Michael Simmons

One of the things wrong with Britain is our inability to say no to campaign groups once they win a hearing on the One Show. One rare exception to that has been Starmer’s cabinet standing up to Women Against State Pension Inequality (Waspi) – the least deserving compensation group in the history of these isles. At the beginning of this year, Welfare Secretary Pat McFadden recommitted the government to the decision to refuse compensation to the 3.6 million women born in the 1950s who claimed not to have been informed that their state pension age would rise to bring it into line with the male retirement age. McFadden was right to make that decision because the claim is beyond baseless.

The final tranche of the Mandelson files was released this afternoon – though no thanks to Lord Mandelson. A Cabinet Office note released alongside the 1,500 pages of documents covering Mandelson’s time as our man in Washington said that messages held on his personal phone would not be handed over. As this was not a statutory inquiry, the Cabinet Office concluded it ‘has no further recourse to search the personal devices of Peter Mandelson’. What they do have, though, are messages between Mandelson and members of the government who have had no choice but to comply. For those hoping for explosions, this particular minesweeper has not – at the time of writing – found much.

Having said she would make no further comment on the imprisonment of her husband, Nicola Sturgeon’s lawyer has issued two further statements on her behalf. Aamer Anwar – a sort of Better Call McSaul – is an odd choice to represent a former first minister who wants to be left alone, given that he’s perhaps the most limelight hungry lawyer in Scotland, if not all of Britain.  His latest utterance on behalf of his client addresses the claim that Sturgeon should have clocked her husband’s embezzlement through her oversight of the SNP’s accounts. Even if she had no idea what he was up to in the marital home, so the argument goes, she should have at least spotted the discrepancies in the SNP’s finances.

‘Politics needs to change,’ Andy Burnham, our presumptive next prime minister, told the ‘Great North Summit’ in Leeds this afternoon. Burnham used the event to declare that what is set to be ‘no ordinary by-election’ should set the stage for a ‘bigger debate about how politics needs to change if it is to work properly for the north of England’. The Manchester mayor argued that Britain had been on the ‘wrong path’ for the last 40 years and that change was needed. He pointed to the ‘devastating deindustrialisation’ of the 1980s that has been ‘compounded’ by ‘deregulation, privatisation and austerity’. His remedy, then, is presumably to attempt to reverse all that.