A Telegraph analysis reveals that Labour Cabinet ministers have accepted over £800,000 in donations and gifts so far this year. Here’s an excerpt:
David Lammy, the Foreign Secetary, has received the most since the beginning of 2024, having accepted more than £150,000 worth. This included £2,500 worth of tickets to see Tottenham Hotspur, with the use of a hospitality box.
The largest sum donated to him was from Labour Together, a Starmerite think tank, which donated £40,440 for the “provision of research and writing services”.
Labour Cabinet ministers have accepted £753,017 in donations and £90,853 in gifts since the beginning of the year, according to the analysis of the members’ register of interests.
Mr. Lammy is followed by Wes Streeting, who received £117,000 in donations and gifts, among them four tickets and hospitality to see Taylor Swift at Wembley costing £1,160.
The Health Secretary’s biggest donation was valued at £48,000 in four instalments from OPD Group Ltd, a company controlled by Peter Hearn, a recruitment mogul and one of Labour’s biggest donors.
He also accepted £13,000 “towards staffing costs” while Labour was in opposition, declared in April, from Kevin Craig, a businessman who later stood to become the Labour MP in Suffolk Coastal.
Mr. Craig was later forced to stand down after it emerged he placed a bet on his constituency outcome in the General Election, betting that the Tories would win. Mr. Streeting returned his donation from Mr. Craig.
Among Angela Rayner’s £104,000 in gifts and donations since the start of the year was £2,230 for clothing from ME+EM, a British luxury fashion brand.
Donations and gifts to politicians have come under renewed scrutiny in recent weeks after Sir Keir Starmer became embroiled in a row over funding clothes donated to him and his wife by Lord Alli.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The Mail reveals that Bridget Phillipson squirmed while defending her £14,000 birthday bash funded by a millionaire Labour peer during a grilling on Sky News’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips.
Stop Press 2: Angela Rayner is facing fresh questions over a freebie holiday to New York paid for by a Labour donor, according to the Mail.
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Bit weak on likely link between footballer sudden cardiac death and jabs – but overall, imagine how different the last two years would have been were this to be the level of MSM transparency!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU5oNx4ZzoM
423 athletes collapse, some die. Just a co-incidence. Nothing to see here. Move on.
Amazing Will! – “If you’re interested in this story you can read about it everywhere.”
Excellent stuff, eh? Loved the headline as well: “Sue Gray’s Report Confirms No 10 (Probably) Broke Its Own Stupid Rules”
Now if we can just get DS atl to stop using Johnson’s cuddly stage name…
I find Pig Dictator fits the bill myself.
Nay, he’s no dictator. He’s just a two-bit puppet.
It’s claimed he had no intention of ever marrying Carrie Symonds, or even of having any type of long-term relationship with her. Johnson is into classical literature, whilst Symonds is into hugging whales. So, it figures that early on Johnson realised that after a few times in her knickers, the compatibility between her and him would quickly fade.
It’s said, though, that Johnson’s string-pullers saw something quite different in Symonds. These saw in her a woke gold-digger that would connect with BBC viewers, Guardian readers and young Labour voters – types that make up a large percentage of UK voters.
As I recall, there were some politically-motivated, snooping neighbours where they were previously shacked-up, who called the Bill to a domestic, before flogging the story to “the media”. Termagant plus amoral philanderer=troubles.
Not to mention those ties to Satanists and nwo types…
I find “self important a- hole” works!
Best summary on DS so far.
And in typical public sector fashion, the solution is to employ even more bureaucrats at the public’s expense to oversee the bureaucrats they already have.
As if organising a party when you are simultaneously telling the public they cannot meet up with more than one other person outdoors requires a vast amount of oversight!
More jobs for London luvvy, BGLT, Save the Plant, Greeny, pc Wokists and BLM supporters then _ Whizzo!
Boris had a piece of cake. So what?
It’s his and Reece Moggs strategy to labour on the more substantial issues of the day and so it should be rather than the BBC reporting that there
“may be photographic evidence of ‘Johnson’ being in close proximity to.bottles of alcohol ( .profanity deleted).
