Steerpike

When you're in a hole, stop digging. These words of wisdom are yet to be heeded by the bright young things in Downing Street, who appear to be ploughing on manfully with plans to slap inheritance tax on family farms. Yet despite all the state-sponsored spinning, the public seems to be increasingly turning against Labour on this issue. According to a poll conducted by Freshwater Strategy for The Spectator, a majority – 53 per cent – of voters oppose Labour’s change to inheritance tax, with barely a quarter (27 per cent) backing the move. One in three Brits (36 per cent) say the announcement makes them more likely to vote for another party, with just 15 per cent claiming it would make them 'more' likely to vote Labour.

There are less than 50 days until Donald Trump takes back the White House – so the Democrats are now doing some last-minute future-proofing. In a bombshell announcement overnight, President Biden revealed he has signed a pardon to a victim of a 'miscarriage of justice' whose case has been 'infected' by 'raw politics.' Who is this hapless victim you ask? Why, none other than the President's own son Hunter Biden. And they call the Trumps nepotistic... The U-turn comes just weeks after the White House denied that the President would make such a drastic move in the final months of his lame duck presidency. Biden, himself, said as recently as June that he would 'not pardon' his son, who was facing sentencing in two criminal cases on federal gun charges and federal tax evasion charges.

Does wisdom come with age? MPs have just voted by a margin of 55 to back a bill to legalise assisted suicide. In what was the first Commons vote on assisted death for a decade, MPs voted 330 to 275 in favour of the bill.  The new intake of parliamentarians – those first elected in 2024 or returning after an enforced absence – were nearly twice as likely to back assisted suicide than any other intake. You might think this is just because most of the new MPs sit on Labour’s benches. Well, perhaps. But this was a free vote on an issue of conscience so we wouldn’t necessarily expect it to fall on party lines.

It's fuel poverty awareness day today. So what better time to reflect on Labour decision to pull payments for pensioners, just weeks after taking office? Ahead of the release of pension credit statistics tomorrow, Mr S has been doing some digging into the Chancellor's past. And it seems that 'Rachel Thieves' – as her critics like to jibe – has not always been such an enemy of universal hand-outs for the elderly.... A recently-unearthed leaflet from the University of Bristol archives reveals that Rachel Reeves made winter fuel payments central to her very first election campaign. Reeves stood for Bromley and Chislehurst in 2005 and made 'More Help for Pensioners' one of her key priorities to voters in the Tory safe seat.

Since Steerpike first reported on the petition for another general election, another two million signatures have been added. (Not that Mr S is taking the credit.) While the petition is most popular in Tory and Reform-held seats – especially in Essex, where almost one in ten of the electorate have signed in some constituencies – MPs in Labour marginals should be taking note too. In Tamworth, Ribble Valley, Sittingbourne and Sheppey, Derbyshire Dales and North West Leicestershire, Labour MPs with majorities of fewer than 1,500 votes have at least 5,500 constituents who have signed the petition. Derbyshire Dales’s new boy John Whitby perhaps has the most to fear as his majority of just 350 votes over the Conservatives is dwarfed by the 5,800 who want to see an election.

For more than a decade, viral petitions demanding an immediate election were the preserve of Remainiacs and much of the Twitter left. So with Labour now in government, it is to no surprise then that it is now much of the right which is demanding another vote. A parliamentary petition to ‘call a general election’ has gone viral overnight, thanks to supportive posts by Elon Musk (who else?) among others. Numbers currently stand at more than 650,000 signatories: six times higher than the threshold of 100,000 required for a parliamentary debate. Wonder what the government response will be eh? Such petitions rarely, if ever, succeed in their goal and those hoping to see Keir Starmer swept out of office will probably have to wait another four and a half years at least.

It's been another bad week for the government, with rows over farmers, ships and businesses too. So what better time for Keir Starmer to manfully undertake his media duties, sitting out this morning for a grilling with local BBC news stations? This annual ordeal can prove somewhat merciless – as Liz Truss famously found to her cost in 2022. Faced with six of the best, how did the current PM compare? First up was BBC Merseyside, where Starmer answered a question about energy bills by talking about, er, anti-social behaviour orders. The host immediately interrupted to point out that 'we've drifted off the topic.' Next, it was a trip to the East of England where the PM was forced on the back foot from the start. 'I've got absolutely nothing against Lincolnshire!

At last, an outbreak of common sense from Essex Police. After a mounting backlash – with Boris Johnson, Elon Musk and Nigel Farage expressing their dismay – the boys in blue have decided to drop their investigation into Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson. The Crown Prosecution Service advised that no charges should be brought against Pearson after reviewing the case, with Essex Police concluding that no further action would thus be taken. At last... The announcement today comes ten days after two police officers called at Pearson's home at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday to tell her she was under investigation and invited her to a voluntary interview. She was told, however, that the officers were not allowed to disclose the specific focus of the inquiry.

Dear oh dear. The left-wing Twitter scourge hasn't gone quite as well as users may have hoped. Following Donald Trump's victory at the start of the month and the resultant appointment of Twitter CEO Elon Musk as co-leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, a number of 'right on' tweeters decided to jump ship to new social media platform Bluesky. Yet it hasn't gone quite as smoothly as they'd hoped… Prominent Twitter commentators including Owen Jones, James O'Brien and Jess Phillips MP have all declared their intention to start using the alternative Bluesky platform in favour of Musk's machine. It's not been quite as easy a transition for some as it has for others, however.