James Heale

Machinery of government is not the sexiest of subjects – but it is a useful way of signalling a politician's priorities. Rishi Sunak used his first reshuffle to rebrand the 'Department for Energy Security' and create a new ministry for science. Boris Johnson invented the Department for Levelling Up; Jeremy Corbyn proposed a 'Minister for Peace.' Now, Nigel Farage has floated his own changes to the Whitehall machine, with the creation of a new ministry for deportations. At a Dover press conference this morning, the Reform leader declared that: We will demand a minister for deportations. It will be part of the Home Office but it will be a separate department within it.

Robert Jenrick just cannot stay out of the headlines. Today, the shadow justice secretary is under-fire for comments made to UCL students last month in which critics claim he endorsed a potential Tory-Reform ‘coalition’. In remarks first reported by Sky News, Jenrick said that: [Reform UK] continues to do well in the polls. And my worry is that they become a kind of permanent or semi-permanent fixture on the British political scene. And if that is the case, and I say, I am trying to do everything I can to stop that being the case, then life becomes a lot harder for us, because the right is not united... I want the fight to be united. And so, one way or another, I'm determined to do that and to bring this coalition together and make sure we unite as a nation as well.

It is the eternal question for UK policymakers: America or Europe? For the past nine months, Keir Starmer has sought to follow his 17 post-war predecessors in maintaining an uneasy balancing act between the two. But the Prime Minister’s tricky task has been made even more difficult by Donald Trump’s return to the White House. The President is a lifelong Eurosceptic, declaring in February that ‘the European Union was formed in order to screw the United States’. In his second term Trump is demonstrating even more hostility towards the EU than before. His administration has shown little interest in maintaining close Atlantic ties, citing grievances on trade and defence expenditure. That leaves Labour with a choice. Does it go all in on a UK-US trade deal?

In truth, there was little that was new in Nigel Farage’s speech today. For more than a decade, he has positioned himself as commander of the ‘people’s army’, fearlessly ‘parking our tanks on Labour’s lawn.’ First, it was Ukip, then it was the Brexit party. Now, his chosen vehicle to crush the establishment is Reform. All the greatest hits were played at today’s party rally: taxes are too high, migration is out of control and working class strongholds have effectively been abandoned. His Durham members lapped it up appreciatively, buoyed by a week in which Reform outflanked the government on British Steel. But while the songbook was familiar, Farage offered some new remixes too.

It is a tough life these days being a member of the Welsh Conservatives. The party lost every Westminster seat in July and now have barely a hundred councillors across the country. In December, the fractious parliamentary party voted by nine votes to seven to retain leader Andrew RT Davies; he quit regardless, prompting his replacement by Darren Millar. He looks to be taking his party to a distant fourth place in the newly-expanded Senedd next year, with polls suggesting that the Conservatives will finish ten points behind Reform. Now, today, a fresh blow has hit Millar’s party. Among those who have been charged by the Gambling Commission in last summer’s ‘betgate’ scandal are three senior Welsh Conservatives.

In the end, it was David Davis who said it best. Today’s emergency debate on how to save British Steel’s Scunthorpe plant amounted to a ‘nationalisation in all but name Bill’, with new measures amounting to a ‘reprieve, not a rescue’. Jonathan Reynolds, the Business Secretary, did a decent job of affecting reluctance at the sweeping powers being handed to him to order Chinese owners Jingye to buy the raw materials to keep the plant’s two blast furnaces going. ‘I do not want these powers any minute longer than is necessary, but I do need these powers to rectify and save this situation’, he told the House. But, in the key admission of today’s debate, Reynolds told MPs that nationalisation remains ‘the likely option’ in the long term.