Matthew Steeples suggests “poison pen” Isabel Oakeshott’s career prospects now belong in nowhere but a slurry pit; he highlights an encounter with her and argues she has disgraced the journalistic profession
In September 2019, I called out Isabel Oakeshott as “a woman who is best known not (as she claims) as a ‘journalist’ but instead as a ‘lobbyist who carries a poison pen.’” Now, in the wake of this mouthy menace breaking an NDA and releasing Matt Hancock’s Whatsapp messages, I again repeat this suggestion.
TalkTV tittle-tattler Oakeshott, who just happens to be in a relationship with the man who’d have the nation eating chlorinated chicken that is the Waitrose Belgravia shopper, fellow TalkTV host and Reform Party leader Richard Tice, is someone I’ve only ever encountered once and that was back in September 2019.
On the evening in question, I found myself invited by the charming folk at Quiller Publishing – a house whose owner once told me his firm was more used to publishing books on ferrets and fox hunting than pomposity and politicians – to a rather ritzy party at Carlton House Terrace for the publication of the now late Stuart Wheeler’s excellent autobiography, Winning Against The Odds: My Life in Gambling and Politics.
Gathered for the occasion, aside from the tycoon’s glamorous daughters, were, amongst others, members of the Aspinall family and the ever vivacious Neil and Christine Hamilton. I was perhaps a ‘rarity’ in being a Remainer in a room crammed to the brim with Brexiteers and on arrival I found the then Sky News presenter Lewis Goodall outside and not even allowed in.
As the nemesis of Boris and Carrie ‘Princess NutNut’ Johnson that is Dominic Cummings – himself a little less known than he later became after his COVID-19 lockdown breaking Barnard Castle jaunt in March 2020 – interviewed Wheeler on stage, one person caught my eye. There before me, amongst a room of ‘party appropriate’ outfits, stood a little blonde number in her clearly grubby gym kit.
I asked the friend accompanying me: “Did the Lycra-clad woman think she’d been invited to Barry’s Bootcamp?” and after being met with a curt: “She clearly takes style advice from Katie Price” in response, saw the woman concerned turn. Realising it was Isabel Oakeshott, I guess neither of us should have been surprised.
Oakeshott, it has now become incredibly clear, is a woman who doesn’t do ethics as much as she doesn’t do fashion. A journalist is not a journalist if they don’t do all they can to protect their sources and though Matt Hancock is a man truly and very much utterly deservedly loathed, the fact that Oakeshott has betrayed her source is beyond contemptible.
Pompous to her core, as was illustrated when she threw a hissy fit and stormed out of an interview with Cathy Newman for Times Radio yesterday, Oakeshott will now find it very hard to continue in the profession she claims to be a leading figure in. She is, I’d argue, nothing but a traitor and a disgrace.
Why anyone would want to talk to the fake news muckspreader who told porky pies about David Cameron’s sexual shenanigans with a pig was already in question prior to what Oakeshott has been touting as the #lockdownfiles, but today – rather like her boyfriend Tice’s political ambitions – it’s this Gordonstoun educated gobshite who will find her career prospects deservedly headed nowhere but to pigsh*t.
Editor’s Note – Unlike as is the case in many publications, this article was NOT sponsored or supported by a third-party. Follow Matthew Steeples on Twitter at @M_Steeples.
Pictured Top – The ‘poison pen’ not a ‘journalist’ with the Health Secretary turned ‘I’m A Celebrity’ contestant she opted to so outrageously betray.
Wikipedia informs me she went to St George’s School and Gordonstoun, two of Scotland’s most prestigious private schools in Scotland How dare she defile their name.