The Londoner: Jacob Rees-Mogg's plot to swell the Tory party

Jacob Rees-Mogg is encouraging “Conservative supporters” — understood to include former Ukip members, we have learned — to join the Conservative Party in a bid to boost membership numbers of those on the Right of the party, and possibly tilt a future leadership contest in his favour.

Rees-Mogg has long been advocating a closer relationship between the Tories and Ukip — in 2013 he called for an electoral pact — though this explicit widening of the net marks a step change. But he’s not the first politician to call for outsiders to join the Tories — a practice known as entryism. Conservative politicians have made much of Labour’s struggles with entryism as former Marxists and Trotskyists joined the party in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s election.

Last year Nick Clegg wrote in his book How to Stop Brexit “joining the Conservatives is another route to make your views felt”.

Clegg’s plan was for Centrists to infiltrate the Tories to prevent a hard Brexit. Rees-Mogg unsurprisingly has a different angle. His Brexit ambitions would be significantly bolstered by an influx of Ukip-minded members. In Conservative leadership contests, after candidates are whittled down to two by MPs, it is the membership who make the final decision.

Low Tory membership figures make the party particularly ripe for a sudden surge of new members. Conservative membership numbers have long been in decline and, as of March this year, languish at 124,000, just over a fifth the size of Labour’s 552,000. Ukip membership peaked at 42,200 in December 2014, and even a part of that could make a decisive impact on the next Tory leadership contest.

Nor would it have to come to a contest: fear of losing a decisive leadership battle might swing the party towards the loudest faction. Clegg hoped it might be his anti-Brexiteers who would benefit, but now it’s Rees-Mogg turning up the dial. He told The Londoner: “Tory membership was rallying earlier in the year and historically was bigger than Labour. This could happen again and Brandon Lewis [the party chairman] is doing a good job.”

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White Paper fiasco has Raab in a sweat

New Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab had a car-crash first outing at the Despatch Box to deliver the Government’s much-anticipated Brexit White Paper. MPs complained they hadn’t seen a copy and those who had did not have enough time to read it. Speaker John Bercow took the very rare step of suspending the Commons for five minutes to give anxious parliamentarians time to skim the document. Later karate black belt Raab was spotted running full speed and furious on the Westminster gym treadmill during his regular workout.

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Norman Rosenthal, formerly of the Royal Academy, says Blenheim Palace “severely compromised” the artists they have exhibited by hosting Trump last night. “You could not name two more exemplary, politically prominent artists than Jenny Holzer and Ai Weiwei,” he says. “If you want to show artists such as these, you have to accept the moral consequences.”

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The man behind the Trump Baby blimp is taking him on tour. Leo Murray tells Newsweek: “We’re going to look at Trump’s diplomatic itinerary over the next 12 months and reach out to activist groups unfortunate enough to be expecting a visit [to] see whether they would like to fly Trump Baby over their venue.”

The Joy of sex - before her political career

TORY mayoral hopeful Joy Morrissey has a saucy past. Before joining the Conservatives, the Ohio-born activist was an actor and landed parts in Hollywood romcoms, including 2009’s Geek Mythology. One scene from the low-budget flick sees her straddling her co-star in her underwear as she pretends to ride him like a pantomime horse. “I’m not embarrassed by anything,” says the Ealing councillor. “I was 23 years old. I was pretty uninhibited and I’m just someone who accepts people as they are and who they are. My experimental theatre work was a lot more scandalous. Thank God that wasn’t filmed.”

Show of force from Labour old guard

Labour’s former media and strategy chief, Tom Baldwin, launched his book Ctrl Alt Delete at Ink 84 in Highbury last night. The gang were back together: Baldwin’s old boss Ed Miliband, Tristram Hunt, now V&A director, Alastair Campbell and Fiona Millar. “This is Jeremy Corbyn’s favourite bookshop,” Baldwin said. “Well it was, until we contaminated it.”

Meanwhile, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator and star of Fleabag, was in high spirits after being nominated for an Emmy for drama Killing Eve. “It feels really f***ing nice,” she told us at the Soho Theatre. “I want to celebrate by eating hummus.” Before that she watched The One, Vicky Jones’s comedy. Waller-Bridge originated the lead role in the play in 2014, now taken over by Tuppence Middleton, who called in an “intimacy coach” for the sex scenes. “It was like a choreographed dance and they took us through the sexual contact,” Middleton said. “It’s something they need to do in film as well.”

SW1A

Unite boss Len McCluskey is an unexpected poetry lover. “Whenever I go on holiday I take a poetry book,” he told the web series Now What? “I love Shelley, that great Romantic revolutionary to working people who were being oppressed by an uncaring government.” McCluskey then burst into The Masque of Anarchy, a Corbyn favourite: “Rise like lions after slumber/ in unvanquishable number... Ye are many — they are few.” Sounds familiar.

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Parliament’s Strangers’ Bar is suffering its annual infestation of fruit flies from the Thames, but help is on hand: a “fat hairy predator” spider has arrived. It “doesn’t realise that his own days are numbered”, say MPs. They have nicknamed it “Boris”.

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Downing Street cleaning staff say they like Theresa and Philip May “because they always make their beds, pick up their clothes and say thank you”.

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