Steerpike

How much does a sell-out cost? Mr S has been trying for months now to work out what the Chagos deal will mean for British taxpayers. The Financial Times originally reported an estimated total bill of £9bn – before the Mauritian prime minister suggested last week the sum would be much higher. With a sum of £18bn now being quoted by some outlets, Steerpike wants to know which government department will be footing the costs of the 99-year deal? When it comes to figures, the obvious place to start is the Treasury – Whitehall's 'central department' to use Nigel Lawson's phrase. A written question was put to Rachel Reeves, asking if the Chancellor's department had 'made a value for money assessment of the Chagos Island deal'. But according to Darren Jones, the answer is, er, no.

Desperate times call for desperate measures seems to the mantra of the day in Labour HQ. First a foreign office minister insisted that ceding the Chagos Islands was essential to avoid, er, war – and now Labour MP Stella Creasy has invoked Paddington Bear to stand up for illegal migrants. You couldn't make it up… Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, the backbench MP hit out at her own government's plans to slash numbers of illegal migrants coming to the UK. Her intervention comes after the Home Office last night announced rules that will prevent small boat arrivals from becoming British citizens. No matter how long they've been in the UK, anyone who gets into Britain by sneaking across in a vehicle will be unable to get citizenship.

Just when you think Labour’s Chagos saga can’t get any stranger, it does. Now foreign minister Stephen Doughty has claimed that ceding the archipelago to Mauritius is necessary to avoid sparking war. Writing in the Times today, Doughty has rather bafflingly insisted that there is a risk foreign powers like China or Russia could exploit an advisory ruling by the International Court of Justice and build intelligence centres near the Diego Garcia US military base. In fact, the foreign office minister has gone as far as to suggest that retaining the Chagos Islands could result in an international disaster on the scale of the Cuban missile crisis.

It was a late-night showdown in the Commons yesterday evening. The terrain? Labour's Border, Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill. But while the legislation was passed – by Pyongyang-style majorities – on the back of Labour votes, a row has now broken out over whether the Tories or Reform were more effective in their opposition. Nigel Farage took to X to say that: Without Reform MPs there would have been no vote on Labour’s useless immigration bill tonight. The Tories did not intend to oppose it until we forced a vote in the House of Commons. Reform UK are the real opposition.

The BBC is back in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. As the trial between the Scottish nurse Sandie Peggie and NHS Fife continues – after Peggie's suspension over questioning the use of female-only facilities by trans doctor Beth Upton – it seems that the Beeb can't quite seem to work out how to characterise its coverage. Mr S's spies have drawn attention to a rather odd change on the BBC Scotland website in an article covering the ongoing trial. Initially a piece was posted with the headline: 'Transgender doctor tells tribunal "I am not male".' The opening paragraph of this read as follows: A transgender doctor at the centre of an NHS employment tribunal has repeatedly insisted on being a woman after being called a man by lawyers during cross-examination.

Back to the assisted dying bill. It has emerged that the legislation's requirement for a senior judge to approve whether someone should be allowed to end their life has been removed over concerns about the toll it could take on Britain's struggling courts. An amendment put forward by Kim Leadbeater, the bill's sponsor, has now proposed that, instead of having a high court judge investigate each case, a panel of social workers and psychiatrists among others should oversee applications. How curious. It's certainly quite the turnaround. While Leadbeater has now claimed the changes will 'make the system even more robust', prior to her amendment, the bill's sponsor and her supporters were vocal proponents of the high court judge method.

With Sue Gray gone, one might have expected the Labour government's infighting to have subsided. But there is a new public enemy now: Richard Hermer KC. The Attorney General has caused quite the commotion during his time in the top job, with questions raised over his links to Sir Keir Starmer's controversial Chagos deal, his legal representation of ex-Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams and his stance on Israel. It's his commitment to the ECHR, however, that has ruffled feathers in recent days as the government attempts to improve its messaging on migration.

Is Labour on a legislative go-slow? In recent weeks, Mr S has noticed a theme from conversations in the corridors of power. Across the House, MPs are increasingly noticing the number of 'one-line' whips they are on in parliament. This refers to diktats issued by the party whips: a one-line whip means that MPs don’t have to turn up to vote if they don’t feel like it, but if they do, they must then vote with the whip. Three-line whips, by contrast, are non-negotiable. So it says something about the state of the Commons right now that nearly half of the sitting days since the general election have been listed as a 'one-line whip'. Analysis by Jerome Mayhew shows that between 4 July and 8 February, the House of Commons had 85 sitting days.

Dear oh dear. In the last hour, Sir Keir Starmer has appointed Ashley Dalton MP to replace Andrew Gwynne as health minister – after the latter was sacked and suspended over the weekend over some rather offensive message exchanges. But it would appear that Dalton is not without her skeletons either. Mr S can reveal that the new public health minister has voiced some quite odd views in the past on gender ideology… Dalton has in the past tweeted that 'trans women are women' regardless of biology and believes in gender self-identification, writing in 2016: 'I think people should be able to define their own gender and that society should be set up to support not hinder that.