London Diary
Green multimillionaire and former Just Stop Oil supporter Dale Vince is doing his best to prevent the Greens from winning a single seat on Thursday.
The activist entrepreneur who financially supported the orange-spraying JSO activists until late last year now says Labour is the real green option.
“I’m not confident enough about the outcome of the election to say, oh, we can have some Green MPs,” he told us. “I know the Greens say that: ‘Why can’t you just give us some MPs, come on.’ Labour has a Green manifesto. We’re going to get a Green government!”
He says he has visited constituencies where the Greens have a chance and advised people not to vote for them. “It’s the only real alternative – Labour or the Tories, and we know the Tories are not green at all, so I’m trying to encourage people to vote Labour.”
We caught up with Vince at Glastonbury, where he was leading the Just Vote campaign, named after his previous support of the JSO. Using banners, merchandise and a giant ballot box, the campaign urged festival-goers to cast their votes on Thursday.
He suggested that Sir Keir Starmer could speak at the festival, as Jeremy Corbyn did in 2017, when he drew the biggest crowd since the Rolling Stones headlined. “It would be cool if Keir spoke here,” Vince said. “Why not? Why can’t Keir come? Keir on the Shangri-La stage would be good.”
Vince stopped funding the JSO last year and started sending money to Labour candidates. Now he says: “Just Stop Oil couldn’t stop the Tories, but you can if you come out on Thursday.”
Trust me 2.0
History repeats itself, in a sense, on the front page of today’s Evening Standard. In March 2021, as the country was just emerging from miserable lockdowns, Rishi Sunak appeared with his red box and urged us to trust him with the economy. According to the polls, that didn’t quite work. Today, with Labour potentially in government by the end of the week, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves appears on our cover with an almost identical message. “Trust me,” she pleads in an exclusive interview with our political editor Nicholas Cecil. Will things work out for Reeves where they didn’t for Sunak?
