ANDREW PIERCE: London Labour chiefs driving Keir Starmer’s woes

Sir Keir Starmer may be the leader of the Labour Party, and miles ahead in the polls, but his appeals for London Mayor Sadiq Khan to drop the hated expansion of the Ultra-Low Emission Zone (Ulez) have been totally ignored.

Starmer U-turned on the £12.50 daily charge on older polluting vehicles when it cost Labour the Uxbridge by-election, but Khan doesn’t seem to care.

Now he has a Ulez problem in his own constituency. His Labour-run local authority, Camden Council, is proposing a new surcharge on petrol cars registered before September 2015 and diesel cars registered before September 2019.

Previously, the extra charge had been paid only by owners of diesel cars. The council blueprint says the proposed additional charges of between £448 and £622 will ‘reflect the impact of older petrol and diesel vehicles’.

Owners of electric cars, meanwhile, will have to pay more than triple the amount for a parking permit next year, up from £45.56 to £138.90. The council also proposes to limit households to just one parking permit each, down from the current three.

The council’s environment chief, Adam Harrison, says: ‘We need to seize every opportunity to make Camden a more sustainable, carbon-neutral borough.’

Having failed to strong-arm Khan, can Starmer control his local council?

Former Health Secretary Matt Hancock says of his trials and tribulations on the brutal Channel 4 reality show Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins: ‘It is not really about physical fitness, it’s about mental resilience. It’s about the ability to put one foot in front of the other.’

It makes a change from putting his foot in his mouth.

The fabulous Pam Ayres gives her own take on the outbreak of bed bugs in France.

‘Bugs! This mighty plague of insects, with their itching and their pain, Cause Frenchmen in their agony to jump into the Seine, And tourists in their multitudes must scratch themselves and cower, Reeking of repellent at the top of Eiffel Tower.’

I-spy: At a Westminster book launch Seamus Milne, Jeremy Corbyn’s former spin doctor, locked in conversation with Matthew Doyle, who does the same job for Starmer. Asked what they were talking about, Doyle answered: ‘The weather’. 

Bad omen at the Labour conference. In the annual football match against journalists, Labour scored an own goal. 

One of the most outspoken critics of Sunak’s decision to junk HS2 was Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham. He accused the PM of treating Mancunians like ‘second class citizens’ and of betraying the North.

This is the same Burnham who has said: ‘The difficult thing with HS2 is the chopping and changing. You can’t build infrastructure on this scale in this way. But we argue it’s not the right solution for Manchester anyway. We should have north–south and east-west links.’

Double standards again from the self-styled King of the North.

As for Starmer’s verbal gymnastics avoiding addressing HS2, the Tory MP Esther McVey gets it in one: ‘You can see why he’s not called Sir Clear Starmer.’

Sturgeon’s campaign knockback

After a humiliating defeat for the SNP in last week’s Rutherglen by-election, the former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon recalled the horrors of campaigning.

On the Rosebud podcast, she says: ‘I still cringe when I think about it. It was a housing estate and the design of the houses meant it was confusing as to what was the front door and what was the back door. 

‘We went to this house, and a woman came to the door. She was very upset and said, “We just had a family funeral, it’s really not a good time, please go away, we’re grieving, and I don’t like the SNP anyway.”’ 

Sturgeon uttered profuse apologies, walked away, and went to a different property. Except it wasn’t. ‘We went to the back door and knocked on it, and the same woman came to the door.

‘This time she wasn’t quite so polite.’