Keir Starmer’s Downing Street was dysfunctional from its earliest days. Labour, senior figures often say, had a plan to win but not a plan to govern. Blame for this was attributed to Sue Gray, who resigned as Starmer’s chief of staff after just four months in office and whose tenure still “casts a long shadow” in the words of one government source.  No 10 has strived ever since to recover from this false start. As well as the appointment of Morgan McSweeney as Gray’s replacement, two Blair-era figures joined last November: Jonathan Powell as national security adviser and Liz Lloyd as director of policy delivery and innovation. In his memoir A Journey, Tony Blair writes of the latter that she brought ...

One of the most common yet most difficult political footballs for politicians to control is cronyism, as the government is currently finding out. Labour is scrambling to deal with the connections its preferred candidate to chair the new football regulator, David Kogan, has to the party. Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, has removed herself from the process of rubber-stamping Kogan’s approval to the post, after he revealed to a select committee of parliamentarians last month that he had donated to both Nandy and Keir Starmer’s respective Labour leadership bids in 2020. (Kogan said the contributions were “very small”; under current political donation rules, they did not need to be publicly declared.) Writing to explain her decision to watch Kogan from ...

It once looked like Keir Starmer was going to be a pro-growth prime minister. Alas. It seems increasingly obvious that the government isn’t committed enough to the reforms that are needed.  The problems run deep. Growth and productivity have been slow, nearly flat, since 2008. The housing shortage in London and the south-east is getting worse. Cambridge is an economic powerhouse thanks to scientific research. But planning rules means there is no spare laboratory space. We cannot build any. We produce far less energy than France, and it costs a lot more. Cities like Manchester ought to be flourishing, but productivity is far lower in British cities than in other countries. Outside London, we are sluggish. A hundred years ago, Birmingham was ...

Inside Labour there might not be a vacancy but there is always a contest. The government’s early unpopularity means this is even truer than usual. Over the past fortnight – via her leaked memo to Rachel Reeves – Angela Rayner’s alternative vision has become clearer. MPs believe both the Deputy PM and her more Blairite rival Wes Streeting are monitoring their support within the parliamentary party. But it is Andy Burnham who is most clearly positioning for a post-Starmer world. Critical interventions by the Greater Manchester mayor are hardly unheard of. During Keir Starmer’s difficult early years as Labour leader, Burnham regularly advertised himself as an alternative. His speech to the soft-left group Compass on Saturday afternoon (31 May), however, was ...

I think when Robert Jenrick closes his eyes he sees an X feed, a long scroll of posts from accounts called things like @Elizabethansexoffender and @Rhodesianringmaster. He’s far from the only senior Conservative for whom this is a problem, but this week he has taken the concerns of the online out of the cyberstew and into the real world: specifically, the London underground network. The Shadow Justice Secretary has gone vigilante, and has released a video of himself confronting fare-dodgers on TfL. “Excuse me, do you think it’s alright not to pay?” asks Jenrick, speaking to a figure whose face is a censored blur. “Seriously, why don’t you go back to the barrier and pay”, says the 43-year-old MP for ...

The Lanarkshire town of Hamilton occupies a special place in Scottish political folklore. It was there, in 1967, that the SNP candidate Winnie Ewing won a famous by-election. Hamilton had been a safe Labour seat for decades. No one predicted a defeat. It was the moment the Nats truly arrived on the scene, and it changed a nation’s politics forever. Hamilton may – just possibly, just perhaps – shock Scotland again next Thursday, when yet another by-election takes place there. This time it is for the Holyrood Parliament, which didn’t exist back in 1967, and the constituency is formally Hamilton, Stonehouse and Larkhall. This time the SNP is the incumbent. And it is not Labour that could snatch the seat away, ...

The National Liberal Club is a mausoleum. I refer not to the age or appearance of its patrons, but to an expired purpose. The Liberal Party was not only the most successful political movement of the 19th century, but defined an entire period of British politics, one which came to an end in the 1920s, when the current Labour-Conservative stranglehold established itself. Since then, the party’s name has lived on as part of the Liberal Democrats. But the “Liberal England” it represented has strangely died. So when Reform UK selected the club as the venue for its agenda-seizing press conference today, the symbolism was clear. Nigel Farage was making the sarcophagus of a fallen political movement into the rostrum for his ...

The Labour Party, Harold Wilson once observed, is “like a stagecoach. If you rattle along at great speed everybody is too exhilarated or seasick to cause any trouble. But if you stop, everybody gets out and argues about where to go next.” In some areas, at least, Labour is rattling along. Government officials point to three trade deals in two weeks as evidence of a more “agile” Britain on the world stage. But Keir Starmer’s direction has remained unclear – so everybody is arguing about where to go next.  A “reset” was what aggrieved MPs demanded after Labour’s election humbling: a U-turn on the winter fuel payment cuts, the loosening of Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules and higher taxes on the wealthy. When ...