Congratulations to Ross Kempsell, publisher of the right wing Guido Fawkes website, who has been handed another plum job.
Kempsell recently stepped down as Boris Johnson’s press advisor, a position he somehow combined with running a political news website, but anyone worried he won’t be able to make ends meet needn’t fret. He’s now joined the Tory think tank Policy Exchange as the lead for its “Future of the Right” project. “I am looking forward to pulling together the best minds to examine the opportunities and risks for the right as a whole, regardless of partisan allegiance,” he cheered.
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With such a bulging portfolio, it’s perhaps no surprise that Kempsell has little time for what many might think is his actual job – as a legislator-for-life as a Conservative member of the House of Lords. He has managed to speak in the chamber just five times this year, and a grand total of 11 times since being appointed to the House by Boris Johnson in July 2023 at the age of just 31.
His contributions compare poorly to those of Charlotte Owen, his fellow Tory peer whose appointment at the same time, at just 30, garnered many more headlines. She has managed to speak 14 times this year, and introduced a private members bill to criminalise the creation and solicitation of sexually explicit digital forgeries, or “deepfakes”, without consent.
Kempsell, meanwhile, has been using his rare contributions in the chamber to make populist speeches about how “the United Kingdom is in a state of free speech emergency”. Happily, the House of Lords is somewhere you can speak about whatever you want – if, that is, you can be bothered.
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