As Mandrake predicted, Nigel Farage’s entry in the register of MPs’ interests made interesting reading, showing he was raking in a jaw-dropping £97,000-a-month.
Oddly, however, Farage only makes scant mention of his long-standing private company Thorn in the Side that he set up in 2011 as a receptacle for his media income and that, according to its latest figures up to the end of May 2023, held £1,359,062 worth of accumulated profits.
He reports his presenter’s fee from GB News as being paid into it but neither lists his directorship or ownership of the company. The business returned a £212,097 profit last year alone.
His shares in All Perspectives – the parent company of GB News – are not listed either, though with £84.1 million in ongoing losses they are hardly likely to be worth more than £50,000 and don’t amount to 15% or more of the business. No mention, either, of Farage’s shares in Reform Ltd.
The Farage brand may not be also be the licence to print money it once was: he has declared just one speaking engagement and his eponymous gin venture – managed by his partner Laura Ferrari – racked up a deficit of £6,789.
David Mencer, the Israeli government spokesperson who last week controversially accused Today presenter Mishal Husain on air of “blindly repeating” what she is told by “terrorist organisations,” is a former director of Labour Friends of Israel, I can reveal.
His latest incarnation as the hard right Benjamin Netanyahu’s mouthpiece marks what might seem like a remarkable career change for a man who had previously served the British Labour Party, working as a research assistant to the MPs Joan Walley and Gwyneth Dunwoody, as a councillor in Barnet, north London, and then taking on the top executive role at Labour Friends of Israel between 1998 and 2004.
Born and educated in the UK, Mencer also ran the PR campaign for David Lammy – who has taken significant donations from Labour Friends of Israel – when he ran unsuccessfully to be mayor of London in 2016. Mencer relocated to Israel not long after that and took up his current government role earlier this year.
“David is a PR man and so he’ll always argue his client’s case robustly,” says a former colleague from Mencer’s other incarnation at the PR outfit Weber Shandwick in London. “It just now happens to be this extreme right wing Israeli government.”
Though LBC and Sky News respectively took Sangita Myska and Belle Donati off air after they evoked Israeli anger, the BBC mounted a robust defence of Husain, whom Mencer said should “win the pro-Palestinian reporter of the year award.”
A BBC spokesperson said: “As the listener could hear, Mishal Husain was asking legitimate and important questions in a professional, fair and courteous manner.”
Husain had asked Mencer about an Israeli strike on a school compound in Gaza and put to him that Dr Khamis Elessi had told the BBC that casualties had included elderly people, women and children. Mencer rejected Elessi’s account, saying Israel was “extremely sceptical about pseudo-medical staff” who had “inflated” casualty figures throughout the campaign in Gaza.
In her days in power, Suella Braverman liked to fulminate against what she regarded as the “multibillion-pound wastage” in the way taxpayers’ money is used.
That hasn’t stopped her pocketing a £16,876 exit payment from the Home Office. The tax-free perk – reported in the department’s latest annual report – equates to £888 for each of the 19 days she served as home secretary before Rishi Sunak sacked her.
Braverman turned a deaf ear to widespread calls for her to reject the payment, even though she has also just declared £57,972 in extra-parliamentary earnings between March and May this year alone. The only bars to a ministerial payoff are reaching retirement age or a new ministerial role to go on to.
With the Farage riots a still too vivid memory and the police needing all the support they can get, Lord Charles Moore saw fit over the weekend to start ranting in the Daily Telegraph about “two-tier policing.”
The pernicious notion originated with the likes of Tommy Robinson, Laurence Fox and Nigel Farage to encourage a sense of grievance that the white thugs who took part in the recent unrest – targeting in particular the Muslim community – were being treated differently to, say, Black Lives Matter protesters.
Sir Keir Starmer, his home secretary Yvette Cooper and Sir Mark Rowley, the Met police chief, all made it clear everyone was policed the same. For a serving member of the House of Lords to give credence to such seditious nonsense is however unprecedented, but then Moore – needless to say, installed in the upper house by Boris Johnson – has himself been a long time critic of the Muslim community.
An especially pious Catholic convert, he once wrote of his unease about Muslim neighbours and there were calls for his dismissal after he suggested in another column that the prophet Muhammad might have been a paedophile.
Labour is committed to removing hereditary peers from the Lords and imposing a mandatory retirement age of 80. This will go some way towards reducing the size of the upper house as there are currently 91 hereditary peers and around 154 aged over 80.
Sitting pretty, however, are the 26 Church of England bishops, even though church attendance is falling and only around a third of the population now identifies as being Christian (it was two-thirds in 1983).
The separation of church and state notwithstanding, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was, I am told, open to discussion about reducing the numbers of the lords spiritual, but it’s an area where Labour is currently fearful of treading. “We still don’t do God, but we don’t want to be seen to be doing away with God,” one Labour strategist whispers. “Most of them are broadly onside, too.”
With the Daily Mail’s website facing increasing competition and sites such as X making it harder for its content to get traction, Lord Rothermere wants Katie Davies, its new editor-in-chief in New York, to rethink the whole operation. “Word is Rothermere wants Katie to take it upmarket, making it distinct from the paper and more sophisticated and feminine, which is quite a brave approach in the online world,” one staffer tells me.
After it was announced in May that Gerard Greaves, Davies’ predecessor as editor-in-chief, was leaving the company after almost a quarter of a century, neither hide nor hair has been heard of him. One Mail staffer tells me there had been rumours that Greaves might return to the company after his undefined “health issues” had been resolved.
“The perceived wisdom had always been that Gerard’s position was unassailable,” he tells me.
