The day started with some suggesting there was nothing to distinguish Rachel Reeves’s economic approach from that of Margaret Thatcher. It ended with Reeves outflanking not just Thatcher but New Labour from the left.  In her 8,000-word Mais Lecture, delivered last night at City University in London, the shadow chancellor offered her most explicit repudiation yet of the model pursued by Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s governments. Though she praised New Labour’s record on public service investment and poverty reduction, Reeves warned that the project failed to recognise that “globalisation and new technologies could widen as well as diminish inequality, disempower people as much as liberate them, displace as well as create good work”.  She added that the labour market “remained characterised ...

Few Prime Ministers produce such strong feelings that their passing provokes some people to celebrate. When Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, much praise for a transformative national leader followed, but so did an attempt to push a version of the Wizard of Oz song ‘Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead’ to the top of the charts. (It made number two.) In the Times, the journalist Caitlin Moran wrote that “all the cheap, unworthy, yet ultimately heartfelt jubilation” was an expression of “the simple astonishment and relief” of people who felt they had “survived something”. So, when news broke on 18 March that the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves was to make a speech – the annual Mais Lecture to City executives, no ...

The shadow cabinet, I gather, has been told to fashion its policy briefs into as many press releases, speeches, attack lines and titbits of repartee as possible. The aim is to create a stockpile for the long, slow march towards the election. Labour’s hope that it will be in May has morphed into a begrudging shrug that perhaps No 10 will play the long game. There is some concern that holding the party in a battle-ready crouch could produce burnout among officials and campaigners. Others in the party no longer see by-elections as opportunities to flex electoral muscles and test out attack lines, but a distraction from the 650 individual contests Labour must fight in the general election. Labour’s strategy makes ...

There are many problems for Vaughan Gething to deal with when he is sworn in as Welsh first minister later this week. The first is to bring the Welsh Labour Party together after a closely fought and bitter leadership election campaign. Gething does not have the luxury of a resounding mandate: he got 51.7 per cent, while his opponent Jeremy Miles got 48.3 per cent. There are still grumbles around a £200,000 donation Gething received from a company led by a man convicted of environmental offences. Accusations of a union “stitch-up” by Miles injected a level of distrust into the contest. Little wonder that the mood within the party is not one of rampant celebration. Then there are the policy issues. ...

One of Sadiq Khan’s proudest boasts is that he has never lost an election. “I’m a winner, I never lose,” he told his team when he entered the race to become Labour’s London mayoral candidate in 2015, recounting how he had won every contest he had fought since standing to be a school class rep at the age of 11. But as Khan seeks an unprecedented third term as mayor he is haunted by the spectre of defeat. He and his team privately fear that the London election on 2 May will be far closer than most believe – a message that Khan will reaffirm at his campaign launch with Keir Starmer today. At first this resembles classic expectation management – ...

If Rishi Sunak thought that ruling out a general election on 2 May would help soothe his fractious party, he will be sorely disappointed. Few people genuinely believed a May election was likely (though it suited Labour to talk it up). Sunak himself had essentially already ruled one out, telling reporters on 4 January that his “working assumption” was that an election would be held in the second half of this year. At the time, I wrote that this decision seemed both obvious and inevitable: “as long as the Tories continue to trail Labour in the polls by around 18 points, Sunak is not going to gamble on an election he seems almost certain to lose”. Since then, much has happened but ...

When Keir Starmer became leader he promised to make Labour’s internal investigations professional once more. This is the reason why Starmer says he cannot restore the whip to veteran left-winger Diane Abbott. He holds up his hands and argues he cannot interfere in an independent process. Abbott has been suspended for 11 months after she wrote a letter which suggested that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people did not experience racism. But pressure is building on the Labour leader to change course.That is because Abbott has been at the centre of politics this week. A Tory party donor, Frank Hester, said that she “should be shot”, unleashing a botched response from the Conservative Party and splits within the party. This has ...

There were no prizes for guessing the theme of today’s PMQs. After last night’s dangerously large Tory rebellion over amendments to the Rwanda bill, Keir Starmer had a brilliant opportunity to highlight the Conservatives’ fractures and Rishi Sunak’s rapidly depleting authority. And that is exactly what the Labour leader did. Starmer was clearly enjoying himself, starting by noting that the government had “lost contact with 85 per cent of the 5,000 people” due for deportation to Rwanda. “Has he found them yet?” he mockingly asked Sunak. Unsurprisingly, the answer was not yes. And the rest of Starmer’s questions followed the same pattern. Today was all about highlighting the government’s dysfunction and the stunning incompetencies surrounding the Rwanda scheme: the £400m already paid ...