ANDREW PIERCE: Keir Starmer’s sorry attempt to get unions on side 

With Labour reporting a huge £5 million deficit, Sir Keir Starmer is desperate to try to curry favour with the trade union barons who bankroll the party — the same unions that brought large parts of the country to a standstill last week with three days of strikes on the railways.

The trouble is, Starmer’s ban on frontbenchers joining picket lines — and his sacking of frontbencher Sam Tarry for doing just that — have infuriated the union brotherhood. 

Last month, Mick Whelan, head of train drivers’ union Aslef, even publicly speculated about breaking the traditional link between unions and the Labour Party.

The Left-wing New Statesman now reveals that Starmer has privately apologised to Whelan, to Paddy Lillis from the shopworkers’ union Usdaw, and to Matt Wrack, boss of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), for his picket-line stance.

Same old double standards from the Labour leader. 

And, of course, no apology from him to the millions of people hit by the strikes inflicted by his union cronies.

The Mail revealed on Saturday that the NHS has spent £1 million on hundreds of woke staff networks — money which could have been spent on patient care. Central government is even worse. 

There are an astonishing 326 diversity officers in the civil service. Let’s hope they’re given their marching orders when Liz Truss, an enemy of the woke tendency, is PM.

Esther: Tony’s a masked bore 

Tony Blair, via his Institute for Global Change, is calling for face masks to be made mandatory again on public transport. 

Esther McVey, the former Tory Cabinet minister, is not impressed. 

She says: ‘The global change I want to see is for our freedoms never to be taken away from us again as they were during the pandemic.’ 

Deborah Turness, the BBC’s new News supremo, is finally expected at Broadcasting House eight months after accepting the post. 

If the former ITN chief needs help navigating the corridors of power, perhaps predecessor Fran Unsworth can assist. 

Before leaving, Unsworth, paid £340,000 a year, claimed £29.38 in expenses for ‘orientation with potential staff member’. Mind how you go, Deborah. 

Orderly Britain, published this month, is a timely corrective for doom-mongers wailing about a nation in meltdown. 

Authors Tim Newburn and Andrew Ward unusually employ the issue of dog mess ‘and what we do with it’ to illustrate their argument. 

They add a small caveat, though: ‘Naturally, we must tread carefully.’ 

Since taking his seat in the House of Lords in 2019, Simon Woolley has been mistaken for a member of staff three times. 

The first black man to head a Cambridge college, he was asked the first time by a peer to help him with photocopying. 

‘I did it,’ he tells Saga magazine. The second time, he told the peer he was not staff. 

When the peer asked for a third time, Woolley, founder of Operation Black Vote who grew up in foster care on a council estate, snapped: ‘I’ve had enough of this. I’m one of you.’ 

He’s the shape of you my lord 

Can you spot the difference? 

Labour’s Lord Wood is regularly mistaken for singer Ed Sheeran, once even on a stag night for Feargal Sharkey, the former frontman with punk band The Undertones. 

The biggest giveaway to his true identity is that Wood, a former adviser to Gordon Brown, is a terrible singer.