Londoner’s Diary
Boris and Carrie Johnson took their toddlers skiing in La Rosière for the Easter weekend. It was “not for the faint-hearted and I did wonder if we were a bit crazy to attempt it,” wrote Mrs Johnson on Instagram, where she shared thrifty tips. “I got all the kids ski gear off Vinted. Don’t think I spent more than £30 on each child… Will sell most of it back on Vinted when they grow out of it too.”
But the couple did spend a little extra on private lessons rather than opting for ski school with normies. “One lesson was totally wasted as Wilf decided to have a full on meltdown because I’d put suncream on his face,” Carrie lamented. “It’s definitely not easy though. Just getting the kids up the mountain, pushing Frank up in the buggy, while carrying our skis and theirs, was a proper workout.” Gone are the days of gold wallpaper in Downing Street...
Owen Jones tears a rasher off us for bringing up his porker alias
It seems tens of thousands of Labour members have “done an Owen Jones” and quit the party over disagreements with the leadership of Sir Keir Starmer — the latest figures say party membership has fallen by 23,000 this year. Jones, a Left-wing columnist, spectacularly gave up his party membership of 24 years standing last month and urged others to do the same. He will be supporting Green and independent candidates. Londoner’s Diary’s small contribution to the Jones furore was to note that some colleagues at his paper, the Guardian, had started using an old nickname for him: “Squealer”, after the pig who serves as minister of propaganda on George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
As we pointed out, comparing Jones to that “fat porker” was rather childish and not very accurate since he isn’t propagandising for anyone these days. We suggested that, if his Guardian colleagues wish to throw around playground insults, they should be a bit more creative. Fair point? We thought so. So we were disappointed to see Jones quivering with outrage in a 30-minute YouTube video he has made “responding to my critics”. “It’s quite funny,” he said in a distinctly unamused tone, “that I’ve got an entire piece in the Evening Standard urging my colleagues to come up with a different term of abuse to describe me — that’s the industry I’m in, I think it’s useful, I just think people need to know because the media’s an important part of a democracy.”
A little hysterical, but we did get this interesting snippet of literary exegesis from Jones: “Now if we’re gonna go down the Squealer in Animal Farm route, I mean, that’s a book about how a movement started preaching equality until it became indistinguishable from its opponents — that sounds a lot like Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour party, doesn’t it, compared to the Conservatives… It could be a story, I suppose, about how Labour and the Tories became indistinguishable so maybe that characterisation does apply more to my critics.” He is definitely not rattled! Oink, oink.
Wes wins our vote by taking us for fools
Say what you like about X/Twitter, but it has opened up a world of possibilities when it comes to April Fool’s Day. Our favourite prank yesterday was from Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting, who posted a photo of himself on the set of ITV’s Lorraine Kelly programme and claimed he would be hosting a regular cooking segment on the show. “Every Tuesday I’ll be joining ITV’s Lorraine with low-cost, quick and healthy recipes that you can make yourself at home in 15 minutes,” he posted.
It had that important ingredient for a good leg-pull: believability. Less convincing was Alastair Campbell’s claim to have taken up a job at Eton College (He spends a lot of time on his podcast The Rest Is Politics moaning about his co-host Rory Stewart’s old school). Cricketer Jos Butler used April 1 to announce he would finally change his name to Josh, since everyone mistakenly calls him that anyway.
Tories fork out more for attack ads than mayoral candidates
Anybody remember those bizarre Conservative attack ads last month about Sadiq Khan “seizing” power in London and turning us into the “crime capital of the world” (false)? Well, it turns out the videos, one of which had to be pulled after using footage of New York instead of London, might have been a very expensive dud. LabourList, a blog which has crunched the numbers, reports that altogether the Tories spent more on their attack ads targeting Mayor Sadiq Khan last month than they did on the entire mayoral campaigns of their candidates in the North East and East Midlands. Is this a vote of confidence in their underdog London candidate Susan Hall, or a sign that party headquarters is starting to panic as the May 2 polling day rapidly approaches?
