As the new director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, Tony Danker will be a key figure as the Government targets signing a new trade deal with the EU by the end of the year.
No surprise then that the CBI, which opposed Brexit, has appointed a man who is an arch Remainer.
Danker, 48, who takes up his post in November, is currently working for the Be The Business quango. Prior to that, he was chief strategy officer for the Guardian, which is no friend of the Tory Government, let alone Brexit.
The new director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, Tony Danker will be a key figure as the Government targets signing a new trade deal with the EU
But what is even more interesting was his role as a paid employee of the last Labour government. Danker was special adviser to Liam Byrne when he was Cabinet Office minister in Gordon Brown’s administration.
When Byrne became Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danker followed him there to advise on policy matters.
Presumably, he agreed with Labour’s reckless spending spree which ended with Byrne leaving behind a now infamous letter for his successor in the Coalition government, which said: ‘Very sorry. I’m afraid there is no money left. Good luck.’
Perhaps he even wrote it. I think we should be told.
‘Life’s too short to deal with horrible people,’ Tim Davie told a Cannes TV conference in 2018. ‘It’s just not worth it, don’t spend time with those jerks. Work with people you like.’
Now that Davie has secured the top job at the BBC, we can presumably expect a clear-out of Herculean proportions.
Tory MP Tim Loughton noted the ‘irony’ of them performing Nazi salutes
No victory for far-Right thugs
Tory MP Tim Loughton has the measure of the cretinous far-Right thugs who went on the rampage at the weekend.
In a tweet, he noted the ‘irony’ of them performing Nazi salutes as they demonstrated supposedly in defence of Churchill.
But given their violent attacks on the police singularly failed to break the thin blue line, they could hardly pick up on Churchill’s trademark V for Victory.
Boris Johnson described the covering up of the statue of Winston Churchill as ‘absurd and shameful’ and lavished praise on Winnie in a series of tweets.
But he is not completely blind to his hero’s faults. In The Churchill Factor, the PM’s 2014 book on Britain’s wartime leader, Johnson wrote that Winston had slightly lost the plot on Indian independence, a policy that Churchill opposed.
‘All parties were in favour of greater Indian independence, even most Tories,’ wrote the then Mayor of London.
‘What was he up to? I’m afraid his motives were not pure. He was outraged by the prospect of losing India, the blow to the prestige of the British Empire . . . and loss of export markets for Lancashire cotton.
In that sense, he seemed selfish and chauvinistic.’ Steady on, BoJo.
With the PM scrapping plans to make gender change easier, would Lola, The Kinks’ 1970 hit about a transgender flirtation, survive the current censorious climate?
Sir Ray Davies, the lead singer in The Kinks, says the song is ‘a celebration of artistic freedom (including my own) and the right for anyone to be gender-free if one wishes’.
Phew, no need to ‘cancel’ arguably Britain’s greatest living songwriter then.
Barnard Castle made the headlines when Dominic Cummings claimed he drove there during the lockdown to test his eyesight.
The 2005 book Brewer’s Britain And Ireland, reveals Barnard Castle is slang in Durham dialect — and means ‘Pathetic excuse’. Quite.
Ed’s tough tangle with Prezza
In the first of a series of online Q&A sessions with pupils at public school Ampleforth College, the broadcaster Ed Stourton was asked which politician he’d found most difficult to interview.
The Ampleforth old boy replied: ‘They’re all difficult in different ways.’ He said John Prescott, who was deputy PM under Tony Blair, ‘would go off on wild tangents and get terribly tangled up with his language’.
He added: ‘I was once interviewing him and he said: “You’re a terrible man for asking the questions and not giving the answers.”
‘I thought that that was my job, but never mind.’