Unfortunately, people’s anger is being directed at the hypocrisy, not the stupid rules. The things those staff were doing in Number 10 were just ordinary things getting on with life, which we all should have been free to do if we chose to do so.
What did people expect?
Manufacture outrage to sell newspapers as readers wallow in self satisfied indignity.
… and miss the crucial point.
Agreed, Covid only dangerous if they pretend it is.
With the very nimble and convenient pivot from “let’s wait for the Gray investigation to be concluded” to “let’s wait for the police investigation to be concluded”. It’s almost as if they weren’t cooperating while trying to appear as if they were cooperating.
What are the police investigating exactly? If it’s for offences under the specific legislation then it’s too late to bring charges anyway (has to be within six months of the offence for Summary offences, which these are, unless the legislation creating the offence specifies a longer time limit, which it doesn’t in this case).
Unless they are going for misconduct in public office, but that would seem way over the top for something like this.
I think it is about who drank wine and who drank gin and tonic.
Stat,ute of Limitations .
Forgot about that.
This country has no statute of limitations as such, so there’s no time limit on prosecuting either-way or indictable-only offences – but so far as I’m aware all of the possible relevant offences here are Summary-only, which do have a six-month time limit.
Should have been response to CynicalRealist.
Bit of brain freeze this afternoon due to meds.
Mods dealt with the worst of it so my thanks to them.
So, it’s not just statues, but statutes that we’re toppling now?
“within 6 months from the time when the offence was committed, or the matter of complaint arose.”
Plot twist, there’s no statute of limitations on issuing an FPN. That leaves the innocent-until-proven-guilty guilty parties in the position of having to say “Prosecute me or begone”, then getting off on the technicality that they (maybe) can’t be prosecuted.
While that’s absolutely the right thing to do when handed any FPN blackmail demand, I don’t think it’s an example that this or any other regime particularly wants to set lest the peasantry follow it.
Of the line you quote, the second part – ‘or the matter of complaint arose’ relates to civil claims in a Magistrates’ Court, so it’s only the bit about ‘Offence’ which applies (someone on here has challenged this before, so I may as well note it!).
Didn’t know that about FPNs though! Is there any legal guidance anywhere on this?
In addition, I’ve found another seeming reason why they couldn’t bring a prosecution.
I assume that the legislation which would be used is one of the orders made under schedule 22 of the Coronavirus Act 2020*. In addition to making the offences Summary-only, it specifically states (s.2) that “Nothing in this Schedule applies in relation to the Parliamentary Estate” – which would seem to me to preclude prosecution anyway, even if it was still within six months, assuming all the ‘parties’ took place in buildings forming part of the Parliamentary Estate.
Have I missed any relevant legislation which would actually allow prosecution? If not, why are they wasting yet more money on investigating it?
*https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2020/7/schedule/22
Apologies, you’re quite right, I was tired and emotional (not in the political or media sense) and thinking of something else. It’s 6 months to file the case, that’s long since expired for most of these offences.
I suspect that there’s no statute of limitation on FPNs because nobody ever thought one would be needed. In practice an FPN should only be issued as an alternative to prosecution where the coppers or CPS reckon that there’s a realistic chance of conviction, which is zero in this case, both on time and location (the barons did remember to absolve themselves of the laws applied to the peasantry, just not in so many words).
However, strictly speaking I can’t see anything stopping the Met from issuing blackmail demands. It’ll be hilarious to see what happens then: they can either admit to the offence and pay the bribes, or weasel out on a technicality which might create worse press.
Not that any of them will care, they’ve clearly realised that press excoriation has no real power, and they can just ride it out and say “Now what?”
After the money they’ve blown on Covid, define ‘waste’, please?
Just to add that I’ve contacted the Met to ask why they consider that it’s a good use of their time to investigate this, given that the alleged offences are summary-only and were more than six months ago so that even if they find evidence no prosecution can be brought.
If I get a meaningful reply I will post it on here…
http://t.me/publicannouncement602967921
Apparently this. Hammersmith police and vaccine accident s and deaths.
