There were some in Labour who never expected Louise Haigh to enter Keir Starmer’s cabinet. Both allies and sceptics questioned whether the soft-left 37-year-old – who nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership – would make it to the top table. That she did – becoming the youngest-ever female cabinet minister – was a reflection of the esteem in which Starmer held her. Haigh was deemed to have mastered her transport brief in opposition and so made the transition to government.  But this morning she became the first cabinet minister to resign from Starmer’s six-month-old administration. The trigger was a Sky News story which revealed that Haigh was convicted of fraud by misrepresentation in 2015 after wrongly reporting that her work ...

The Royal George Hotel in Perth has existed since 1773. Queen Victoria stayed there in 1848, and there are two lamps in the hotel fashioned from the bed she slept in. Since March this year, the Stone of Destiny, used in the coronation of ancient Scottish kings, has been on display 300 yards away. It is, therefore, a place of some historic note. This weekend, a different kind of history will occur, when the Royal George hosts Reform UK’s first-ever Scottish conference. The event, which only lasts four hours, is billed as featuring “Richard Tice MP and guests”. A few short years ago this might have created general amusement in the mainstream political class. No longer. The party is expecting between 200-300 ...

It’s been ten years since my brother took his own life. He waited for his wife to go away for a night and then threw himself down a flight of stone steps. When she returned the next morning she found him dead at the foot of the stairs. He was 60 years old and had recently become paralysed from the waist down as a result of kidney cancer. The coroner was unable to ascertain the cause of death or how long it had taken him to die. It was entirely possible that he had lain there for hours in the dark before he died. The family will never know and are haunted by his lonely death. His palliative care team phoned me ...

For reasons best known to myself, I decided to watch the first episode of Meet The Rees-Moggs not in the privacy of my own home, but with the crowd attending the official launch of the reality series at Warner Bros HQ in London (Warner is the owner of Discovery+, which is streaming the show). In a way, this was a mistake. At home, I would have been able to step away for minutes at a time, the better to despair and self-medicate. But on the plus side, maybe I’m just a little better prepared now for life in 21st-century Britain, a place in which some men will always be good chaps whatever they’ve done, and no one will ever have to go ...

Oxford in the 1980s was well-photographed, and as a consequence we have several contemporaneous images of a young William Hague. He went up to Magdalen College in 1979, to read (inevitably) Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Let it not be said he didn’t know how to have fun though: an image of him bopping in evening dress is now preserved forever. But the best is more sedate. Hague is at the Oxford Union, the university’s neo-gothic debating society, and looks it. Winged lapels; loose, thickly knotted bowtie; three shiny buttons on each flank of his tailcoat.   The two young men to either side of him look like standard Union apparatchiks, or “hacks” as they’re known. One, wide grin and swept hair; the ...

Liz Kendall, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has announced what the government is describing as the “biggest employment reforms in a generation” to address the fact that 9.25 million people in the UK are economically inactive. The reforms include a new National Jobs and Careers Services, changes to how apprenticeships are funded, an overhaul of the Jobcentre system, mental health support and other public health measures. Those last two measures are the key point, because while there are many parts of the employment system that need fixing – the Apprenticeship Levy, for example, has long been misused by some businesses to pay for things like management training courses – the most frightening thing about Britain’s labour market is the number of ...

More than two and a quarter million people have signed a petition calling for a general election. This doesn’t mean anything in real terms for Keir Starmer, but it is worthwhile to look at where these signatures are coming from: not population centres, nor cities but rural, shire England. Look at North Yorkshire on the map above – deep red. Look at Lincolnshire – the reddest it’ll ever be. Ditto Essex. There has been plenty of consternation at the verification process for the petition. The website asks you to provide a postcode to sign, but it doesn’t require any proof of address. So who is to say that the entire list of signatories isn’t just overrun with Americans inspired by Elon ...

Not every MP will have a strong view on social issues. Matters relating to the economy, public services and the country’s place in the world are more likely to motivate an aspiring politician. They will then join a party, made up of others who are broadly (sometimes very broadly) of the same mind set and values. That party then obtains most of its votes from those who are sympathetic to its values. Once in parliament, an MP can safely follow the party line, unless they actively choose to go their own way. Then along comes an issue such as assisted dying. It is unlikely that it is an issue that drew an individual MP into politics; it does not divide down ...