Mrs Crackenthorpe's Diary – 18 July 2022 edition
2 min read
How time flies. When last Mrs C picked up her quill, Nadhim Zahawi was a respected education secretary and Rehman Chishti’s leadership ambitions were known to no one but himself. Evidently some private matters should remain so – but others require immediate exposure…
The Tory leadership contest has seen no shortage of attack dossiers flying around, and your diarist was handed significant documentation in the form of a leavers’ book for Queens’ College, Cambridge, featuring none other than now ejected contender Attorney General Suella Braverman (or Fernandes, as was). Quite the bibulous read it is too, describing long-ago antics. “One of her more notable binges left her prostrate in the foyer of a plush hotel in Grosvenor Square,” reads the claims in one entry. A second bender is reported to have rendered her horizontal in the road: “it took the distant rumble of an articulated lorry to spur onlookers to drag Suella to the safety of the pavement.” We’ve all been there, Suella, we’ve all been there.
Events are moving so quickly that the big question around the fall of BoJo has been long forgotten: exactly what did Michelle Donelan do to spur Lucy Allan into taking to Twitter to huff about her (blink and you missed it) promotion to education secretary? My email, as ever, is below. Lucy, for what it’s worth, was last seen clapping along at a Kemi Badenoch speech before being overheard agreeing the contest was only ever going to come down to Liz or Rishi.
Which naughty Tory MP put their name on the ballot for not one but two leadership candidates? My mole reports that had one of the contenders in question arrived at the ’22 to submit their form after the other, so becoming the one told to strike off the duplicate, they would have been knocked out in the first round.
Wit, in this Parliament, is in short supply. So bravo for Labour’s Charlotte Nichols, who found herself on the receiving end of Tory MPs’ complaints on the Terrace having taken an empty chair from their table. “You’re going to have to get used to us stealing your seats, aren’t you?” came her unimprovable reply.
Send tips! MrsCrackenthorpe@protonmail.com
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