“There’s either a very convincing catfish, or Michael Gove is now active on Bumble,” says the Popbitch newsletter. The Minister for the Cabinet Office separated from his wife in July. According to his dating app bio, he is 6ft tall, a Virgo, works out sometimes, is a social drinker/smoker, a conservative and “not sure what he’s looking for”.
Carrington’s farewell
Boris Johnson may not sack his Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, says John Rentoul in The Independent. That doesn’t mean political accountability is dead. No fewer than 13 ministers have fallen on their swords since Johnson became PM. And the resignation usually cited to show “things were done differently in the past” has an interesting wrinkle. Lord Carrington resigned as foreign secretary in 1982, when Argentina invaded the Falklands – intriguingly, when Carrington was 99, in July 2018, he raised his fist “like a football fan” when he heard that Johnson had resigned as foreign secretary from Theresa May’s Cabinet. He promptly died.
Boris is Blair’s true heir
Tony Blair and Boris Johnson seem to occupy opposite ends of the political landscape, says Bagehot in The Economist. In fact, “Johnson has learned much from Blair”. The PM visited a Labour meeting in south London as a journalist in 1995, and wrote that “Supertone” played members “like a master organist”. Johnson was “mesmerised”, and it shows. Like Blair, he “never wags the finger about how people should run their lives”. He also has episodes of “Blairite centrism”, pronouncing on climate change and obesity in a way he would once have described as “nanny statism”. But Blair blew his chance of reforming the public sector by leaving it too late. His mistake is a stark warning for Johnson: it’s not enough to win power, “you must use it before it wanes”.
Dom’s plan to win the White House
Dominic Cummings is pitching himself as a one-man politics start-up, asking Silicon Valley billionaires and venture capitalists to give him a “tiny and cheap” investment of £1.5m-£2m to find a candidate who can replace Joe Biden and beat Donald Trump. He took to his blog to plot his Washington takeover, declaring Biden “rubbish” and dismissing the Democrats as “firmly in the grip of a generation of activists deranged by Ivy League insanity”. He advised campaign staff to roam swing states in pick-up trucks if they want to understand real Americans, and promised to abolish the Pentagon and much of the federal government.