Ed miliband

When Morgan McSweeney concluded his evidence on Tuesday to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee about the Mandelson affair, a senior Labour figure remarked: ‘What really did we learn from all this? That Keir made a bad decision, wants someone else to blame and didn’t really know what was going on in his own government. Fancy that!’ The fact that 14 Labour MPs voted to refer the Prime Minister to the Privileges Committee (the body which forced Boris Johnson from the political stage) – and a total of 53 recorded no vote in his defence – is far from a ringing endorsement of his leadership. But the significance of the Mandelson

Labour MPs who want Wes Streeting to be their leader have, apparently, one great fear. If their man triggers a contest, they are terrified it will lead to Ed Miliband entering the race to stop the Health Secretary – and coming out top. A Miliband premiership would, they worry, be the death of Labour. I’ve got news for them: we are already governed by Ed Miliband. This is now his administration. And they, and the rest of us, had better get used to it. Keir Starmer is no longer really in charge of this government – if he ever really was. He is Prime Minister in name only. His foreign

Is there any area of public policy which Keir Starmer’s government has got right? ‘Where very little is working, AI is a bright spot,’ says a former adviser. ‘They’ve started well but they are now in danger of blowing it.’ When Labour came to power they consigned much of the past 14 years of Tory rule to the dustbin. But Starmer poured resources into Rishi Sunak’s AI Security Institute and published an AI Opportunities action plan in January last year, declaring (very un-Starmerishly) that he wanted to ‘mainline AI into the veins’ of the economy. Last week an audit found that 75 per cent of the proposals had already been

With three weeks until the Budget, the main political parties have been setting out their economic thinking. Each faces the same bind: anaemic growth, fiscal constraints and uncomfortable exposure to the bond markets. The upshot is that there is less ‘clear blue water’ on the economy between Labour, the Conservatives and Reform. Even Sir Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, irritated some colleagues by appearing to suggest he would raise income tax if he were in Rachel Reeves’s shoes at his party’s conference. ‘It’s a good job no one is listening to us,’ jokes a fellow frontbencher. If the economy is less of a dividing line in British politics, what might

Home Andrew Gwynne was sacked as a health minister and suspended from the Labour party for making jokes about a constituent’s hoped-for death, and about Diane Abbott and Angela Rayner. Oliver Ryan, a member of the WhatsApp group where the jokes were shared, had the Labour whip removed and 11 councillors were suspended from the party. Asked about 16,913 of 28,564 medics registering to practise medicine in Britain last year having qualified abroad, Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, said there was ‘no doubt’ that ‘the NHS has become too reliant’ on immigration. The government issued guidance saying that anyone who enters Britain by means of a dangerous journey will normally

Electricity is magical stuff. From a couple of tiny holes in a wall comes an apparently endless supply of invisible, weightless, silent ether that turns instantly into light, heat, motion or information at your command. It is a metaphor for the modern economy: we use pure energy to create useful outcomes in the real world. We found out last week that Britain has now for the first time achieved top spot, among 25 nations, in terms of the price we pay for this supernatural ichor, for both domestic and industrial use. This is a disaster. Electricity prices have doubled in Britain since 2019. They are 46 per cent above the

Today’s pre-Budget Prime Minister’s Questions would probably have been unremarkable had it not been for a sudden change of cast. At the very last minute, it was announced that Sir Keir Starmer had tested positive for Covid and would be replaced in the chamber by a blast from his party’s past in the form of Ed Miliband.  Tory MPs were largely focused on ensuring that the session was as pointless as possible The former Labour leader joked that his return to this session was for one time only, before launching into a series of questions about the government’s preparation for the COP summit. He accused Boris Johnson of offering warm