn has admitted they got it wrong but to be legally censured could be the outgoing leader’s final humiliation.