There has never before been an Easter honours list – giving out gongs to wealthy donors like Mohamed Mansour scarcely fitting in with the message of Jesus’s sacrifice – and parliamentary rune-readers believe it might be the clearest sign yet that an early general election is on the way.
Rishi Sunak, for all his public protestations, is pessimistic about whether he will be able to hang on until June, when the honours are normally framed around Trooping the Colour and Garter Day.
“It’s not gone down well at Buckingham Palace, but the latest internal and public polling Rishi has seen has rattled him and the old traditions and courtesies clearly no longer apply,” one Whitehall insider tells me. “The king last saw the PM on March 26 when Rishi made no mention of this and it’s put the monarch’s plans out. Given the state of his health, this is desperate stuff.”
Sunak’s allies believe that the threshold of 52 no-confidence letters is likely to be reached, if not before the local elections, then certainly after them. “So Rishi faces a choice of two humiliations – leading the party into oblivion at a general election or facing oblivion himself in a leadership contest after the local elections,” my informant adds. “Rishi is adamant that it should be he who leads us into the Valley of Death, so a late May election is now a distinct possibility.”
Sunak would have to dissolve parliament 25 working days before polling day so my informant speculates that MPs may not even be required to come back when the Easter recess ends on April 15. “Think how much drama and effort it would save Rishi if parliament did not have to return that day. Also, that would be the day when Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the 1922 committee, would otherwise have to confront the PM with the letters he has received from MPs who already want an end to this long-winded death scene.”
Over the Easter recess, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport set up what amounts to a show trial for the BBC. The members of the committee charged with deciding how the corporation should be funded in the future are less than impartial.
They include Martin Ivens, a long-time Rupert Murdoch yes-man who is now editing the Times Literary Supplement after being eased out of the editorship of the Sunday Times. The DCMS says he was chosen because “he had the experience overseeing print media into the digital age”.
One former Sunday Times colleague of Ivens laughs at this idea: “Martin was useless at computers and anything digital, which is why Murdoch replaced him and brought in, for a time, the tech-savvy Emma Tucker.”
Other names include David Elstein, who has long argued the BBC must be funded by subscription. Then there’s a trio of former government communications directors – Siobhan Kenny (DCMS), Helen Bower-Easton (Foreign Office) and Amber de Botton (No 10) – the latter two being Tory appointees to ensure any decisions are in accordance with the wishes of Conservative high command.
The closest the committee has to any members who can claim to be even remotely tech-literate are Lorna Tilbian, a free market City veteran, and Peter Bazalgette, until last year chairman of ITV and yet another Tory.
One BBC veteran tells me: “It’ll be a nice day for a hanging when this lot get to decide our future. It’s a foregone conclusion that we will end up with a much smaller corporation, which will lose its universal licence fee funding.”
With Jeremy Hunt’s plans to “abolish” the non-dom tax status enjoyed by billionaires such as the Mail boss Lord Rothermere shown to be riddled with loopholes worth hundreds of millions of pounds to him and the wealthiest people in the country, milord’s newspapers have been obsessing about the relatively paltry sums Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner saved herself through prudent tax planning in relation to the sale of a former council house.
“It’s always a measure of desperation when we deploy Glen Owen to savage Rayner – he’s known as Domestos in the office for shifting the political stories more principled political hacks leave behind,” one Mail insider informs me. “You’ll recall it was Owen’s byline that was also on the revolting allegations about her trying to distract Boris Johnson at the dispatch box when he was prime minister by crossing and uncrossing her legs in the manner of Sharon Stone in the film Basic Instinct.”
That story was angrily denied by Rayner and even Johnson called it “misogynist tripe”. This led to more attacks on Rayner and a tear-stained piece by Owen in which he recounted his “week of vile abuse at the hands of the left’s Twitter warriors”.
Our source adds that morale within the Mail newsroom has fallen sharply with DailyMail.com editor-in-chief Gerard Greaves back in London on what is being called “compassionate leave” after issues arose in the media group’s New York office.
There is mutiny in the air in the Daily Telegraph newsroom now that the UAE-backed bid for the newspaper group appears to have been dealt a fatal blow by the proposed new legislation banning foreign states or government officials from holding direct stakes in British media assets.
“Everyone seems to have held forth about our papers’ future except the journalists who actually produce them,” one disgruntled Telegraph hack tells me. “At the Guardian, journalists are allowed under the terms of the Scott Trust to vote for new editors and make their voices heard on significant issues for the business and we’d now like to make our voices heard on the future of our papers.”
He says plans for an independently audited vote among journalists are in hand and the UAE, with their aim to turn the Telegraph into a proper global player, have “the overwhelming support of the rank-and-file”.
A Daily Mail takeover would almost certainly result in redundancies, as the group looks for synergies between the titles, and my man doubts Sir Paul Marshall, the GB News backer making a rival bid, is in it for the long haul.
John Baron, the Tory MP facing questions about whether he’s been lobbying in his own commercial interests, picked up £48,076 in extra-parliamentary pay from Baron & Grant Investment Management. He declared his income from the City firm just days before questions were asked over whether he had used a parliamentary role to push for new Brexity City rules.
The Basildon and Billericay MP, who is stepping down at the next election, netted his pay cheque thanks to his shareholding in Baron & Grant. Figures for 2023 show the business is thriving with a £214,713 pre-tax profit. Baron sits on the Treasury committee and is facing questions about how he appeared to use three of its three meetings to request “urgent” changes to investment trust rules that would not be unhelpful to Baron & Grant.
Baron has insisted his questions to the committee were in the “public interest”.
