Miriam Cates has joined the ranks of backbench Tory MPs expressing support for Donald Trump. She thinks the world was a “safer place” when Trump was US president, saying people were too down on him. “I don’t think he was a dreadful president last time. In fact, some of the calls he made on China and Iran, for example, were absolutely the right calls,” she told The House magazine over the weekend. Is a pattern emerging?
Fellow MP Jake Berry also said recently that Trump was a “much better president than Biden,” and to “bring him back”. Andrea Jenkyns told Sky News she’d like to see a return of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, who she has christened as “the dynamic duo”. Jacob Rees-Mogg has endorsed the ex president, saying he’d “rather have Donald Trump than President Biden”. Cates does not go as far, and admits “some of the language he uses and the arguments he engages with now could be pretty destructive”. Tory mayoral candidate Susan Hall encouraged Trump to win, so that he could "wipe the smile of [sic]" Mayor Sadiq Khan's face. Outward support for Trump's re-election has not yet made its way to the frontbenches. Perhaps they are waiting to see the verdict on his 91 felony counts.
Fishy Business?
Rumours are swirling through Westminster about the shadowy group of Tory rebels plotting to overthrow Sunak’s premiership. Hard right members of the party want to instate a PM who is tougher on immigration and can stand up to Reform UK, the party set up by Nigel Farage which is steadily gaining influence. Word on the street is that the plotters are meeting over fish platters at J Sheekey, the upmarket seafood restaurant in Covent Garden, to discuss schemes and schisms. One of the rebels, Simon Clarke, outed himself in a Telegraph article last week calling for Sunak to resign. He said the PM “does not get what Britain needs”. Perhaps this group, which Bloomberg describes as “right-wing lawmakers and advisers” will put the country to rights over their £6 oysters.
Zemmour in need of a Geography lesson
Far-right French politician Eric Zemmour may want to get his facts straight before he criticises London’s multiculturalism. On a visit to the city he was taken on a tour of Whitechapel in the east end, alongside YouTuber Carl Benjamin. Zemmour took to X to compare the neighbourhood with Pakistan’s capital city. “In London, Whitechapel has become Islamabad,” he wrote. But Whitechapel is famously home to the UK’s largest Bangladeshi community – even the tube sign Zemmour poses in front of is translated in Bengali. Zemmour leads the Reconquête! party in France, which espouses hard line anti-immigration and anti-Islam ideas.
