Not so very long ago, Michael Gove could take a chauffeur-driven ministerial Range Rover for granted. Unemployed these days, with no job forthcoming from either the Daily Mail or the Times, and still to find a permanent home after being turfed out of his luxurious grace-and-favour residence in St James’s, he is reluctantly becoming acquainted with the joys of public transport.
My exclusive picture shows him at Tisbury Station in Wiltshire after he had attempted to board a packed train, and been repelled. “Lots of trains had been cancelled from Exeter that weekend, but a lot of us managed to get on the one three-carriage running in the afternoon,” explains Zachary Thornton, a 33-year-old sales manager at Bury St Edmunds-based Thornton Sugar, who was already on the rammed train.
“At each station people would try to board but there was no space for them. Tempers were starting to boil over. At Tisbury, Gove tried to push on board into what had become a wall of flesh on the train. The long-suffering passengers in the carriage groaned that there was no room for him, and he eventually gave up trying. Then people started to realise who he was, breaking out into laughter and taking photographs of him, as he stood on the platform with a sour look on his face.
“The guards told everyone on the platform – including Gove – they’d simply have to wait for the next train, whenever that might be. The look on Gove’s face as we finally moved out of the station was something else. I don’t know what he’d been doing in Tisbury, but he looked, if honest, a bit hungover and dishevelled, with his collar popped up.”
A former gossip columnist, Gove is said to be trying to sell his memoirs, but even prime ministerial ones seldom sell well. The problem Rupert Murdoch may have with giving him a commission is that he is already publishing Boris Johnson’s, and their versions of events are unlikely to tally in every respect.
Lord Lebedev made a rare cameo appearance in the House of Lords last week to be sworn in for the new parliament, but made sure his soon-to-be-weekly London Evening Standard recorded the fact he’d popped in and made a rambling speech on the need for longevity research.
“Nobody talks to Lebedev in the Lords as he comes in so rarely we see him just as a tourist,” one of his fellow peers tells me. “He makes the bare minimum appearances in order to avoid expulsion.
Some members, such as Lord Prescott, who had a stroke in 2019 and has spoken only once since then, have now had their membership of the upper house terminated because of being unable to make the minimum number of appearances.
Under reforms made in 2014, members of the Lords must attend at least once in a session.
Evidence that Lord Ashcroft’s Biteback Publishing may have to rethink its strategy are demonstrated by its latest accounts, which show it has slipped a further £400,000 into the red. Its retained earnings deficit now stands at £3,889,599. The firm – set up in 2009, and publisher of titles such as Ashcroft’s own All To Play For: The Advance of Rishi Sunak – has yet to report a profit in any set of accounts. It seems optimistic to think Liz Truss is going to turn things around.
Still, Ashcroft has lately told the Guardian: “Biteback selects titles for which they believe there is likely to be a readership. The last few years have been challenging for independent publishers, but I am happy to say this year Biteback is in the black and the future looks good.”
That remains to be seen. Biteback is owned by the former Tory grandee via Political Holdings, whose 2023 accounts are overdue. It was itself nursing £4.3m in losses in 2022.
Of the runners and riders in the Tory leadership steeplechase, Priti Patel is socially and politically probably closest to Rupert Murdoch. She attended, with her husband Alex Sawyer, the ceremony at St Bride’s Church in London to celebrate Murdoch’s ill-starred wedding to Jerry Hall and has been a regular at his summer parties in the capital.
For the moment, however, the nonagenarian tycoon is dithering about who to endorse – the Sunday Times seems keen on Kemi Badenoch, whereas the Times on Saturday ran a sympathetic interview with Tom Tugendhat, whose lack of political principle Murdoch will probably find appealing – and one of his executives tells me they are still officially “waiting for the white smoke to rise”.
He adds that the Murdoch editors who ensure their long-term survival “work out, at times like these, what Rupert thinks before he thinks it”.
Exactly a year ago, around the time the Telegraph titles were put on sale after being seized by Lloyds Bank from the Barclay family over a dispute about unpaid debts, I wondered whether they wouldn’t end up going at a bargain-basement price.
Since then, a lot of putative bidders have withdrawn – among them Lord Rothermere of the Daily Mail group, Sir William Lewis when he decided instead to helm the Washington Post, the UAE investors after the row about foreign ownership – and now the private equity group CVC has also decided discretion is the better part of valour.
“Valuations around £600m were bandied around at the start of the sale process, but that presupposes a bidding war and there are not a lot of serious bidders still standing,” says my informant close to the sale process. “The only one who still seems avid is Sir Paul Marshall, but the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, will take some convincing that the man who saddled the country with GB News passes the “fit and proper person” test to own a national newspaper.”
My informant reckons David Montgomery of the London-listed publishing outfit National World is probably now the most financially and politically viable bidder still in the frame, but if he acquired the group there would almost certainly have to be significant redundancies, and he would be unwilling to pay anything near £600m.
