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Ann Clwyd, who has died aged 86, never held ministerial office or high office of any kind. Unless, of course, you count a stint as chair of the parliamentary Labour party, though that is more of a penance than a power trip. She did a few tours on the opposition front bench under Neil Kinnock, John Smith and, briefly, Tony Blair, but she was too independent-minded and probably not metro enough for a New Labour red box. That she was rebelling against the government a few months into its first term only confirmed that. Voting against an early Harriet Harman benefit cut, designed to force single parents into the labour market, Clwyd pointed out there were ‘about 1,500 single parents and only 200 jobs available’ in her Cynon Valley constituency.

What do you do when you’re in a hole? Stop digging. Apparently Emily Thornberry didn’t get the memo. The Shadow Attorney General was wheeled out on the Easter Monday media round to defend Labour’s attack advert which claims that Rishi Sunak isn’t tough enough on criminals convicted of child sexual abuse. Thornberry did her best to sound authoritative and lawyerly but came unstuck multiple times during her seven-minute grilling on Radio 4’s Today programme. After allowing Thornberry to sound off on the importance of overhauling the sentencing guidelines on child sexual abuse, host Justin Webb asked her about Sir Keir Starmer’s own role in drawing them up.

Today Kwasi Kwarteng attempted to calm concerns in his party over the fallout from the not-so-mini Budget – telling MPs: 'We are one team and need to remain focused'.  That message is likely to face some resistance after the latest polling. Tonight the Times has published a new YouGov poll which gives Labour a 33-point lead. Yes, you read that right. It is thought to be the largest poll lead enjoyed by a political party since the late 1990s. It comes after a poll earlier this week gave Labour a 17-point lead. According to the survey, just 37 per cent of 2019 Conservative voters would stick with the party were an election held now. Labour's poll lead is so large that you can expect more talk of letters going in and questions about her longevity in No.

Wednesday morning at Labour conference is back to being the graveyard shift, with the delegates who are still there nursing hangovers and sharing videos of the speakers on the stage doing karaoke the night before. But this morning's session covered two of the most important public services from two of the party's rising stars – Wes Streeting and Bridget Phillipson. Streeting was in the gravest of the graveyard slots this morning Streeting is everywhere (including in the karaoke videos), and some of his colleagues are a bit irritated that he seems to have been anointed as the next Labour leader. Phillipson, though, is the one to watch because she unnerves the Conservatives and is applauded for being tough in her education brief.

Is nationalisation the vote-winner which Keir Starmer believes it to be? We will find out in due course, but my hunch is that the British public as a whole care a lot less about who owns the train carriages they ride in and the power stations which generate their electricity than Labour MPs do.  No one who remembers British Rail will be under any illusions that public ownership is a panacea What they care about rather more, surely, is whether their trains arrive on time and whether their lights stay on. No one who remembers British Rail will be under any illusions that public ownership is a panacea for a functioning railway, and neither will anyone who remembers the three-day week be fooled into thinking a public-owned power industry guarantees keeping the lights on.

Tonight’s YouGov poll in the Times is brilliant news for Keir Starmer ahead of his conference speech tomorrow. It has Labour 17 points ahead, its biggest lead since the company started polling in 2001. These numbers, following the market reaction to the statement, are an awful start To be sure, the numbers reflect more voter disappointment with the government than a sudden bout of Starmer mania. Some 68 per cent of voters said the government was managing the economy badly. Only 12 per cent thought the ‘mini-Budget’ is affordable. Just 19 per cent said it was fair, against 57 per cent who thought it was not fair. And 69 per cent of those who voted Tory in 2019 opposed the scrapping of the 45p tax rate.

Keir Starmer tonight told the weekly parliamentary Labour party meeting that 'we will never underestimate Liz Truss'. The Labour leader added that 'she is a talented politician who has got to the top through hard work and determination' and that 'she will do whatever it takes to keep them in power'. He warned that 'the polls might tighten and her plans might create some buzz'. It was a reminder to the party, which often struggles to accept female Tory leaders, not to fall into the trap of mocking Truss or feasting too much on the Tory civil war. How will Labour approach the new PM? Starmer will be asking her questions on Wednesday at her first Prime Minister's Questions, and will have spent the past few weeks working on his strategy for that.

Sam Tarry, who joined today’s picket line at Euston and gave various interviews from there, has been sacked from the Labour shadow transport team and the front bench. However, Tarry has not been sacked for being on the picket line, but for making unauthorised media appearances. Labour’s line is that this isn't about appearing on a picket line. Members of the frontbench sign up to collective responsibility. That includes media appearances being approved and speaking to agreed frontbench positions.  This morning, Tarry implied that rail workers would not have gone on strike under a Labour government as they would have been offered a more generous pay deal. Given that Tarry is a close ally of Angela Rayner, his sacking will cause comment.

