💔🚪By combining No 10 and No 11’s staff, Boris Johnson hoped to keep Rishi Sunak’s Treasury under his thumb, say Annabelle Dickson and Esther Webber in Politico. But 10 months after the move, the joint unit has switched allegiances. Liam Booth-Smith, a highly rated housing expert brought in to be the PM’s man, is “completely and utterly Rishi”, according to one source. Another member of the joint team said they could speak “only for Sunak”. Alex Hickman, a customary point of contact in No 10, appears increasingly to be doing things for the Chancellor. The team is now joint “in name only”.
Just say nein to German politicians
🇩🇪 🗣️ Pity the poor voters of Germany, says Andreas Kluth in Bloomberg. The average word count in party manifestos is 43,541, and ahead of the 26 September election, they are stuffed full of verbosities such as Mindestbeitragsbemessungsgrundlage and Allgemeinverbindlichkeitserklärung. Most Germans “have no clue what these fabricated terms mean”. Which brings to mind Mark Twain’s remark that a lot of what appears in “the awful German language” is “not words [but] alphabetical processions”. Worse, these lexical “tapeworms” leave the field open for “pied pipers and cynics” to discard their scruples and oversimplify. “If only populist politicians would heed Orwell’s six rules of writing and speak clearly. God help us.”
The Met’s latest scandal
👮🏻♀️🚨This week the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Cressida Dick, was offered a two-year job extension. But in June an official report concluded her force was “institutionally corrupt” and revealed that she had placed “hurdles” in the way of solving a murder case. “Dame Cressida Dick herself is living proof that if you work for the Met, it’s possible to foul up and survive,” says Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. No wonder people on both sides of the political spectrum don’t trust the police.