Keir Starmer’s loyalty to his Labour family may be gauged from the dead bodies littering Downing Street: Sue Gray, Peter Mandelson, Angela Rayner, Louise Haigh, numerous mandarins, Spads and (this category really is too long to list) spin doctors have all been ruthlessly dumped. Morgan McSweeney is entitled to sweat. Because when the going gets tough, Don Keir gets terminating.
Perhaps it’s no great surprise that a consigliere to the Downing Street godfather spotted an upside for the PM in the deputy leadership bun-fight, should faithful Bridget Phillipson lose to revengeful Lucy Powell (as many MPs expect and bookies predict). Finishing second, mused our insider, would still be a victory of sorts for Starmer, by damaging without destroying an Education Secretary considered a future potential challenger. For the one, not the many.
Tasty exchanges between Green eco-socialist Zack Polanski and Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf were personal as well as political on Question Time. The pair went at each other with fury, the pugnacious Polanski accusing Yusuf of being a “far-right fascist”, whereas yeller Yusuf brought up Polanski’s hypnotherapist past and his former belief in enlarging boobs via the power of the mind. Glorious! The pair have history, messaged a Reform snout. Before the bout, when Yusuf and Polanski found themselves in a breakfast telly green room, Yusuf mistook the Green for a TV producer and asked for a cup of tea. That certainly stirred the pot.
Desperate to put behind them her claims that he was part of a sexist boys’ club, Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn pose as friends reunited. Or are they at best frenemies? The public display of unity at the launch of Your Party in Liverpool masked, we’re told, ongoing private enmities. Reports surfaced the following day at The World Transformed (TWT) festival in Manchester that Sultana and Corbyn – or Fruit and Nut, as Neil Kinnock calls them – refused to share a green room in both cities. Teams Corbyn and Sultana were also rumoured to have been kept apart. Sultana compared their relationship to the disputatious Gallagher brothers. As one disgruntled TWT punter observed, before falling out “the Gallagher brothers actually achieved something”. Ex-Labour MP Michael Dugher was more brutal. “Worst Oasis tribute band ever,” he tweeted.
The last time Cotswolds landowner and farmer Jeremy Clarkson hinted he could run for parliament in his gritty Yorkshire hometown of Doncaster, another local recalled his family house had a tennis court. Diddly squat resulted 15 years ago, but might the TV presenter be tempted again? Clarkson asked in a cryptic tweet whether Doncaster North voters wanted “someone from your neck of the woods” to kick out Ed Miliband. Motormouth Clarkson was a driving force in the notorious Chipping Norton posh set alongside David Cameron and Rebekah Brooks. If he did stand, would it be for the Tories or Reform?
Never let it be said that soon-to-be-history Conservative hereditary peers who battled to save what they view as a House of Lords birthright lack self-awareness. A snout disclosed the sobbing blue bloods are planning a leaving bash in White’s Club, the snootiest of St James’s gentlemen’s watering holes. Nothing’s too good for the aristos.
Newish Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper’s handling a ’mare over the China spy scandal, and her hubby Ed Balls suspects dark forces may be at work. Balls, the former Labour cabinet minister turned Good Morning Britain presenter, speculated on his Political Currency podcast with George Osborne that the story was an attempt to shift attention away from Peter Mandelson’s sacking. “It’s a dead cat on the table,” declared Balls. “Yeah…” replied a sceptical Osborne, who, let us never forget, was pipped by Mandelson to the Washington ambassadorial post. Unperturbed, Balls pressed on with his China theory. “Explain why a month after [Mandelson’s my ‘best pal’ devotion to Jeffrey Epstein] came out, there’s suddenly this massive briefing war in Whitehall with all these political sources picking a fight between the Home Office, MI5, the CPS and the Foreign Office. Why would you choose in such an unseemly way to have such a massive diversionary tactic unless you needed a massive diversion?” Because, er, the China spy case collapsed?
The New Statesman wonders if, out of front-line politics, Michael Gove misses the ministerial high life, and particularly the wining and dining by scoop-hungry hacks at their papers’ expense. Now relegated to the fourth estate himself, Gove’s a regular at a Westminster branch of Pret A Manger. Our informants watch Gove glumly queuing at lunchtimes while scrolling through X. His usual order of an austere egg-mayo sandwich paired with a pot of bircher muesli is a world away from the state banquets he once graced.
We hear one Labour newbie’s relations with his staff are distinctly frosty and winter isn’t yet upon us. Asking them to attend the party’s Liverpool conference, then making them pay for hotel rooms out of meagre wages, wasn’t the socialism they signed up to.
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[Further reading: Kemi Badenoch’s sarnie of destiny]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Emperor