I’m not sure that the Conservative party wants to win elections. Tom Tugendhat was knocked out of the leadership contest on Monday, and Liz Truss is now the bookies’ favourite to be the next Prime Minister. Any party that thinks the latter beats the former cannot say it is serious. There are several reasons for Conservatives to ignore me on this topic. First, I’m not a Conservative. Second, Tugendhat and I are friends. Third, I take a view of party politics that seems to be utterly out of fashion these days. That view is that politics works better when parties try to win the other side’s votes. When Conservatives pursue Labour voters, the worst bits of right-wing conservatism are muted. When Labour woos Tory supporters, the worst bits of the left are sidelined.

That was quite a debate. I’ve never seen senior Tory ministers and MPs lay into each other so publicly.  Rishi Sunak accused Liz Truss and Penny Mordaunt of being socialists – not a compliment in the Tory lexicon – for being reckless with the public finances. Truss attacked Sunak for raising taxes to record levels. Kemi Badenoch called for unity while attacking more or less everyone for everything. Mordaunt seethed at what she saw as the cheap personal attacks she’s faced in recent days, especially over the trans debate. Tom Tugendhat attacked everyone else for being current or recent members of Boris Johnson’s government.

‘The candidates fighting to replace Boris Johnson as Conservative party leader and Britain’s prime minister reflect the country’s rich diversity,’ the England-hating New York Times put it earlier this week, through gritted teeth, ‘with six having recent ancestors hailing from outside Europe.’  It might seem initially curious that it’s the Conservatives who are so ethnically diverse. In British politics the realignment over Brexit caused identity to replace economics as the crunch issue, so that the gap between Labour and Tory voters on the issues of immigration and diversity has significantly grown, even if immigration’s salience has declined and remains low.

Yesterday’s Times carried a report that will only add to Sir Keir Starmer’s troubles. It quoted several members of the shadow ministerial team suggesting that Starmer is dull and unimpressive.That will only sharpen the perception, held by quite a few Westminster people, that the Labour leader isn’t doing as well as he should be, given the government’s weaknesses and failings. ‘Keir Starmer is not dragging his party down but he's not transforming its fortunes either’. That was the conclusion of a New Statesman analysis a few weeks ago, and probably a fair one. The problem for Starmer is the fact that Labour needs that transformation. One of the most overlooked facts of political life is just how badly Labour did in 2019.

Silence. That is what we heard during Gloria de Piero’s recent focus group which she held for her GB News show in her old constituency of Ashfield, one of many Red Wall seats that fell to the Conservatives in 2019. Most participants had been Labour voters up to that election but felt the party had somehow let them down and ceased to represent the working class, especially with Jeremy Corbyn as leader. De Piero found them most talkative about how Boris Johnson had once appeared to be a different kind of politician, one whose promises they had believed but who they now felt had let them down, thanks to partygate. But when the former Labour MP asked her focus group about Keir Starmer there was, for what seemed an age, silence.

Boris Johnson is running out of time to produce things the Tories can show the voters at the next election. The theme of his Queen's Speech – if there was one – was an attempt to fix that. That next election campaign was countered by Keir Starmer in the chamber this afternoon. The main focus was on the cost-of-living crisis and how much worse things are going to get. Funnily enough, Starmer didn't mention the members of the government who'd broken Covid rules The Labour leader repeatedly accused this government of not being 'up to the challenge', with the Tories producing only a 'thin address bereft of ideas or purpose, without a guiding principle or a roadmap for delivery'.

‘A new dawn has broken has it not?’, asked Tony Blair as the sun first blinked over London’s South Bank on the early morning of 2 May 1997. Blair was addressing a crowd of supporters following Labour’s first general election victory since 1974, an election that saw the party win 43.2 per cent of votes cast and achieve its biggest ever Commons majority, even bigger than Clement Attlee’s in 1945. It was a victory that laid the foundations for an unprecedented 13 years of Labour government. After this year’s local elections nobody in the Labour party is talking about a new dawn. In reality, the results are nowhere near good enough for Keir Starmer to credibly make this claim.

The narrative around the 2022 local elections looks something like this at present: Labour is strengthening their vote share in London, even taking former Tory citadels like Wandsworth and Westminster. Yet they are doing less well outside of the capital, where there is growth from the Corbyn era but it’s looking much smaller than they had hoped. If similar dynamics continue, the next general election is going to be close, probably hung parliament territory. This makes the Lib Dem performance interesting. If the next general election is as close as today’s result, then a few seats here and there can make all of the difference to who gets to be Prime Minister. Crucially, the Tories need a majority while Labour does not.

Oh, those rotten Tories. You've got a PM being fined for parties, a Home Secretary making a mess of our borders and a Culture Secretary who can't even spell the name of the Channel 4 star she's berating. Sleaze is rife, inflation is back: it's like the nineties without the hope. What could be worse? Well, there's always the Labour party.  Jeremy Corbyn may be gone but Sir Keir Starmer's barmy army is still stuffed with socialists of the hard-of-thinking variety. Richard Burgon is banished to the backbenches but there's always good old David Lammy, the ardent Europhile handpicked by Starmer to shadow Her Majesty's principal secretary of state for foreign and Commonwealth affairs.

