By our health correspondent, Ophelia Balls
OILY Government salesman Wes Streeting breezed into Carlisle on Friday grinning like the captain of a victorious football team returning home with a trophy.
But the Labour Health Secretary’s happy-go-lucky smiles were strictly for the cameras with his visit to Cumbria tightly stage-managed by shadowy Spin Doctors.
Although not generally known for his reluctance to open his mouth, media interviews with the reliable rent-a-gob were pooled.
This meant that the only media allowed to ask questions of the VIP were the television cameras of ITV Boredom rather than the local print media.
This ensured maximum celluloid sharing opportunities for the ambitious little turd who focussed on the national broadcast media.
It was a different story in the run-up to the General Election when Wes All Mighty was a mere nobody.
On his visits to Carlisle and Wokeington, newspaper titles representing the two towns were keenly cultivated by Labour.
Pleased to be welcomed into the inner circle, adoring young Scroogequest Churnalists loyally went along to record Wes’s every Tory-bashing word.
But electoral success and a big Cabinet job appear to have gone to his already oversized head.
Under the pooling arrangement, instead of an exclusive interview and a sit down with him, cuckolded local papers had to make do with 500 words of dry “copy” written up by broadcasters Border.
Rumour here has it that Wes is a growing fan of West Cumbria and usually finds time to bunk up with his equally ambitious bosom buddy – Josh MacAlister, Labour MP for Whitehaven and Workington.
Posh Josh recently had the gall to accuse the Tories of “governing by press release” but will presumably keep schtum about Wes’s attempts to control the narrative!
When not in London, Josh resides far from the baying plebs in a lush corner of the Lake District where one can only speculate that when Wes is in the county they spend the night agonising over the plight of the common man.
Up the workers!
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