Politics

Charlie Taylor, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, has published his first annual report since Labour took office. It will make grim, embarrassing reading for the government. The report shows that despite a year of efforts to control drugs, violence and crime in prison, our jails have become even worse under Labour. The report says they found that ‘in many jails, there were seemingly uncontrolled levels of criminality that hard-pressed and often inexperienced staff were unable to contain’. Even in open jails like HMP Kirkham, whose former governor was recently jailed for a relationship with an inmate, ‘drugs had become a major problem with inspectors regularly smelling cannabis as they walked

Today’s Urgent Question in the House of Commons about the state of the economy was dominated by two people who weren’t there: Liz Truss and Rachel Reeves. One wouldn’t expect Truss to be present; after all she lost her seat last year and is presumably busy on some important project elsewhere. Perhaps working on her list of ‘people who destroyed me’ – always just missing the most important name on it. The problem is that Sir Keir is now even less popular than Truss was at her nadir Truss is constantly invoked by Labour and today was no different. This is presumably in a crude attempt at subliminal messaging to

What a week it has been in British politics. After the welfare rebellion on Tuesday and then the shambles of PMQs on Wednesday, life in CCHQ must now seem a little easier. This week, it was the turn of Kemi Badenoch to address the Conservative Group dinner at the Local Government Association annual conference. And the Tory leader delivered a rather risqué line about Reform, according to a recording sent to Mr S. Badenoch told her audience on Wednesday that: Sometimes it’s really challenging when we have opponents to the left and the right of us promising people things that we know that they can never do. And a man