James Heale

The Tories are stepping up their seat selections, amid increased speculation that a new Prime Minister will mean an early election. Kemi Badenoch has talked extensively about the importance of attracting good quality candidates as she bids to show that the party has changed under her leadership. The selection process has been overhauled, with the Tories boasting that more than 2,000 people have now applied. One of those is Grant Shapps, the former Home Secretary. Such is his enthusiasm to stand that he co-founded the Conservatives Together organisation in 2024, to ‘provide the training and resources needed to help rebuild the party.’ Shapps though is understood to have not passed the selection process, according to multiple party sources.

Nigel Farage has always been keen to emphasise his status as a global figure. Whether it is his friendships with America's Donald Trump or Australia's Pauline Hanson, the Reform UK leader likes to see himself as part of a wave of 'new right' figures across the globe, championing national sovereignty and borders. One of those he has forged ties with is Jordan Bardella, President of the National Rally in France. Marine Le Pen, the RN party leader, is currently polling as the favourite for next May's presidential election: if elected, Bardella will serve as her Prime Minister. Farage had lunch with the young Frenchman last December, discussing plans to stop small boats crossing the Channel. Since then, the relationship only seems to have deepened.

Tomorrow, Andy Burnham will become Britain’s 59th Prime Minister. The team around him has been strikingly circumspect when it comes to setting out his plans. But this weekend we are starting to get some smoke signals via the Sunday papers. The new PM will back licences for drilling at the Rosebank and Jackdaw gas fields. Thames Water, Britain’s largest water supplier, is likely to be placed in special measures over £18bn owed to creditors. Plans for digital ID and the abolition of jury trials will be scrapped, with the post of AI minister upgraded to cabinet rank. Around a third of the cabinet are expected to be sacked and the Departments for Business and Technology overhauled too.

No one quite yet knows what Andy Burnham will be like as Prime Minister. But a preview of the coming Tory critique is offered by Neil O’Brien, the man tasked with co-ordinating the Conservative Party’s policy offering. ‘He's tended to go with the soft left all the time, WASPI women, always the sort of easy answers’, he says. ‘I just don't see any fundamental reconsideration of the big choices that got us into this mess.’ Burnham might be ‘more deft’ than his predecessor – but there is little sign he is willing to countenance ‘some big break with Starmerism’ on Britain’s economic woes. An Opposition criticising the government is nothing new. O’Brien, though, is refreshingly willing to hold his own party to account.

It was Napoleon who said that ‘To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty.’ Nigel Farage is nothing if not a man of the 1980s. Big ambitions, loud suits, indoor smoking: for him, the greatest year to have been alive was 1988, the high noon of Nigel Lawson’s tax-cutting zeal. Farage was a City trader whose thinking remains defined by that era of Thatcherism: of buccaneering Britain and primary colours politics. ‘Everyone around him was doing well’, says one friend ‘and then he spent the next two decades discovering that it was not the case for the rest of the country’. One person who recalls that era less fondly than Nigel Farage is Andy Burnham One person who recalls that era less fondly is Andy Burnham.

On the terrace of parliament, only two stories dominate this evening. The first is the end of Keir Starmer, who this lunchtime faced Prime Minister’s Questions for the final time. The second, much more exciting event, is England versus Argentina in the World Cup semi-final tonight. It was only appropriate, therefore, that Starmer’s successor, Andy Burnham, has sought to tie the two together in one of the few interviews he has given prior to entering No. 10. Since a poor performance on Newsnight during the Makerfield by-election, Burnham has sat down for only one full-length broadcast grilling – despite being about to take over the nuclear codes for a G7 country.