James Heale

Kemi Badenoch was in an upbeat mood when she addressed her troops last week. ‘This time last year,’ she said to the 1922 Committee, ‘people told me Jenrick was taking over the party, Starmer was steady, Farage would be the next prime minister. A year later, Rob is under police investigation, Starmer has resigned and Farage is not even an MP.’ It was a reminder of how quickly the wheel of politics can turn. Now the arrival of Andy Burnham has reset Westminster. The cabinet has been re-orientated towards Birmingham and the north. Members of the Co-Operative party – the standard-bearers of Labour’s collectivist tradition – have been given the business, energy and education briefs. Mutualism, more than Manchesterism, could define the new government. In his first speech at No.

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.

The investigation into Ann Widdecombe’s death continues to astound. Counter terrorism police have now taken the lead on the probe after ‘new information and evidence’ came to light. A 28-year-old man arrested on suspicion of murdering the former MP remains in custody and has been re-arrested on suspicion of commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism. ‘We are pursuing multiple lines of enquiry to establish the motivation for this attack’, said Laurence Taylor, the Head of National Counter Terrorism Policing. Today’s statement completely contradicts the claims of Devon and Cornwall Police who said yesterday that counter-terrorism partners had reviewed the case and ruled out a terrorist motive.