Question Time 16th January 2025
The Panel:
Chris Bryant (Labour)
Nadine Dorries (Conservative)
Calum Miller (Liberal Democrat)
Ayesha Hazarika (Broadcaster)
Liam Halligan (Economist & Journalist)
Venue: Northampton
Sir Christopher John Bryant is the Labour MP for Rhondda and Ogmore has been for a near quarter century. A previous member of the Conservative Party, the 62-year-old at present enjoys the grand title of Minister of State at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
Cardiff-born Chris is the son of a Crysler Corporation executive and was educated privately at the £49,000 per year Cheltenham College. A graduate of Mansfield College, Oxford, Sir Christopher was ordained priest in 1987 but left the Church of England ministry after four years. Following a career at the likes of the BBC and Common Purpose, he entered the House of Commons in 2001.
Once pictured on a ‘dating’ website in his underwear, Sir Chris also raised eyebrows during the expenses scandal when after claiming £84,350 in Parliamentary expenses on a London penthouse in which he lived while renting out another London property that he owned for £3,000 a month.
Comrade Chris sold the penthouse for £1.1 million, more than twice what he paid for it.
This week’s ‘We Just Can’t Get Rid Of Them Award’ goes to Ms Nadine Dorries. Not an MP having stood down from her Bedfordshire seat at the July 2024 general election, the 67-year-old is still welcome on Question Time. Another un-indicted expenses criminal, Nadine was caught claiming over £3,000 in personal travel expenses against her Parliamentary work. Added to which, she claimed £60,000 in ‘second’ home allowances while it emerged she only used her ‘main’ home for ‘free weekends and holidays’.
The discrepancies came to light when concerned taxpayers scrutinised Ms Dorries’ online blog, which, in her defence, Dorries claimed was 70% fiction and 30% fact. Despite, or perhaps because of this, Dorres wasn’t sacked and jailed but rather promoted to be Secretary of State for Digital Culture, Media and Sport under Boris Johnson. In this role, in a rare bout of threatening to be useful, she promised to maim the BBC but nothing came of it.
In other financial news, Nadine’s daughters Jennifer and Phillipa were on the Westminster payroll too, with both being paid north of £30,000 pa for roles such as office manager, executive secretary and senior secretary.
Nadine also pulls the old tax dodging trick whereby her earnings from media – which includes a spell on Mr Aton Dec’s ‘I’m Desperate For Publicity, Get Me In Front Of The Cameras’ – are paid into a company rather than to herself. The company is Averbrook which at the moment just has one employee.
Hold on a minute, why does the MP for Mid-Bedforshire, a fifty-minute commute from central London, need a second home?
Calum Alexander Miller is the new Lib Dem MP for Oxfordshire’s Bisteter and Woodstock since the July 2024 general election. The son of a Church of Scotland Minister and a social worker, 44-year-old Calum read PPE at Oxford before taking an MPhil in International Relations at the same university.
Following a seven-month spell as a Marks & Spencer management trainee, Callum adjourned from the real world to take a series of non-jobs in the Civil Service and at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. Besides working in advocacy at Representation To The EU and International Development And Climate Change, the married father of four and part-time rugby coach became a fellow of Oxford University.
One of the North Lanarkshire Hazarikas, Ayesha Yousef Hazarika, Baroness Hazarika, was educated at a predecessor school to Glasgow’s £20,000 a year Hutchesons’ Grammar School. A graduate of Hull University, the doctor’s daughter whose brother is also a doctor, took further studies in Communications and Politics before joining the Civil Service.
There, the 49-year-old became a press officer at the Department of Trade and Industry. Later becoming a political adviser to senior Labour Party politicians, a media commentator contributing columns for The Scotsman and the London Evening Standard, and one of the launch presenters of the Times digital radio service.
By night she did stand-up ‘comedy’, her unfunny non-humour captured for all time on the BBC’s Asian Network YouTube channel available here.
Appearing more posh and less Scottish than on her QT appearances – surely the girl isn’t a fake?- her routine included, trigger warning, the one about her mother sitting her and her brother down and telling them it was time they married (each other).
As for humour, one feels able to repeat in a family column Her Ladyship riff, “I know what you’re thinking, brown skin, white teeth, normally it’s the other way round with Glaswegians.”
A fuller and annotated text version of the routine, as if a copy of Mein Kampf in a German public library, can be found in a previous version of QT Review here.
Liam Halligan attended the £26,000 per annum John Lyon School in Harrow before attaining a first-class degree in Economics at the University of Warwick. Further study earned him an MPhil, also in Economics, from the University of Oxford. After that, he moved into journalism with the Daily Telegraph. Liam has also contributed to CNN, GQ, Channel 4, Russian Economic Trends and the FT and was a founding father present at the launch of GB News in 2021.
