2 days ago
Keir Starmer is flushed with humility about where his portrait might be
Sir Keir Starmer is perturbed by something in Downing Street. In an interview published in this week's New Statesman, he walks along the pictures of past PMs and notes that Rishi Sunak is yet to take his place, but also that there doesn't seem to be any space for Starmer himself. 'Presumably,' he says, 'I'm in the downstairs bog.'
It is a brave politician who confesses that his legacy is heading down the toilet, but the PM will be relieved (no pun intended) to hear that the portraits move down with each new arrival. 'It's quite a big operation,' says the historian Sir Anthony Seldon. 'Not too bad if they changed every five years, but seven in the last 15 has meant a lot of rearranging.'
On the grapevine
Sarah Vine's publicity tour for her memoir How Not To Be a Political Wife will reach its apotheosis at the end of the month when she appears on stage with her ex-husband Michael Gove for a Spectator event. The book has lit little fires throughout Notting Hill, and the event called 'Living With a Politician' should be the final conflagration. Also speaking is Hugo Swire, the ex-MP whose wife Sasha called Vine a whinger in The Sunday Times, while Vine herself called Hugo 'bumptious'. It promises to be a dignified occasion. Rachel Johnson is on the panel, despite not being married to a politician, and is worried by the advert for this event 'Will people think I'm married to Michael Gove?' she asks. The cognoscenti know that contingency to be a remote one.
Common ground
The Tories and Reform are not getting closer to an electoral pact, but they are getting nearer the dessert trolley. Lunchers at a Mayfair restaurant were turning heads every which way on Tuesday as the Tories' Robert Jenrick, David Cameron and George Osborne ate only feet away from Reform leader and people's champion Nigel Farage. He and his treasurer Nick Candy were with the former chief scout Bear Grylls, who later denied this was a recruitment chat. Watching from a third table was former Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who felt the whole thing didn't live up to the description of Mayfair given by the 19th century wit Sydney Smith, who said it 'enclosed more intelligence and human ability, to say nothing of wealth and beauty, than the world has ever collected in such a space before'.
There was a grand gathering at the Locarno Room in the Foreign Office as the permanent secretary at the Department for Transport Dame Bernadette Kelly held farewell drinks after eight years in post. The place was rammed with ex-colleagues, not least as Kelly had six secretaries of state in her tumultuous time. Rumours abounded about a five-figure catering bill which was footed by Kelly — though, as the woman who oversaw HS2, she's used to inflated budgets. No word on whether her party, unlike the rail route, went on to further destinations.
A wealth of pain
Thank you again for your exam howlers for which medicine, it seems, is fertile ground. Sandy McLennan proved this with his offerings. 'Gout is a disease of affluence,' one of his candidates wrote. 'Women rarely suffer from it.' Other pearls of wisdom he's read included 'urine is often made by the kidneys' and 'proteins are all different, some more so than others.'
