Londoner’s Diary
They were once as close as two people can be in politics, but things have long since soured between ex-chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng and his former boss Liz Truss. The dynamic duo collapsed in the aftermath of the mini-Budget, when she sacked him in an attempt to appease the markets.
Now Kwarteng seems to have severed ties with Truss, saying he resents her latest warblings about the “deep state” while she tries to flog her book Ten Years to Save the West.
“I hate... the conspiracy theory stuff,” Kwarteng told the Leading podcast. “We’ve talked about history all of our adult lives. Whenever someone says, ‘This is a conspiracy theory, this is deep state,’ I just turn off because human beings don’t work like that. They’re not smart enough.” While plugging her book in America alongside the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon in April, Truss said that the “deep state” would try to “undercut” Trump just like it has “undermined my proposed reforms”.
“I think her view is, her issue is, to try and sell these books. So she’s trying to generate noise to sell books,” said Kwarteng.
After its release, Truss’s book briefly made third place in The Sunday Times’s bestseller list last month. “People very close to her [are] saying this isn’t going to end well,” Kwarteng claimed.
Cummings’ call to action
It looks like Dominic Cummings’s new party has a proper name, after going under the placeholder “startup party”. The ex-Boris Johnson adviser, pictured, has popped up on the Companies House website as the director of a recently registered company called People’s Action Ltd.
“People’s Action” would not be a totally novel name for a political party. It was used in Singapore by Lee Kuan Yew, the reforming Right-wing prime minister whom Cummings has name-checked before as a political inspiration. He has written that Lee’s book, From Third World to First, “has many lessons for us”.
Cummings aims to take power by the end of the decade and carry out a programme of radical reform. He has suggested Harry Potter author JK Rowling as a possible party leader.
Lanyard wars
So-called “Minister for Common Sense” Esther McVey didn’t win everyone over yesterday with her suggestion that LGBT+ lanyards should be banned in government workplaces.
For example, Conservative chair of the London Assembly Andrew Boff tweeted: “You can take my [rainbow] lanyard from my cold dead neck”. Good to see everyone is getting along in Tory-land!
A bad workman blames his tools
Did you know Keir Starmer’s father was a tool-maker who made tools in a tool-making factory? The Labour leader rarely stops going on about it, but that hasn’t got through to most of the public. Polling by More In Common shows that only 11 per cent of people can say what Starmer’s dad did for a living.