Mr Halligan left that news channel as recently as June 2024 and now, amongst other projects, co-presents with Allison Pearson a weekly Telegraph podcast called “Planet Normal” – which is often in the Apple iTunes top 10 most popular news podcasts.
Despite being ‘multi-award winning’, ‘highly-skilled’ and oozing ‘recognised expertise’ while ‘holding two school governorships’ (according to himself via his LinkedIn profile), Liam doesn’t quite make the top ten on the Amazon best sellers list.
His recent book, ‘Home Truths: The UK’s Chronic Housing Shortage: How It Happened, Why It Matters And The Way to Solve it’, sits a chronic 56,881 paces behind the Marquis de Sade’s ‘120 Days of Sodom’.
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Question one, a hospital in London is advertising for corridor nurses. What’s to be done?
Chris Bryant wanted to fix the NHS from top to bottom. We, meaning you the taxpayer, are putting an extra £22 billion of funds in, but it’s also about reforming the system, especially regarding social care. How soon can we expect to see a difference, wondered La Bruce. A whole parliament replied Chris. From pharmacy to GP training to GP surgeries to hospitals – seven days a week. While public sector unions lobby for a four-day week, he forgot to add.
Nadine blamed Labour’s Private Finance Initiative from decades ago. There are more people now and fewer beds. Why didn’t the Conservatives do something about it then? asked La Bruce. The Labour government are tipping money into the black hole of the NHS with the government having, following previous ‘reforms’, no control over what happens to the funding, replied Nadine
A lady in the audience suggested people take personal responsibility for their own health, for instance through diet and exercise. A chap dressed in black with his hat on the wrong way round and wearing large earrings claimed to be in charge of dispatching people from hospital. He pointed out that the NHS right hand and left hand are not coordinated.
Liam reminded us we keep on saying the NHS is the best in the world while we all know it isn’t. We’re at the bottom in the developed world league tables. He hinted that ‘free at the point of use’ must be on the table in any future reforms. He added lockdown had been a disaster, creating a covid-only service. There are waiting lists to get onto the waiting list to get onto the waiting list.
A giant fat man complained about beds. So large he was on sticks, he wanted taxes to be higher. Perhaps a food tax?
Calum Miller gave examples from his surgery. Not that sort of surgery, his constituency surgery. He blamed the damage done by the Conservatives, yawn, and highlighted that a lack of social care blocks 12,000 beds a day. Ayesha wanted a cross-party approach. There were questions about why the Labour review of such things is to take two years.
Mrs AWS worked in social care as a school leaver. Overnight, two teenagers were responsible for a dormitory of 40 ladies. They got on with it. Now this minute, there is a large detached house around the corner for three old ladies with special needs. Most of the time at least three or four cars sit outside, suggesting a staff to patient ratio of 1:1 rather than 1:20. That’s why it’s so expensive and undoable.
The next question was about Elon Musk. Friend or foe? Friend, said Nadine and mentioned the leverage he’s given to the Muslim rape gang scandal. La Bruce told her she was wrong and that Elon makes nasty comments about Starmer and Jess Phillips. I didn’t say I was a fan, said Nadine, just that I agree with him at times.
Chris thought the British people should run the country, not Elon Musk, and that applies to Putin too, who interferes in British elections. Does he? And Barack Obama who interferred in the Brexit vote, interrupted Liam. Barack Obama didn’t have much success, replied Chris lamely. He took out his violin and played a sad tune for poor put upon Jess Phillips, omitting to mention much of the abuse she receives comes from her own Muslim constituents who would prefer a Hamas MP.
La Bruce pinned Chris down on ‘grooming’ gangs. The most despicable thing thats happened. Covered up by him and the Labour Party, he omitted to mention. Ominously, he wanted ‘proper data’ about the ethnicity of the offenders. ie to fiddle the figures. He ranted a denial about Labour’s part in the cover-up and took the blame for nothing. Callum thought Elon Musk was a threat to the UK. Many in the carefully selected BBC audience clapped like seals. Liam noted that the former LibDem leader, Nick Clegg, had engaged in something similar via Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook.
Displacement technique, continued Liam, the Elon Musk issue is a deliberate distraction from the grooming scandal. La Bruce proved him right by interrupting to tell him the question was not about ‘grooming’ but about Elon. Halligan persisted and used the phrase ‘child rape scandals’. So be it if it takes Elon Musk to tell us this is an international scandal that needs to be sorted out on behalf of people abandoned by the media-political bubble in London. Maybe there isn’t going to be a national inquiry because Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions at the time?
Well said Liam.
Ayesha ranted. This time about Tommy Robinson and two murdered MPs. She forgot to add one of them was murdered by a Muslim, and the other was up to her neck with Palestine, the Syrian White Helmets and the toxic sectarian politics of Yorkshire’s Muslim ghettos. She name-dropped the Church of England and the Catholic Church but did advocate for the national enquiry that her own party is refusing.
We shall see.
© Always Worth Saying 2025
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