Diary: Yes minister

The word from Westminster is that new prime minister Liz Truss is not particularly keen on the four-day week. Unlike the businesses currently taking part in the trial – 86% of which said they would like to keep the long weekend – Trickle-Down Truss is having even her reputation for hard-work tested by recent events.

As Diary went to bed we were hearing rumours of all-nighters and pushed deadlines as the machinery of government attempted to recover from two successions in as many weeks. With Friday’s mini-Budget, and plans to slash stamp duty, taking priority, a few of the less fundamental issues have been put on the back burner – like confirming the new housing minister, for example.

Former construction minister Lee Rowley has been the obvious heir apparent to the role, taking the post as a briefless parliamentary undersecretary of state in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities on the 7 September. But, technically, ministers need to be approved by the monarch, and King Charles has many more pressing matters at the moment.

Now it appears Rowley has grown tired of waiting for his coronation. This week he tweeted his acceptance of the highest-turnover role in government, scooping his own department. Of course, it could be that he simply wants to get as many days as possible under his belt before he is inevitably moved on. Still, it is hard to imagine anyone beating Marcus Jones’s record of just 62 days.

Image of Liz Truss by James Veysey/Shutterstock (13365796r)

Compulsory purchase O’Brien?

One other potential candidate was former levelling-up minister Neil O’Brien, who quit Boris Johnson’s government in a joint statement with Lee Rowley and fellow levelling-up minister Kemi Badenoch following the Chris Pincher scandal (another housing minister, incidentally). And he is similarly seen as someone who at least has an interest in the industry. We also hear he might be quite keen to get back into the department. O’Brien was the driving force behind plans to shake up compulsory purchase, including proposals to slash hope values. Indeed, the consultation paper appears to have been based on “Green, pleasant and affordable”, an 80-page policy paper he wrote in 2018, which advocated CPO-ing swathes of land on the cheap for much-needed housing and regeneration. Now we hear the reforms may not be quite as high up the new PM’s agenda as they were for Johnson. Maybe O’Brien would value the chance to push his agenda?

Easy listening

What is the thing you dread most when someone asks to use your phone to play some killer tunes at a house party? That your rubbish taste in music will be revealed to all the world, or that someone will nick the brick? Or worse yet, start scrolling through your private pics? Well, if it is the latter, Quintain Living has come up with a solution. Tenants at its Wembley scheme can not only plug their phone into the speaker system for music, they can also lock the door of the “phone box” to prevent thieves and snoops. Clever, right? Sadly, Quintain has yet to find a solution to your dodgy taste in tunes.

Levelling-up Bill

Despite boasting more than 11,500 followers on his @peterproperty Twitter account, former EG editor Peter Bill has made a point of following no one, telling one contact on the social media platform that he preferred “to disseminate information from sources other than Twitter”. So we were surprised and excited last week to notice that Bill’s following count had suddenly rocketed from zero to… one! The lucky tweeter? Jim Armitage, business editor at The Sunday Times. Was a new era being ushered in? We quickly sought guidance from The Mighty Bill to see how Diary, too, could become one of this most hallowed elect. Moments later Armitage was unfollowed and the count dropped back to zero. Investment bank traders can make a so-called “fat-finger trade” when adding an extra zero to a transaction. Maybe this was a fat-finger follow.

While one door closes…

Quintain may not have unlocked the solution to dodgy tastes in music (see story above), but it has opened the door to another – one bound to chime with Diary’s younger readers. Its BTR development has a children’s play area with a bathroom. No, that isn’t the solution – that’s essential! The solution is the two doors, a regular door for adults and a smaller one built into the original for children. So cute! In the interests of research, we checked that there is no rule preventing grown-ups from using the smaller door, if they so choose.