EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: Will Starmer abolish resignation honours?
EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: After criticising Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list, doesn’t Keir Starmer have the chance to declare he would abolish the tradition if he gets the keys to No 10?
Hasn’t Sir Keir Starmer got the chance to take the high ground – after criticism of Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list – by declaring that, if he gets the keys to No 10, he’d abolish the tradition?
Perhaps he is dogged by the shadow of predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, who declared his intent not to nominate peers and then sent civil liberties campaigner Shami Chakrabarti to the red benches after her favourable report into Labour anti-Semitism.
Marie van der Zyl, now president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, labelled it ‘whitewash for peerages’.
Apart from hairdresser Kelly Jo Dodge, Boris seems to have forgotten the staff in his honours list.
It is tradition for a few lower grade medals, such as the MBE and British Empire Medal, to go to the lower orders who make day-to-day life bearable.
Theresa May remembered a chef and a housekeeper and David Cameron honoured gardeners and caterers. Alas, Boris has overlooked the servants. Poor show for an Eton and Oxford man.
Apart from hairdresser Kelly Jo Dodge, Boris seems to have forgotten the staff in his honours list
Hasn’t Sir Keir Starmer got the chance to take the high ground – after criticism of Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list – by declaring that, if he gets the keys to No 10, he’d abolish the tradition?
Recalling late Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi’s jealousy after David Cameron attracted admiration with a lake swim during the 2010 G8 summit in Canada, Cameron’s then adviser Tom Fletcher recalls.
‘Berlusconi was so envious that he went off to get eight photographs of himself in tight red swimming trunks… very tight budgie-smuggling Speedos.
He handed them round the leaders of the free world, which was quite a moment!’
Fearless Joan Collins, pictured, risks antagonising Hollywood’s writers by expressing bafflement at their strike.
‘I just don’t get it,’ she spouts at the Kite Festival. ‘It is very hard today to be an actor and actress. 90 per cent of us are out of work most of the time, so what are you going on strike for?’
She adds: ‘They will hate me for this. I will get expelled and get cancelled.’ To the trenches Percy!
Oxford English graduate Michael Gove attempts a quote from Mark Antony’s ‘Friends, Romans countrymen’, speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when discussing Boris Johnson’s fate, grandly telling Radio 4’s Mishal Husain: ‘The good that men do is oft interred with their bones, while the evil lives on.’
Close but no cigar. Mark Antony states: ‘The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.’
Mind you, Gove was unflatteringly compared to Caesar’s murderer Brutus by Boris’s father Stanley when he destroyed Johnson’s leadership bid in 2016.
Oxford English graduate Michael Gove attempts a quote from Mark Antony’s ‘Friends, Romans countrymen’
Sky’s eminent crime correspondent Martin Brunt, invited to promote his book No One Got Cracked Over the Head For No Reason at CrimeCon – described as ‘The World’s No 1 True Crime Event’ – was following in bizarre footsteps.
‘A woman once turned up with the faces of her favourite serial killers tattooed all over her,’ explains Martin. ‘She had Fred West, Dennis Nilsen, Myra Hindley and the Yorkshire Ripper. She was asked to cover up or leave. She left.’
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