Who's out to get Rishi? That's the question allies of the Chancellor are asking after a week of revelations about the Richmond MP. They include the non-domiciled tax status of his wife, Akshata Murthy, Sunak's decision to hold a US green card and pay tax in America for his first 18 months in No. 11 and his own alleged links to tax havens. There have also been leaks over briefing battles, including the Treasury's opposition to insulating homes in the energy strategy and a proposal to double the energy rebate. The timing of such stories – coinciding with Boris Johnson emerging from the darkest period of his premiership – has raised suspicions about Johnson loyalists seeking revenge for Sunak's lukewarm support during partygate.

Given the Tories' current woes with everything from parties to ferries, surely now is the chance for the long-awaited Labour revival? Keir Starmer has been talking a good game recently but polls still show the two main parties in close contention. To aid his chances in the upcoming local elections, the Labour leader has unveiled a new slogan: 'On your side' – a battlecry that will echo down the ages like Ed Miliband's 'Better Plan for a Better Future' and Gordon Brown's 'A future fair for all.' Reading the latest PR speak from party HQ, Mr S was struck by a sudden realisation. For Keir Starmer's latest effort appears to be the sixth separate slogan championed by the Labour leader since his election less than two years ago.

Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t want to talk about penises. He’s going to have to do it anyway, and he’s not going to be alone. The Labour leader was interviewed by LBC’s Nick Ferrari on Monday, becoming the latest journalist to test Starmer on questions of sex and gender. Ferrari asked, can a woman have a penis? Starmer’s verbatim response, offered with a pained expression and sorrowful intonation: Nick, I’m not… I don’t think we can conduct this debate with… you know… I just... I don’t think, erm, discussing this issue in this issue helps anyone in the long run. What I want to see is a reform of the law as it is, but I am also an advocate of safe spaces for women.

Rishi Sunak – Brexit vote and Ukraine resistance 'are not analogous' The Chancellor was in the TV studios this morning, ahead of the Spring Statement that he will deliver on Wednesday. Economic issues, like much else, have been cast into the shadows over recent weeks as the spotlight has inevitably focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Even today was no exception, as in his interview with the BBC's Sophie Raworth, Rishi Sunak was first asked to address a stir caused by the Prime Minister’s remarks at the Conservative’s spring conference yesterday in Blackpool: https://twitter.com/BBCPolitics/status/1505486969094168581?

With the BAFTAs last Sunday and the Oscars next week, film award season is well underway. And while it's too late for new entries this year, Mr S hears of a dark horse for next year's competitions. Step forward, Labour's Barry Gardiner, who is the unlikely star of a documentary about his recent private members' bill to ban 'fire and rehire' practices. Gardiner, Jeremy Corbyn's colourful shadow trade secretary, ran a series of eye-catching stunts to raise publicity for the campaign, including gatecrashing the 1922 drinks at Tory party conference: a move that prompted frenzied speculation of an imminent defection. His efforts to change the law might have been unsuccessful but at least they have been captured for posterity.

Sir Keir Starmer's interpretation of the Equality Act has caused something of a stir. The Labour leader cited the Brown-era legislation to support his assertion that 'trans women are women' and that this 'happens to be the law in the United Kingdom'. This reading of the Act has drawn criticism from gender-critical feminists, including the trans writer Debbie Hayton, who states: If Keir Starmer thinks that I am a woman, I am delighted to tell him the truth. Transwomen (like me) are male, while women (like my wife) are female. Biology does not lie, male is not female, and therefore transwomen are not women. For all my many other sins, I am not a lawyer.

Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer had one thing in common at PMQs: they were both keen to talk about the escalating situation in Ukraine. While the Prime Minister wants to use the crisis to show there are more important issues than parties, the Labour leader views it as an opportunity to put some clear blue water between himself and his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.  Starmer is using the Ukraine situation this week to emphasise Labour’s return to the centre His call at Prime Minister’s Questions to ban Russia Today has already received some criticism from figures on the left and right of the party who believe it would be self-defeating.

So that’s that then. After years of claims and counter-claims, Prince Andrew has settled with Virginia Giuffre for an eight-figure sum thought to be in the region of £12 million. This, for a woman he said he had never met. Hmm.  The humiliation for the disgraced royal isn’t over yet though: self-promoting Corbynista Rachel Maskell, the MP for York Central, has been quick today to demand his title as Duke of York be removed to avoid offence to the good people of God’s own county. And it seems that Labour backbenchers aren’t the only critics to whom Andrew is giving succour. For pressure group Republic, which campaigns for the abolition of the monarchy, has seen an uptick in its fortunes in recent weeks.

Not for the first time in her political career, Diane Abbott is getting a lot of flak online. She’s being trolled, heckled and denounced as an enemy of the United Kingdom. Only this time Ms Abbott is being hauled over the coals not for saying something silly, but for saying something sensible. Something true. Something fundamentally correct. Namely, that Nato bears a great deal of responsibility for the current crisis in Ukraine. Browsing the Abbott-bashing headlines you could be forgiven for thinking she had upped sticks, flown to Moscow, and sworn lifelong allegiance to Vladimir Putin. ‘Diane Abbott backs Russia!’, says the Express.