Steerpike

As if the Labour government didn't have enough on its plate with Rachel Reeves's spending review to be announced at midday, it is also facing pressure from the US over sanctions imposed on two Israeli cabinet ministers. Late last night, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned that the travel ban and asset freezes imposed on security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich ‘Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said that the asset freezes and travel bans on Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich ‘do not advance US-led efforts to achieve a ceasefire, bring all hostages home, and end the war’.

How much have political donors gifted to their party coffers? Well, the results are now in. Today's Electoral Commission figures bring some long overdue good news for Kemi Badenoch's Conservatives, who have come out on top: the Tories received a whopping £3.3 million of donations between the 1 January and 31 March 2025. In fact, Badenoch's boys in blue took £1 million more than the Labour lot who received £2.3 million, and over double the £1.48 million of donations Nigel Farage's Reform UK took. Talk about raking it in, eh? And the Tories have more than just the raw figures to boast about: it transpires that onetime Labour supporter and video game entrepreneur Jez San donated a staggering sum of £1 million this quarter.

For years, Steerpike has been warning about the dangers of a new Chinese 'super-embassy' being built in Tower Hamlets. Located on the site of Britain's old Royal Mint, there are plans to build Beijing's largest overseas outpost, sitting opposite the Tower of London. Local residents, many of whom are Uighur Muslim, are viscerally opposed, while the Met has major security concerns about the site becoming a magnet for anti-China protests too. Quelle surprise... Having ignored all domestic opposition to this plan, pig-headed officials might now be willing to take advice from candid friends from overseas. This weekend, it was the Americans sounding the alarm in the Sunday Times, amid fears that the building could effectively become a nest of spies in the heart of London.

Oh dear. It sounds as though Rachel Reeves was something of a bust at the big CBI shindig last night at the swish 8 Northumberland Avenue venue in central London. It was barely seven months ago that the Chancellor confidently promised the lobby group in the same room that 'We’re not going to be coming back with more tax increases, or indeed more borrowing.' But this evening, the Treasury minister told those same business leaders in a Q&A that: Look, I'm never going to have to repeat a budget like that. You know, that was a big tax raising budget. I recognise that. It is what I felt that we had to do to secure our public finances... People need to know that we're never going to repeat anything on that scale.... we will never have to repeat anything like that again. Hmm.

Tree-hugging isn't just for the Greens, it seems – as former Tory leadership contender James Cleverly will insist this evening. At a London event tonight, the ex-Foreign Secretary will make the case that Conservatives should care about the climate and urge his colleagues to reject 'both the luddite Left and the luddite Right' on green policy. 'Conservative environmentalism doesn't mean a choice between growth and sustainability,' Cleverly will tell the Conservative Environment Network tonight in a dig at both the Labour government and Reform UK. The former Cabinet Secretary will speak this evening at the annual Sam Baker Memorial Lecture – where he will award Tory MP Andrew Griffith for championing the marine environment of Chagos.

Dear oh dear. Mr S offers his condolences to anyone who tuned into Defence Secretary John Healey's car crash interview with LBC's Nick Ferrari this morning. The Labour man stumbled his way through a rather excruciating conversation, in which Ferrari took him to task over his defence plan's figures. Starting on submarines, the LBC host quizzed Healey on whether the UK government's defence plans were cast-iron commitments or merely aspirations: 'You talk about the nuclear submarines and to develop 'up to' 12. What does 'up to' mean? That could mean one.' JH: These are… long-term decisions first of all. NF: How many is it, Secretary of State? I could lose up to 30 pounds of weight – but I might lose six ounces. This is the reality. So what does 'up to' mean?

Sir Keir Starmer's Labour lot are in the bad books with Speaker Lindsay Hoyle after details of the government's Strategic Defence Review mysteriously appeared in several newspapers before the Prime Minister's speech this morning. The Speaker was rather unimpressed with the whole thing – given he has had to remind Starmer's army on multiple occasions that it is a breach of the ministerial code – and today tore into the PM's party. Blasting the leaks as 'regrettable', Hoyle dressed down the government benches: The Prime Minister made a speech and held a press conference in Glasgow. In addition to other media appearances, this follows several days of media briefing. I am disappointed once again that the government appears to have breached the principle set out in paragraph 9.

To Scotland, where once Britain’s greatest schools were found. These days, sadly, that can no longer be said, thanks to the SNP’s mismanagement over the past 18 years in office. One of those who served as a minister in its wretched regime was Ash Regan, who held the Scottish Government’s Community Safety brief from 2018 to 2022. Having failed to win the party leadership in 2023, she now sits as an MSP in the Alex Salmond fan club that is the Alba party.  Her latest Holyrood initiative is to restart the debate on prostitution north of the border. Regan is championing a new ‘Prostitution (Offences and Support) (Scotland) Bill’ which aims to criminalise the buying of sex in Scotland while decriminalising those selling sexual services.

Another day, another bit of bad press for the Labour party. Attorney General Lord Hermer sparked outrage when he compared political threats to leave the ECHR to the Nazis during a speech to the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RUSI) defence think tank on Thursday – and has since acknowledged, rather begrudgingly, that his 'choice of words was clumsy'. You don't say! Mr S is rather curious about who exactly gave the controversial phraseology the green light – if it was approved at all. The speech appeared on the official government website after it was delivered, with the Attorney General's baffling comparison retained in black and white.