Prime Minister Boris Johnson still has to answer to the Caribbean holiday charges
After more than a year, Kathryn Stone, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, had begun an inquiry into how Boris Johnson's Caribbean trip over the Christmas holiday in 2019 was funded; she has still to say a word about the matter.
"There are no deadlines set for members to come back with the requested information, so it's not inconceivable this will report after Johnson has left office."
Says my man in Westminster.
When I asked for a progress report, a spokesman for Stone told me: "In July 2018, the Commons agreed on an amendment to Standing Order No 150, deciding that the commissioner should cease her long-standing practice of publishing the names of MPs whose conduct is under investigation. This means we can neither confirm nor deny whether the commissioner is investigating an MP."
Stone is understood to have requested information from both Johnson and David Ross, the former deputy chairman of Carphone Warehouse, originally believed to have given Johnson, pictured, the run of his villa on Mustique. Johnson has claimed the £15,000 cost of the villa he stayed in was paid for by Ross, a Tory party donor who owns a property on the island.
Jon Trickett made little secret of the fact that he had, as the shadow Cabinet Office minister, made a formal complaint about Johnson to Stone because the MPs’ “code of conduct requires members to provide the name of the person or organization that funded a donation.”
Lord Myners, the former Labour Minister, is one of several peers facing calls to quit their second jobs in lobbying companies as the sleaze scandal that's engulfing Westminster spreads far and wide.
In 2010, he attempted to become a member of London's august Garrick club. He was proposed by Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, and seconded by the columnist Sir Simon Jenkins. "Myners may have got himself into the Lords, but there was no way we were letting him into the Garrick," one member tells me. "The problem was no one here except Alan and Simon could stand him."
Still, Myners, the chairman of the PR giant Edelman and vice chairman of Lord Mandelson's consultancy Global Counsel, is not necessarily one of the nation's more effective lobbyists.
Mandrake put in a call to Channel 4 a couple of weeks ago to inquire about Paul Dacre's eager-awaited television series, The World According to Paul Dacre, which was first announced almost two years ago.
An answer came there none. Initially, it was thought the former Daily Mail editor couldn't do it because he was being lined up to take over at the broadcasting regulator Ofcom. That never happened. Never a natural television performer – one thinks of his appearance at the Leveson inquiry – it may be he's just got camera shy.
The deputy director of BBC News and head of news content the other day, Jonathan Munro, gushed, "Delighted for Clive Myrie, the new host of Mastermind and Celebrity Mastermind.”
Also in the running for that job – indeed, the Daily Telegraph said she was "leading the race" in a front-page story – was Samira Ahmed, the Newswatch presenter, pictured.
In the successful equal pay case she brought against the BBC, Ahmed disclosed how Munro had not taken kindly to the way she had interviewed him on Newswatch.
Ahmed said that she told her editor she should get "danger money" for what she had to go through. “He was angry and took that out on me; the studio crew were shocked by his behaviour and told me so. The BBC press officer present to watch the recording sent me an email after saying it had got a bit ‘heated’ and she hoped I would have a nice weekend – a veiled admission that he had behaved inappropriately”, she added.
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