GB News is hoping to secure an interview with US president elect Donald Trump after claiming record viewing figures for their coverage of his win.
“I reckon he might do an interview with GB News because he knows we weren’t hostile. We were objective,” explained presenter Andrew Pierce.
And just how objective were they? “We were absolutely cock-a-hoop that he won,” said Pierce.
Lee Anderson was this weekend spotted at Reform’s Welsh conference at Newport’s swanky Celtic Manor golf resort, clad in a Nike baseball cap. Has his boycott of the company ended?
Last year the GB News presenter and part-time Ashfield MP announced he was shunning the firm after it made it a slight alteration to the cross of St George on the new England football shirt, something Anderson described as “woke, namby-pamby, pearl-clutching, hand-wringing nonsense”. Previously he’d raged against them working with a trans activist, saying “anybody who’s buying Nike stuff now needs to have a long, hard look at themselves in the mirror”.
Now, in exciting news for the company, he’s out sporting their brand name again – and they don’t even have to pay him a modelling fee!
Press release of the week: “Nadine Dorries’ Weight-Loss Caused Over 200% Jump in Ozempic Searches”.
Ping! An email arrives in the Rats in a Sack inbox from Asa Bennett, the Brexit-backing hack turned Liz Truss speechwriter.
Bennett was the ultimate Tory fanboy during his time at the Daily Telegraph, writing pieces with headlines such as “Boris Johnson can conquer more than Brexit as the new Alexander the Great”. He was then Truss’s chief speechwriter during the entirety of her triumphant 49 days in Downing Street.
After Truss stepped down to write books about why she should be prime minister again, Bennett joined the Daily Express as assistant editor and used his experience of matters of state to pen such articles as “Quiz: Who said it – Rishi Sunak or Star Wars?”. He’s now associate director of communications for fundraising website GoFundMe, which means he is making strange new bedfellows.
Bennett’s email begins: “I wanted to flag this GoFundMe campaign… to support Jeremy Corbyn, who is facing significant legal expenses following a decision by the Labour Party not to reinstate him to the PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party] despite his membership being reinstated. Jeremy incurred a bill of £33,000 after the Employment Tribunal rules against him.”
What a difference from the days when Bennett was telling Telegraph readers that “as Jeremy Corbyn plots to cement the hard Left’s control, Labour’s appeal is going down the pan” and penning a trademark quiz titled “Who said it: Jeremy Corbyn or Enver Hoxha?”
Exactly eight years after uttering his legendary quote “There will be no downside to Brexit, only a considerable upside”, OG Leaver David Davis MP is showing signs of coming to terms with the disaster he helped to inflict on Britain. In a Telegraph interview, the former Brexit secretary declared that in the light of Donald Trump’s election, “closer arrangements with Europe are just common sense, they are a nearby trading partner”.
Yet some on the Brexity right remain gleefully detached from reality, and there was top-class old-man-shouting-at-a-cloud action on Twitter/X as GB News deputy political editor Tom Harwood and Brexit botcher David ‘Frosty’ Frost lamented the state of Starmer’s Britain.
“There’s something intrinsically Western and capitalist about shops showcasing shiny glittering produce. Sweets at eye level, and near the tills. Now they’re relegated to the back corner,” bemoaned Harwood.
“The government’s obesity strategy has made me feel like I’m living in the Eastern Bloc.”
Frosty joined in. “Tom is right,” he bemoaned. “Not just that. No traffic in towns. Bikes everywhere. Gloomy dark street lighting making the streets unsafe. Hectoring posters on the tube. ‘Think before you tweet’ messaging. It’s regression.”
More traffic, fewer bikes and bringing sweets back to eye level in shops – the exciting manifesto to sweep the Conservatives back to power is already in place!
Expect the paperback version of Liz Truss’ Ten Years to Save the West, published on November 12, to be hailed by its author and publisher as “an Amazon best-seller”.
The hardback version of Truss’s tome shifted a mere 2,228 copies in its first week of release, entering the charts in 70th place. It then slumped to only 1,178 sales in week two, dropping to 223rd.
At the time of writing, the paperback is only 2,117th on the shopping site’s list of all top-selling titles. Yet because of a classification error, it is showing up at number five in one Amazon chart: “Best Sellers in Biographies about Artists, Architects & Photographers”.
The appointment of Mims Davies as Kemi Badenoch’s new shadow Wales secretary means a Davies replaces Byron Davies who replaced David Davies. She will work alongside Welsh Conservative leader Andrew RT Davies. Who replaced Paul Davies. (Fun fact: Mims Davies’ East Grinstead and Uckfield constituency is approximately 177 miles from Wales.)
Should women have voted for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump? It’s something which is dividing the Daily Mail’s star columnists!
It’s a no-brainer for Sarah Vine, Trump flag-waver and former Mrs Michael Gove, writing under the headline ‘Kamala’s biggest mistake was to assume women would vote for her just because of her gender. How utterly entitled and arrogant’.
Praising her hero as “a man who seems ready to take a second term in office deadly seriously”, she mocked Harris as “tense, didactic, finger-wagging and, above all, reductive and politically one-dimensional”.
Over in the other corner, however, Bryony Gordon, poached from the Daily Telegraph at no little cost, had a rather different view, writing under the headline ‘Why did so many women vote (again) for a foul-mouthed, groping misogynist who does nothing to hide his utter contempt for them?’.
“The burning question, of course, is why so many women have voted for a man who seems to show such blatant disregard for them,” she wrote. “Is it for the same reason some victims of coercive control keep returning to abusive partners? Or perhaps it is because Trump campaigned on a platform essentially designed to whip up fear. To terrify women.”
Perhaps she should ask her colleague Vine!
Finally, with so little going on in the world, Conservative peer Lord Dobbs has been badgering the government to find out… how often a particular door in Parliament is being used.
Dobbs used a written question in the House of Lords to ask the government “how many people, in the most recent two years for which figures are available, have used the entrance to the Parliamentary Estate located by the Westminster Underground Station”.
Alas for Dobbs, the writer of House of Cards, the relevant minister Lord Gardiner of Kimble couldn’t possibly comment, citing “security reasons”.
