So, Cluedo fans, who finished off Sue Gray? Was it Chris Mason in the BBC newsroom with the revelation her £170,000 salary topped that of the PM? Was it Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire in the Sunday Times with the exclusive that Gray’s close friend Waheed Alli had been given a No 10 pass after his work leading the election fundraising campaign? Or maybe it was Pogrund again, a short while later, when he exposed the PM had breached parliamentary rules by failing to declare Lord Alli’s frocks for Victoria Starmer. Maybe it was Sky News in its Westminster Accounts project, which showed Keir Starmer had pocketed the largest number of freebies and hospitality recorded of any MP since 2019 (a ...

No 10 isn’t working. That was the conclusion that despairing cabinet ministers drew when Labour assembled for its conference in Liverpool last month. The party’s supposed honeymoon period had been dominated by rows over “freebies” and winter fuel payment cuts, Keir Starmer’s approval ratings had plummeted and Downing Street itself was more and more dysfunctional. Starmer, senior Labour figures observed, had a capacity for ruthlessness. Would he exercise it once more? The Prime Minister himself has now answered that question. Starmer’s critics had hoped that he would reshape his No 10 team before Christmas. But angered by weeks of dismal headlines, he has acted much earlier than that. Sue Gray, Starmer’s chief of staff, has been ousted after just 94 days in ...

Keir Starmer’s first few months in office has not been a picture of cloudless stability - with a summer of riots, stories of infighting, and a shortly-won reputation for dreary spending cuts. And now, with the news that his chief of staff Sue Gray has resigned, the sense that this is a chaotic and poorly managed administration will hardly abate. Gray - who is taking on a new role as an “envoy for the regions and nations” - said in her resignation statement that it had “become clear to me that intense commentary around my position risked becoming a distraction to the government’s vital work of change.” Gray will be replaced by Morgan McSweeney, who moves in to run No 10 ...

There’s a particular type of column, upsettingly common in British newspapers over the past few years, that can be summarised thus: “As a supporter of the Conservative party, here’s what Labour should do next.” These have always baffled me. Compromising to appeal to swing voters is one thing, but why should a political party listen to those who outright want it to fail? All of which is a long way of saying there are very good reasons not to listen to me. Nonetheless, I am baffled that James Cleverly is not the clear favourite in the race for Tory leader. And I suspect this fact says rather a lot about the mess the party has got itself into. Cleverly has, to be ...

“Manchester is absolutely buzzing”, a recent visitor to the city told me. “I sat in a room with a group of senior business people and they were raving about Andy Burnham. How often does that happen with a politician?” Burnham, who has been mayor of Great Manchester since 2017, is the golden boy of British politics. He has taken what was a new office and turned it into what might be the centre of the most exciting democratic energy in the UK. Despite his limited powers, he has used his position to drive through changes that are boosting his city’s economy, its reputation and its sense of itself. It’s no wonder that a steady procession of politicians from across the country are ...

Earlier this week a colleague asked me about my baptism. I was 21, I answered, in my final year of university. It was all very non-ceremonious, in a birthing pool in a squeaky-floored church hall, and I wore – cringe – a Harry Potter T-shirt. Afterwards we helped ourselves to crisps and Shloer from a buffet table. No tighty-whities were involved. I mention tighty whities because last weekend Russell Brand posted a photograph to his social media channels of him baptising a man in a river wearing just that. Both Brand and the other man doing the dunking (whose ponytail and tattoos mark him out as the same man pictured baptising Brand along with Bear Grylls in April) stood mid-thigh in ...

James Cleverly has come out hard against Keir Starmer’s government, calling the decision to hand sovereignty of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean back to Mauritius “weak, weak, weak!” This is all very convenient for reminding MPs and Tory party members, who are in the midst of deciding who they want to be the next Conservative leader, of his credentials as a former foreign secretary. (He’s the only one out of the four current candidates to have held not just one but two of the four great offices of state – a fact he repeated at length during this week’s conference). It is slightly less convenient given that while he was holding that role, the UK announced that it would ...

What theme will define this autumn? No 10 knows what it wants the answer to be: investment.  As well as Kemi Badenoch’s decision to pick a fight with mothers and Robert Jenrick’s decision to pick a fight with the armed forces, aides were struck by how little attention this issue received at the Conservative conference. “They had no argument over the lack of investment that has left the UK unprepared for economic opportunities,” one told me. Strategists eye a potentially potent dividing line.  It’s one that was established by Rachel Reeves’s Labour conference speech in which she declared: “Growth is the challenge. And investment is the solution.” On this, No 10 and No 11 are aligned (a contrast with some previous administrations). ...