For Rachel Reeves, last week’s IMF gathering in Washington DC offered a reprieve from domestic woes. The Chancellor, who noted at the British Embassy that she is the second longest-serving G7 finance minister, enjoyed admiring comments from counterparts about the trade deals the UK has struck with the likes of India. Back at the Treasury, Reeves must contend with less welcome realities: government borrowing reached a five-year high in September of £20.2bn, a number that will feed into the OBR’s pre-Budget forecast (which the Chancellor received the second draft of yesterday). The final version, due on 21 November, five days before the Budget, will determine the size of the “black hole” that she must fill through tax rises and spending cuts ...

Jonathan Reynolds seems to have been in a good mood this week when he met with the four MPs who lost the Labour whip earlier this year. As the Hitch reported earlier, the chief whip scheduled meetings with each of the suspended MPs following conference recess. Rachael Maskell, Chris Hinchliff, Brian Leishman and Neil Duncan Jordan all lost the whip after the welfare rebellion in which they – alongside 43 of their colleagues – broke ranks to go out against the welfare bill. The exact reason why these four were rebuked remains unclear, however. Though none of the four have been readmitted yet, one source close to a rebel said the chief whip clearly wants all of them back in the party. ...

Ben Nunn is back in the fold. The Chancellor’s director of communications and strategy is heading back to Keir Starmer’s right hand to take on a senior strategic advisory role. Nunn was by Starmer’s side during the turbulent Corbyn years, working as his political adviser before graduating to director of communications for the PM’s leadership campaign and later executive director of comms for the Labour Party. Nunn was part of the Arlington Group – an informal set that included the PM and his chief aide Morgan McSweeney – who met at Jenny Chapman’s house with the aim of getting Starmer elected. He exited Starmer’s team in 2021 for a 22-month stint in the private sector before joining Rachel Reeves’s team in ...

There was a time when Labour was reluctant to utter a word of criticism against Brexit. The only reference to the subject in Keir Starmer’s 2024 conference speech came in a passage lamenting the Conservatives’ failures on immigration. The Prime Minister even appropriated the language of Dominic Cummings for social democratic ends, declaring that “taking back control is a Labour argument”. Fast forward to this year: Starmer praised the new trade deal with our “fellow Europeans” and assailed the “Brexit lies on the side of that bus”. That line felt like one of the most telling of the speech – this Remainer was now content to remind voters of his past (“that was me” were Starmer’s first words to a friend ...

On the afternoon of 5 September Lucy Powell was sat in her Manchester Central constituency office when she received a call from an unknown number. “Oh, this is me about to get the sack,” she told her aides, mindful that a cabinet reshuffle had just begun. Powell was right (it was the No 10 switchboard).  In the ensuing phone conversation with Keir Starmer, Powell asked several times why she had been removed from government, but the Prime Minister “couldn’t really offer a reason; he kept saying, ‘It’s nothing to do with you.’” The former leader of the House of Commons was more disappointed than surprised, believing that she had become “a target” for relaying MPs’ objections to the government’s welfare bill. ...

Kemi Badenoch’s advisers looked like they were walking on air after her conference speech in Manchester on Thursday. They went skipping out of the hall, spinning it as a great success. And it was successful in all the superficial ways: well-delivered to rapturous applause and with a properly big surprise announcement to close on with her pledge to abolish stamp duty, the tax on property sales above £125,000 (or £300,000 for first-time buyers). There was all that excited lobby talk of a narrative shift. Didn’t she speak so well? Perhaps things won’t turn out so bad for her after all, despite the months of terrible poll ratings and the spectre of a confidence vote. So have the Tories finally have found a solution ...

Andy Burnham is that rare thing at Conservative conference: a politician with power. “I’ll probably get a better reception here than I did last week,” he quipped at one of his three fringe appearances after a Labour conference where he often rivalled Nigel Farage as the principal target. One of Keir Starmer’s mottos as leader has been “country first, party second”. As befits an advocate of “Manchesterism”, Burnham emphasised that he was “place first rather than party first”, citing the support he had attracted from “traditional Conservatives” across three elections. The mayor was unambiguous about the place he blames for holding the country back: Westminster. “I have to spend part of every single working week in this job remaking the case for devolution ...

On the third day of Labour Party conference, right before Keir Starmer’s speech, Owen Jones, a Guardian columnist with more than a million X followers, found his press pass rescinded. In an email to him, the party cited concerns regarding “safeguard[ing]” because of “complaints we have received about your conduct”. He was in effect being accused of harassing MPs by asking them questions on camera, especially female MPs, including my favourite, and former boss, Emily Thornberry, who thought his way of questioning women had an “element of misogyny”. I disagree with the decision and think it will weaken Labour’s calls of cowardice if Reform one day decides to block mainstream media. It is also both a symptom and a cause of ...