James Heale

The changing nature of political power was neatly demonstrated in Westminster yesterday. In the House of Lords, members debated Labour's plans to purge parliament of its hereditary peers. Yet down the corridor in the Commons, that same principle seems alive and well. Ten Labour MPs are descended from former members, including scions of the Benn, Kinnock and Chamberlain families. The trend is certainly a cross-party one: a tenth of all Conservative MPs have had family members serve as Honourable Members. They include Victoria Atkins, Andrew Mitchell, Jerome Mayhew and Bernard Jenkin, whose fathers served as ministers under Mrs Thatcher. But the shift between the last parliament and this is the number of ministers whose spouses are directly involved in politics themselves.

There has been much focus in recent weeks on Reform's potential impact on British politics. But a rival quintet of insurgents has been quietly making their own plans too. In July, four independents were elected to parliament on a staunchly pro-Palestine ticket: Shockat Adam in Leicester South, Ayoub Khan who took Birmingham Perry Barr, Adnan Hussain won Blackburn and Iqbal Mohamed, victorious in Dewsbury and Batley. They have since formed an 'Independent Alliance' with Jeremy Corbyn, who stormed back in Islington North, and are referred to as 'the Gaza five.'Supporters are now understood to be stepping up their efforts to strengthen ties between members of the group.

Nigel Farage is not generally seen as one of nature's diplomats. Yet the Reform leader is proving to be a formidable force in the international arena. This is most obvious in matters of transatlantic interest, with Donald Trump's return offering Farage the chance to try and derail Labour's Chagos Islands deal. But last week showed a different side to the Clacton MP on a sensitive overseas matter. On Tuesday, Farage met with Mandy Damari, the mother of the last remaining British captive in Gaza. Her 28-year-old daughter Emily was kidnapped on October 7 last year and has now been a hostage for 430 days. The pair were hosted in one of the Commons committee rooms, with Farage subsequently a video of support calling on David Lammy to do more for her.

After 14 years in opposition, you might have expected Labour to come into government bursting with plans for Britain. Yet the first four months of the Starmer supremacy have seen ministers commission a glut of various reviews, consultations and task forces about what they should actually do in office. Helpfully, Sky News has compiled a running tally of these. Their current figure is 61 in less than 150 days: a rate of one every two-and-a-half days. The obvious risk is ‘paralysis by analysis’. Under Yvette Cooper, the Home Office has commissioned seven reviews on police and fire fighter pensions, knife sales, ninja swords, police prosecutions, family visas and counter-extremism.

In recent years, Labour has made great political hay out of allegations of rule-breaking. The party was never slow to criticise Boris Johnson's government for breaches of lockdown, with Sir Keir keen to depict himself as 'Mr Rules.' So it is sub-optimal, to say the least, that a senior minister has tonight admitted pleading guilty to an offence connected with misleading the police while she was a parliamentary candidate. Louise Haigh, the Transport Secretary, appeared at Camberwell Green Magistrates' Court six months before the 2015 general election, after making a false report to officers that her mobile phone had been stolen. Haigh claimed that she was 'mugged while on a night out' in 2013 and then reported the incident to the police.