And so the foreign aid rebellion died before it even began. This afternoon Speaker Lindsay Hoyle decided that an audacious move to amend the ARIA bill to keep spending 0.7 per cent of GDP year on international development was not within the scope of the legislation.
Despite this Mr S thought it worthwhile to go through the names of those Tories listed on the order paper to give you a cut out and keep guide to the new gang of government rebels. Most of those named will be familiar to long-suffering members of the Tory whips office: Sir Roger Gale was of course one of the first MPs to call for Dominic Cummings’s resignation after Barnard Castle and it can hardly be a surprise to see him backing a measure that would gut the latter’s cherished project. Other familiar faces are select committee chairs Caroline Nokes and Simon Hoare – both of whose positions on the equalities and Northern Ireland panels are to some extent a tacit rebuke of Boris Johnson’s own previous statements on these issues.
Old hands are in abundance in the published list of sponsors.
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