In the US they have proper, serious, consequential crimes in the highest office. Break-ins in opposition party offices; selling missiles to Iran; bribing foreign Government officials for personal gain. etc. etc.
In Britain we’re left with drinking a glass of pinot grigio in the office garden. Admittedly, drinking it at a time when people weren’t supposed to be drinking pinot grigio with work people. But still. Hardly high crimes and misdemeanours.
The irony of this circumstances is that getting rid of Johnson will solve nothing, for anybody. Johnson’s Cabinet is such a collection of lightweights and non-entities its hard to see any serious contender to replace him. It’s difficult for me seeing Keir Starmer finagling some sort of General Election miracle to end up in Number 10. The Tories themselves are rigidly split between hard-covidians, and the rest, in varying degrees of softness. Toss in the lingering hard feelings from Brexit and utter fatigue from the past six years (four Brexit, two covid)
I’m no fan of Johnson. A fool and a Spieler with delusions of a Churchillian grandeur he cannot possibly attain. But getting rid of him now will do nobody any good.
In Bidenstan they raid journalist’s homes with CNN following the FBI for the crime of having a copy of the President’s daughter’s diary perhaps containing juicy bits about Ukraine deals.
In the UK we have scientists murdered for knowing too much about politicians WMD lies.
We lock up journalists idefinitely for revealing too much about US war crimes and we also lie about a pandemic to kill off olf folk, loot the country and trash basic civil liberties, so they aren’t so very different to the US
That surely was an ‘assisted’ suicide in the case of Dr Kelly.
No way he topped himself.
Many thanks for posting your comment about that. I’d always felt I was only one who thought that way; quite a lonely sort of feeling.
Some years after subsequent war I met a little dog whilst walking in country-side; consequently, it’s owner, who claimed to be an ex-police officer. We chatted for quite a while about stories in MSM over the years.
I mentioned I’d never felt satisfied about what was said about that story; there’d seemed something missing. (didn’t dare go further than that)
They said:
Team investigating got a lead felt sure would progress but as soon as informed their superiors, investigation been closed, team dispersed to different areas.
All felt upset; believing ‘closed-case’ premature they’d argued against but order had come from so high up, never found its source.
Been close friends but dispersal prevented them staying in-touch. When one found another, that other wouldn’t chat about that remit and, their ‘superior’ warned-off the one from trying to contact any of the others again.
Three been moved out of possible career progression into ‘dead-end’ jobs. (rest never found)
MSM line about body’s location inaccurate. Team had questioned if it’d been moved, felt sure had, but been unable to ‘get to bottom of it’.
It is only ‘hear-say’. I have no proof they were ever in the police. I decide how much to trust someone from their body-language; theirs read as trustworthy.
I think I’m with Hitchens on this (and most of the other things he covers here):
Covid is a Battle Between World Views – Pro-Restrictions Lobby are Trying to Remove Johnson
For once, I wholeheartedly agree. Hitchens has gone out of favour, and I’ve never been a fan, but he is spot on in terms of these issues.
He has both an intellect and an education – which give him a head start over 90% of those put up against him.
I’m sure I agree with him much more often than you do – he’s obviously more on my side of the political divide than yours. But I don’t by any means agree with everything he says. Nevertheless, he is well informed. intelligent, not committed to any political “team”, and I think generally very honest, which adds up to a wise man.
And people here tend to forget that when he started speaking out against the covid panic consensus, he was almost alone in UK public life.
Why is the entire staff of Downing Street not dead. They spent the whole of 2020 telling me that if I dared to meet up with a group of people for anything other than a work purpose then it was absolutely certain that Covid would strike dead every single one of us and all our loved ones. As there seems to have been a party every other day in Downing Street during 2020 then if what they had been telling us is true they should all be dead of Covid!
If they genuinely believed what they were telling us at the time then the only conclusions to be drawn from this are either that they are all suicidal, they are all stupid or that they were lying to us. Anyone of those immediately disqualifies them from running the country and every single one of them should resign and face investigation immediately. They should also be stripped of any rights to receive a taxpayer funded pension.
