Political editor WALTER CRONXITE gives his crystal ball a polish after one of his easier predictions came to pass
Good lord!: David Evans, a former Croydon councillor, gets a seat in the second chamber for life
Friday’s announcement of another raft of political peerages was the latest move to consolidate a takeover of the Labour Party by a small clique of friends from south London.
Because included in Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s 30-strong list of many ne’er-do-wells and underachievers was David Evans, the election strategist who helped put Labour’s Tony Newman and Simon Hall in charge of Croydon Town Hall in 2014, and whose former lover was Alison Butler, the councillor who did so much to create failed housing company Brick by Brick.
None of which will get a mention in the citation for Evans’s “elevation” to the Lords, which comes just a few months after he stepped down as General Secretary of the Labour Party, a post for which he was hand-picked by Starmer in 2020.
Actress: MP Imogen Walker once played Linda Lovelace and later pretended to be a political adviser in Croydon
Also among the 30 new peers named by Starmer on Friday is Sue Gray, oh-so-briefly Downing Street Chief of Staff, along with a several Labour MPs who left parliament in July.
Labour has frequently stated its aim to “reform” the House of Lords, rather than abolish it and replace it with a democratically elected second chamber.
But then whenever they have an opportunity, they end up doling out golden tickets to the Palace of Privilege, where the lords and ladies, barons and baronesses land a job for life amending legislation, get paid £332 per day just for showing up, and enjoy tax-payer subsidised bars and restaurants.
Labour’s excuse this time? “The Tories stuffed the House of Lords, creating a serious imbalance in the chamber. This needs to be corrected to drive through the ‘government’s plan for change’ and deliver on our mandate from the British people,” apparently. And if you believe that…
Those appointed to the unelected second chamber usually take a title – for instance: “Baron Evans of Penge” has a certain dull ring to it… – and can often score a few plum invites to the likes of Wimbledon Centre Court, the Chelsea Flower Show and the Royal Opera.
But they may also be subject to closer scrutiny by the authorities, including the likes of Special Branch and the security services, who ought to want to know more about those recommended for peerages who have been implicated in the unlawful possession of illegally hacked files, while presiding over an organisation whose own data protection practices have been a complete shambles.
Evans, Tony Bliar’s former election campaign guru, only ever had a brief spell as an democratically elected representative, when he was a councillor in Croydon. At the start of the century, Evans established a public relations firm based in offices on George Street, called The Campaign Company.
Schemester-in-chief: Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s Chief of Staff
Numerous figures who have risen to the top of the Blairite Labour Party had at some point worked for Evans and TCC.
Most notable among them is schemester-in-chief Morgan McSweeney, who saw to the ousting of Sue Gray from No10 in October, to assume the role as Starmer’s Chief of Staff.
McSweeney’s wife, Imogen Walker, a former councillor in Lambeth, is now an MP for a Scottish constituency.
Walker was once an actress, whose most notable roles include playing the part of porn star-turned-campaigner Linda Lovelace in a telly drama doc, and pretending to be a political adviser in Croydon in the weeks after the council’s financial collapse
No one at Croydon Council had as much as a Post-it note to record how Walker landed the £39,000 publicly-funded job, which included her drafting the strategy for Croydon Labour’s 2022 local election campaign (and we all know how that turned out…).
Another former colleague of Walker and Croydon MP Steve Reed from their days at Brixton Town Hall is Jim Dickson, the lobbying firm founder who is now MP for Dartford (and remains, for now, at least, on the councillor allowances gravy train in Lambeth).
Meanwhile, former The Campaign Company staffer Peter Lamb (middle name Keir) was elected in July as MP for his hometown of Crawley in Sussex, where he is already notorious for a tweet he sent that said, “If people choose not to put the heating on after several above inflation increases in the state pension then that’s their choice.” Such nice people…
Before “Lord Evans” grabbed his chance to enjoy the fruits of the public purse at Westminster, his The Campaign Company was enjoying generous contracts with Croydon Council, in the years immediately after he had run the 2014 local election campaign in Croydon.
From Brixton to Westminster: MP and Lambeth councillor Jim Dickson
Once Newman and Butler were installed at the Town Hall, it was TCC who somehow managed to land lucrative deals, such as managing the Fairness Commission, which was inexplicably given a £200,000 budget towards producing a report which immediately disappeared without trace.
But with McSweeney digging in at No10, Walker working as Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s PPS and now Evans in the Lords, the south Londoners have their hands firmly on the national levers of power.
If only Environment Secretary Reed would stop pissing off the millionaire farmers while at the same time allowing the polluting water companies to soak their customers with massive bill increases…
Read more: #TheLabourFiles: Source of hacked data worked for Evans
Read more: Dewey pleads guilty to possessing indecent images of children
Read more: ‘Interesting’: the best Newman can say of his Fairness report
Read more: McSweeney’s new No10 job puts ‘Croydon Clique’ in charge
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Evans a peer? Evans above! Him and his mates certainly peed on the good people of Croydon, and from a great height.
Back in June, Starmer wrote “this election is about change”. A few months later, he’s rewarding duplicity and mediocrity while carrying on the Tories’ austerity policy and letting big businesses crap on us
Yet another reason for replacing the House of Lords with elected representatives. That way we would get to choose who sits in our Government and it isn’t just left to Labour, Conservative, and Lib Dems leaders to give power to their mates.
We can’t claim to live in a democracy when half of our parliament is people who we didn’t vote for.