BEST
FOR BRITAIN'S
WEEKEND WIRE
Dear John,
This week, the UK hosted foreign
leaders, struck new ‘trade deals’, and even had a few former PMs stick
their noses in the political fray. Our offices are close enough to the
Houses of Parliament to tell you that unplugged nostrils anywhere in
sniffing distance of this Government are not advisable.
Tragedy in Turkey and
Syria
Early on Monday morning,
southeastern Turkey and northwestern Syria were rocked by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake. The massive
tremor, whose epicentre was on the Turkish side of the border, was
followed by numerous aftershocks felt as far away as Romania and
Iraq.
With winter weather and rain
hampering rescue efforts, the quake has caused widespread devastation,
with over 22,300 people reported killed in the disaster as
of Friday afternoon.
The Turkish government labelled the
earthquake the country’s greatest disaster in over 80 years. The
British Red Cross has set up an emergency fund for donations, while Human Appeal has set
up a fund to help aid displaced persons living in the area affected by the
quake.
Best for Britain
expresses our deepest sympathies for the lives lost
or uprooted by the disaster.
Truss: I was right all along;
everyone had it in for me from the start; it wasn’t my
fault
Truss was back in last Sunday’s
Telegraph when, after all the humiliations, economic meltdowns, and
lost Mexican standoffs with produce that 49 days can throw at a
person, she finally broke her silence in a nearly 4000-word op-ed. The TLDR (and,
for the sake of your sanity, please DR)? I would have gotten away with
it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling markets.
In a very, very, very long-winded
treatise, Truss blamed “economic orthodoxy” for the pandemonium she
unleashed, claimed nobody respected her “mandate” (from 0.17% of the
electorate), and warned Tories to ignore her expertise at their own
peril.
It’s one Deputy Party Chairman,
Rishi. What could it cost? 30p?
Eagle-eyed readers may note that
we’ve used this gag before, but in our defence, the jokes sometimes
write themselves: On Tuesday, CCHQ announced that the new Deputy Tory Party Chairman
will be…Lee Anderson.
Yes, that Lee Anderson, the one who
thinks anyone spending more than 30p per day on food is splashing
cash, brags about how little his staffers are paid, asks his mates to
pretend to be swing voters, and throws boulders at stigmatised people.
Steady-hands Sunak’s star man got
off to a cracking start in his first 48 hours on the job by advocating
for a reinstatement of the death penalty, claiming it’s the only
surefire way to prevent reoffending. We’d like to up the ante:
launching the earth into the sun would also stop crime.
For your enjoyment we clipped this
equally cringey and chaotic
interview the new Deputy
Chairman gave to BBC Radio Nottingham.
Zelenskyy addresses
Parliament
Ukrainian president Volodymyr
Zelenskyy travelled to London this week as part of his first
major European trip since the Russian invasion last February. He also
stopped in Paris and Brussels.
In his speech at Westminster Hall,
Zelenskyy expressed gratitude for the UK’s aid to Ukraine and hailed
expanded plans to train Ukrainian pilots and marines in the UK. He
also reiterated pleas for the UK to send fighter jets to his
country.
Zelenskyy also met the Prime
Minister at Number 10 and held an audience with the King at Buckingham
Palace. The visit comes nearly a year after the Russian invasion.
Reports of a major planned Russian offensive to mark the anniversary
have been reported from the front.
Jet-setting
Sunak
The Prime Minister must really,
really hate spending time outside of London, because fresh reports of
him spurning train travel in favour of private jets emerged this week when he made two separate trips by air to the South
West.
On Wednesday afternoon, the PM was
in Dorset with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and on Thursday, he found himself in Cornwall. Naturally, Sunak saw fit to
channel his best Suella and chopper it back to London on Wednesday
evening so he could return to Cornwall.
Lib Dem MP Wera Hobhouse accused Sunak of playing a “reckless game” with the carbon emissions
from his high-flying premiership. We’re eagerly awaiting for Sunak to
fess up to how many more minutes he really wants to spend in the West
Country–with all that air travel, we expect the answer will be
“not another one!”
Remoaners are, erm, *throws
dart* meddlesome in-laws!
We’re not entirely sure what Kemi
Badenoch’s new brief is following the PM’s latest cabinet reshuffle
(where he didn’t see fit to remove his accused-by-20-plus-of-bullying
deputy), and, judging by comments she made in Rome this week, neither is the Government’s official
international-trade-understander herself.
In an interview with Sky News following the signing of what
the Government is calling a “momentous” post-Brexit “trade
partnership” with Italy, Badenoch blamed the decline in UK-Italy trade on Brexit squabbles, rather than
on the act of putting up a wall between the UK and its closest trade
partners.
She also bizarrely claimed that
pointing out how disastrous Brexit has been is the same as “asking
people who just got married, ‘Where’s the baby?’”
In lieu of a joke about this, we’re
going to quote Sky’s write-up: “The deal makes no change to the UK and
Italy's key trading regulations - from tariffs and quotas to customs
rules - but [Badenoch] said it would help improve trade between the
nations.”
Polls: I’m feeling
(20)22
A little over a month into the new
year, the idea that Rishi Sunak would stem the Tory freefall in the
polls and begin to recover numbers is starting to look more and more
like wishful thinking.
A recent multilevel regression poll
found that, were a snap election held today, Labour would win a
staggering 509 seats. The official opposition would be the SNP on 50,
with the Conservatives in third at a dismal 45, and the Lib Dems would
double their contingent to 23.
Separate FocalData polling
Wednesday gave Labour a 26-point lead nationally, at 49%-23% for the
Tories.
Despite these eye-watering numbers,
Best for Britain’s analysis last month found that the high number of undecided voters could
pull the next election closer than it appears. Check out our
front-page report in the Sunday Times.
With the sun finally sticking
around past 5pm in London, we’ve got dreams of summer holidays, lazy
beach picnics, and, if one of us is lucky enough to become Prime
Minister by June, unlimited hops via private jet. Perhaps we’ll follow
Sunak’s example and take it to the pub. See you later!
Best
wishes,
Tommy Gillespie
Press Officer, Best for Britain
