Boris Johnson's cold feet over his GB News show

Six months ago, GB News announced with great fanfare that Boris Johnson would be joining us in the new year, but since then he has barely been seen, hiding or combing his hair on the station.

Boris isn't so sure it's still such a good idea to be associated with the station, one of the former prime minister's disgraced friends tells me. He decided to prioritize his Downing Street memoir for HarperCollins.

With over 21,600 complaints about it to Ofcom since its launch and disclosure ofSigning timesthat the Conservative Government is now GB News' biggest advertiser, more than €1 million has been spent on almost 10,500 adverts since its launch, including 132,000 in March, making it the biggest advertiser in channel, it's becoming increasingly difficult to make the case that GBeebies is any type of professional media group.

Its former star presenter Andrew Neil estimates that she has managed to lose around €80 million and has no credible path to financial balance, let alone profitability. Layoffs appear to be underway, with CEO Angelos Frangopoulos reportedly telling staff that auditors were helping him plan a streamlining of operations.

It is said that there is an air of desperation in the editorial staff. With big names following Neil out the door, breakfast editor Chris Rogers recently returned to the BBC after just seven months. It is difficult to see how GB News will be able to survive under a likely less financially supportive Labor government.

Now, Sir Paul Marshall, the right-wing hedge fund mogul who pumped millions into the channel, is reportedly set to leave his parent company, apparently to clear the way for hisToday's telegraphoffer.

I very much doubt that Michael Booker, its editorial director, is as enthusiastic about the network as he suggested in a recently leaked memo in which he called it the savior of the television news world. I remember him as a nice, liberal-minded young man from my days doing newspaper reviews on Sky News with him.

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The Conservatives are now in the death grip of the Brexiters. Labor can only hope that they will be free of this once in power. But what of the Lib Dems, the party that once insisted so much on its policy of re-joining the EU?

Liz Webster is a former party candidate and, as the founder of Save British Farming, she is no wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, and she provided me with the names of a cabal of influential figures within the gone that she swears is in the closet. The Brexiteers.

She questions the motivations of Jo Swinson's entourage for pushing her to push for the last disastrous general election just when a popular vote on Brexit seemed within reach and winnable.

Speakers at the time, John Bercow and Anna Soubry, among others, begged her not to do so, but she continued anyway. Sir Ed Davey, when he succeeded the defeated Swinson as party leader, took it upon himself to abandon the policy of re-membership, and since then the parties have stagnated in the polls.

If you had wanted to neutralize the only English party determined to end the Brexit madness, you couldn't have done better, Webster told me. Sticking with Davey after it became clear he had done nothing for the sub-postmasters now has him third in the polls favoring the Reform Party. Result.

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Lord Cameron's status as Foreign Secretary may be good for his ego, but it comes at a cost to British taxpayers. The former prime minister made 16,394 trips per day abroad during his first 35 days in office.

Accustomed to his comfort, Cameron's six trips abroad cost a total of $623,194. He began his jet-setting career after just two days on the job, with a quick overnight trip to Ukraine and Moldova. The cost of 8,759 via the RAF flight was modest compared to a two-day trip of 29,971 to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories a week later.

Later, taxpayers had to fork out $84,104 for a private charter trip to the NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels, when he was able to make a self-aggrandizing video. He spent most of the cash, $322,653, no less on a three-day trip to Paris, Rome, Jordan and Cairo via ministerial airlift and an RAF flight.

By comparison, his boss, Rishi Sunak, appears to be a homeboy, having managed just five foreign trips between October and December last year. Yet Akhil Tripathi, the conservative donor who financed his jet-setting lifestyle, has been preoccupied with defending himself against allegations of fraud in his business activities.

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With the printed editions ofDaily MailAndMail SundayDown, along with staff morale, Lord Rothermere has decided that the MBE recently awarded to his sports writer Jeff Powell calls for celebration.

This week he invited his troops to a black-tie gala evening at the RAC Club in London where he served them champagne to toast Powell. He persuaded his editor, Paul Dacre, still worried that he had never been granted a peerage, to turn up and smile through gritted teeth. And to demonstrate that he is a forward-looking boss, His Lordship brought his octogenarian screenwriter Geoffrey Levy out of retirement to write him a sufficiently moving speech.

OldEmailThe hackers complain that while there was a small celebration when the late Ann Leslie was made DBE, they cannot remember such a fuss ever being made over the idea of ​​anyone getting a common MBE or garden before. Indeed, when David English, the creator of modernityEmailwas knighted, there was no big celebration and unlike the virtual supplement the paper published to announce Powell's honor, it barely merited a padding in the paper.

How Powell achieved this honor is a matter of speculation. One version is that there was frantic lobbying involving Powell's flamboyant Mexican wife, Maria, and the likes of Alex Ferguson, the former Man United manager, but it came to nothing.

Until, that is,EmailThe great Peter Wright responded to a call from the Society of Editors, who said they felt it was time to put a journalist's name forward to the honors committee, and asked if he could think of someone.

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Aside from the heartbreaking task of having to celebrate the honors of others, Paul Dacre can at least take solace in the money he makes from renewable energy.

His ecological credentials were perhaps not very visible when he edited theDaily Mailbut I have heard that the Canaird River Company hydroelectric company, located on its vast Langwell estate in Scotland, has built up a nest egg of 1.4 million.

His estate is entitled to 40% of Canaird's accrued income, which soared by 500,000 last year to 3.5 million in 2023. Dacre is on track to recoup the 2.5 million he spent for his retreat in the Highlands in 2009. The old boy makes the money, too, hosting paying guests in cottages on the estate, at nearly $5,000 for a week in August.