“Why is the entire staff of Downing Street not dead. “
Presumably all their grannies are dead, at least?
One can only dream….
I’m sure baby Wilf is still alive as well.
Yes ! None of them have had the experimental jab have they?
Charges of misconduct in public office and perverting the course of justice are still on the table – I’d think considering the context in which they took place (whole country severely locked down), the 16 or 17 parties with alcohol [copious amounts by all accounts] then that counts as misconduct in public office.
Have we reached peak stupid yet, or is there still some way to go?
Aw, somebody got hurt feelings on the internet.
Our stupidity knows no bounds. Infinite ineptitude.
No fan of Johnson, was thinking for a while that he might be behind loosening restrictions, not so sure anymore after the Sunak story, but believing him and none of them either. It’s probably better for us if he stays on board weakened and if the rebels thereby gain ever more traction, the main thing is to prevent Gove&co.
I can’t bring myself to read this thoroughly and don’t believe much of what this snake is saying and peddling either, but it’s interesting that the meeting that brought this about and which he attended too was not a breach of the rules in his view. I guess his main gripe now is, understandably from his point of view, with the Abba party celebrating his dismissal. I couldn’t care less.
https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/parties-photos-trolleys-variants
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jan/30/dominic-cummings-says-it-is-his-duty-to-get-rid-of-boris-johnson?s=09
Cummings is the architect of the vaccine passport & the extra capability to turn it into an NHSX pass & digital ID. He’s as dangerous & deluded as the whole pro covid cult cabal
He isn’t the architect, he is a middle man at best, chances are Cummings is a WEF young leader alumni.
Never trust a liar.
As ever the key lesson from this is that none of the Tory inner cabal was afraid of covid.
They used State propaganda to terrify the public and then used the terror to justify emergency powers that allowed them to loot the taxpayer as highlighted by the Owen Paterson revelations.
If a mere backbencher like Paterson could command such healthy sums for his covid looting services how much will Boris, Hancock and Sunak be getting in due course?
It’s the thought of the money that keeps them all so cheerful!
How nobody died from Covid attending these parties is beyond me…
Could it be Midazolam wasn’t a dip on the mini sausage roll tray?
They prefer cocaine at no.10
No sadly…Hancock had requisitioned it all for Care Home use!
Good.
Egg?
Johnson: an amoral, walking Integrity free-zone – can anyone any longer doubt it?
I thought it was understood that we were threatened by a weakening of the ozone layer. I now realise that we are threatened by the bozone.
No report by Sue Gray has been published, only an “update”.
Meanwhile the police say their investigation will “absolutely not [take] more than a year“. That quote isn’t made up. That is literally what Commander Catherine Roper of the London Metropolitan Police has said.
PS The “54 letters” thing is about the leader of the Tory party. Keir Starmer can call a vote of no confidence in the prime minister, or any other government minister, whenever Parliament is sitting. (Which is different from a vote of no confidence in the government.) And since the Tory majority is only 80…
In the early twentieth century a murderer could be caught, convicted and executed or reprieved within 3 months of a crime being committed. Now it takes a year to investigate a party when the sentence is a fixed penalty notice. Is that progress?
I’ve been lurking this site for two years now but only just decided to create an account to express how much I appreciate Will Jones. Your work is brilliant and this post made me laugh out loud. I would say that you deserve a prestigious post at a leading newspaper but frankly you’re too good for the mainstream media.
The Daily Sceptic has kept me sane these last two years. I can not thank this site enough.
Ditto.
Nice to ‘see’ you Underpants. What’s it like working for Fraser Nelson, do you get much time off? Or is it mostly time off in lieu?
Back into self isolation whilst this all blows over.
Nice wallpaper.
Here’s Jacob Rees-Mogg sneering at the locked-down commoners. When it comes to the disconnection Jacob, et al., have with the ordinary people of this country, Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake” springs to mind.
Yuck. What a guy JRM is. Another one from him: “Wash your hands to the national anthem“.
