Express man who backed call for British MP's deportation joins Mail

Last year Rats in a Sack reported how the Daily Express’s senior political correspondent Christian Calgie was roundly condemned after endorsing a call for Birmingham-born Muslim MP Zarah Sultana to be deported.

After posting on X that he “cannot wait until my taxes no longer fund Zarah’s salary”, itself a striking remark to make from a lobby correspondent paid as a news reporter, not a commentator, he then doubled down after someone replied to his post saying that he “cannot wait until my taxes fund deporting Zarah”. Calgie replied to this post with “even better”.

Although none of his fellow lobby correspondents publicly rocked the boat, several members of staff at the Daily Mirror – with whom the Express shares a publisher, Reach, and an office in Canary Wharf – made their displeasure with the oafish Calgie clear.

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After getting a bollocking, he posted an apology for his “inappropriate response to a message on X”, though for not his initial post. He added that he was “taking a break from X to prioritise my mental health” – a curious line from someone who had a few years earlier tweeted a “gentle reminder to people in power” not to “use your mental health… as an excuse for abusing people”.

Calgie’s “mental health” seemed to recover rapidly: he was back posting on X within three days, and evidently back at work almost as quickly, boasting just days later that he had “just got Reform to commit to a serious crackdown on Motability”, the scheme helping disabled people get access to cars.

Now just five months after backing a call for a British-born Muslim MP to get chucked out, Calgie has got his reward: a senior job at the Daily Mail, where such comments are quite handy to have on one’s CV.

He has been given the previously untaken role of “senior political editor-at-large” at the paper. Quite what the job entails is unclear, although he will no doubt be hoping to last longer than Isabel Oakeshott, who held the title of “political editor-at-large” at the Mail between February 2016 and early 2017 but has since, er, deported herself to a Muslim nation.