As I paraded round parties to celebrate the New Year, I looked the part. Badly tied bowtie, stained shirt, bulging tweed waistcoat, faint  scent of cigarillo – an editor-at-large, large as life, notebook to hand. “In groups of five or six/They spoke of Wegovy, and politics.” We seem still in a midwinter stasis – kicking heels, draining drinks, waiting for the Labour coup that never comes. And there’s too much of who, not yet enough of what. If the party is really to oust Keir Starmer because of his epic unpopularity – even assuming he can be replaced with a more eloquent new leader – what happens to economic policy; to relations with Trump after the Venezuela strikes; to Britain and ...

It’s not just Keir Starmer who is staring down the barrel of a sudden and undignified end to his leadership. Anas Sarwar, his close ally and leader of Scottish Labour, also faces questions about his future. North of the border, Labour has sunk to third place in the polls, behind the SNP and Reform. With six months to go until the Holyrood election, the party is nowhere near where it needs to be if it is to oust the Nats from Bute House. Concerns are growing among senior figures that Labour’s ambitions might be done for, even before the campaign has a chance to get properly underway. It’s impossible not to feel for Sarwar. Most of his problems are not of his ...

In her upcoming Budget, Rachel Reeves is rumoured to be planning a revision of council tax as part of a wide swathe of tax rises. Owners of expensive houses could be asked to pay thousands more, with the plan estimated to raise around £4bn a year. For decades, governments have shied away from reforming council tax, wary of a backlash from those affected. It has never seemed to be worth the political capital it would cost. Now, though, our desperate Chancellor seems likely to take the risk. It’s about time Scotland’s leaders did the same. They are certainly talking the talk. Last month, finance secretary Shona Robison published a consultation on reforming council tax. On the back of a paper by ...

Katie Lam has been increasingly talked of as a future leader of the Conservative Party, but her elevation might happen much sooner than expected. The Pygge can reveal that on 25 October, a new domain name was registered on the world wide web with the curious title LamForLeader.com, along with three other host names. Who might have done that? A spokesperson for Lam told the Pygge: “This has nothing to do with Katie or any member of her team.” There may be an innocent explanation for all this. Perhaps an enterprising individual who has been reading the papers decided to register the domain with the intention of selling it to Lam’s team in the event of a future leadership race? Rishi Sunak’s campaign site, ...

A year ago, Paul Johnson, the then head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, told me that Labour “might get lucky” on growth. “I think we are finally escaping the long shadow of the financial crisis; we forget just how big a shadow that’s cast across all economies, ours more than most,” he said. Rachel Reeves, her advisers reflect, has not been lucky. The Office for Budget Responsibility, despite its gloomy reputation, has long erred on the side of optimism. As if waiting for Godot, it has continually forecast an improvement in productivity growth that has never come. Now it is calling time. To coincide with the Budget, the OBR will downgrade anticipated growth by around 0.3 per cent, imposing a £21bn penalty on Reeves. ...

The Caerphilly by-election was, at its heart, about local people seeing the danger of the forces of the populist right and bravely telling them where to get off. Ordinary decency stood up to aggressive populism. There is hope for the future yet. Though of course there is the small matter that the Labour Party took a drubbing, and I, at this time, am a Labour Party candidate for the Senedd (Welsh Parliament) next year in neighbouring Newport and Islwyn (Islwyn is part of the same Caerphilly Council area as the Caerphilly by-election.) I should, by any measure, be petrified that the long hours, and years, of hard work could all be for nothing. A wasted effort and historic defeat beckon. Yet I ...

For more than a century, Labour has been hegemonic in Wales, its run of victories surpassing that of any other force in the democratic world. Yet when the Caerphilly by-election result was announced this morning there were some inside the party relieved to have kept their deposit. That gives you some sense of the scale of Labour’s humbling. In the Senedd contest, won by the nationalist Plaid Cymru, its vote plummeted to just 11 per cent (from 45.9 per cent). Labour lost here for many of the same reasons that it is trailing across the UK: a belief that a party that promised change has amounted to more of the same; enduring anger over the winter fuel payment cuts (often raised by voters) ...

Back in 2005, while still a human rights lawyer, Keir Starmer told a documentary: “I got made a Queen’s Counsel, which is odd since I often used to propose the abolition of the monarchy”. Starmer abandoned his youthful republicanism long ago – the past tense was the clue in that line – and today sits in the pro-monarchy tradition of Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan and Clement Attlee (who argued that there is “far less danger under a constitutional monarchy of being carried away by a Hitler, a Mussolini or even a de Gaulle”). Indeed, one of the mostly unwritten stories of Labour’s first year in office is how smooth the relationship between No 10 and the palace has been. As the global ...