Steve Baker MP FRSA
@SteveBakerHW
·
1h
“Millions of people took seriously a communications campaign, apparently designed by behavioural psychologists, to bully, to shame, & to terrify them into compliance with minute restrictions…”
Fear & shame was weaponised during the pandemic: no Govt can ever do this again
https://twitter.com/SteveBakerHW/status/1488195204519714819
I remember when I first started discussing that, back in early/mid-2020, it was a “conspiracy theory” according to the panickers.
Now it’s time to keep ramming it home…
The care homes and the NHS hospitals appear to be the ones who have gone over OTT, there was no mandate to stop relatives, or anyone, visiting people who were dying, in any of those places.
8th April 2021
“Here’s where BoJo has been this morning. Truro…in a Café! No social distancing, no masks, more than two households, indoors! One rule for us and one for him! Photos were quickly removed from the FB page which posted them. Why was that?”
He’s a sceptic?
Johnson is a liar, we know he’s a liar, he knows that we know he is a liar, and yet he still lies…
That really was very good Will.
When will we hear from the Behavioral Science Unit/BIT/Nudge, and their part in it? Obviously those in No10 didnt believe a word of it.
Fight For Your Right (To Party) – Boris Johnson on YTI do hope this some how gets to be in some a hit/play chart.
Brilliant.
And of course with this complete Whitehall farce attention is conveniently diverted away from this quite astonishing misuse of public funds
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/30/ppe-bought-for-nhs-waste-minister
I’m just about fed up with government propaganda and nudge control tactics. It’s getting rather tiresome. It’s been turned into something that will keep Boris in longer.
Nudges are everywhere….I just heard Sky Sports (transfer deadline day for football) emphasise “Christian Eriksen signed by Brentford and on the way to the UK after having his COVID-19 vaccine”.
– why mention he’s just had a vaccine?
– not mentioned for any other player being signed.
– is it because they don’t want anyone to ask Eriksen about last summer’s possible vaccine related adverse event?
Its all so obvious that it’s insulting.
Anyone who continued listening to the criminals in the westminster pit, chastising unjabbed NHS staff, will not have felt compelled to celebrate the indefinite pause on the mandate.
Whilst they might not be legally requiring the jab to keep their jobs, the government and NHS will instead turn the coercion dial up to the max.
Savij Jabid was clearly enraged by the audacity of these people for standing up to him.
This was not the behaviour of a politician in the traditional sense of ‘they work for us’, this was an angry tyrant showing his true colours.
As did this NHS CEO when he allegedly said the following recently:
Danny Mortimer, CEO of NHS Employers.
On the basis this person said the above statement, they should tender their resignation immediately.
People were under threats of being fined by the police if they broke the stupid rules, they were even harrassed by the police at protests, on public transport and in supermarkets for ignoring these stupid rules (plenty of videos out there of the police doing just this) – people could even face a visit by the police because the government encouraged people to snitch on their neighbours if they broke the stupid rules.
The government spent £millions on a fear campaign to deliberately manufacture a crisis they knew they could use to manipulate and dupe people into following the most senseless rules.
Its easy to say people should have just simply ignored the rules and simply got on with their lives as the government did in this case but when you have the threats of visits by the police and the possiblity of a fines you cannot afford hanging over you if you fail to comply to these senseless rules (I seem to recall Hancock announced a £10,000 fine for anyone who failed to self isolate) then its not such a simple as it sounds – this government spent £millions scaring the life out of everyone so people were not only fearful of the virus they were also just as fearful of facing big hefty fines if they failed to follow this governments stupid rules.
This government is corrupt and cannot be trusted ever again … it must go.
The painful stories of children, adults being harmed in so many ways by a lockdown imposed by the same gov’t partying at no 10 is the real story. Some mp’s had the gumption to tell tales of horror imposed on some of their constituents. Yes, we all know one rule for them, one rule for us. Unfortunately, this time they went too far. It is now up to the people of this country to stand up for themselves. It is obvious this gov’t will never stand up for us.
Nor any gov’t. They are cut from the same cloth, pulled by the same string, paid from the same pocket.
In what parallel universe is it that ” it is not yet clear if Johnson lied to Parliament”? Pass the rose tinted glasses and white stick, please!