Steerpike

Ahead of the Prime Minister's address a number of Cabinet ministers are savouring the last full day of their party conference. Pat McFadden – Labour's campaign co-ordinator and now the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster – was in conversation with the Guardian's Pippa Crerar this morning, enthusiastically recounting election night, lamenting the loss of Labour colleagues who lost their seats and talking political strategy. McFadden lauded the support of his wife, the deputy campaign director, throughout the election campaign – 'without her it wouldn't have happened – before describing his reaction to the exit poll. 'Relief was the word,' he admitted. 'I didn't jump around the kitchen or anything like that. The emotion was relief.

To Liverpool, where all the wit and wisdom of Sir Keir’s Labour party is gathered. Starmer’s army has come to the city armed with bright ideas and insightful opinions — and no one more so than Bell Ribeiro-Addy.  The Labour MP for Clapham and Brixton Hill has been thinking long and hard about the woes her party has faced this last week — cronyism accusations, a freebie fiasco and anti-Sue Gray leaks, to name but a few — and has come up with a solution. To help Starmer better handle press scrutiny, Ribeiro-Addy has suggested the Prime Minister should consider, er, regulating the press. If you want to deal with a problem properly, go to the source, eh?

Party conferences are never short of hyperbole. Whether it's on the conference floor or the late night bar, impromptu speeches and after dinner speeches are often peppered with the kind of comments which come back to haunt a political party as their fortunes change for the worse. And while this year's Labour jamboree is only a few hours' old, it seems we may already have our quote of the conference. Congratulations to Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, for issuing this challenge to fellow delegates when he addressed them earlier today: I want our Labour Party to become the natural party of government. A title the Conservative party claimed for years, but we can take it from them. We have the chance to prove that we are the changemakers.

This weekend Labour hosts its party conference in power for the first time in 15 years. The great and the not-so-good of the labour movement is descending on Liverpool to eat, drink and debate the merits of mission-led government. Bottoms up chaps! Kicking off proceedings is Angela Rayner, tasked with appearing on the BBC's flagship Laura Kuenssberg show to defend the government after a week of bad headlines. So it was perhaps unfortunate then that the Deputy Prime Minister has found herself in her own brush with the press, on the eve of conference starting. The Sunday Times reports that she 'appears' to have breached parliamentary rules by failing to declare that a friend joined her on a 'personal holiday' funded by Lord Alli, the peer at the centre of the 'passes for glasses' scandal.

It’s his sworn ambition to become Prime Minister of the UK by 2029. But is Nigel Farage perhaps spending a little bit too much time in the States? Barely had the Reform leader finished addressing his party conference, then ‘ping!’ An email arrived in Steerpike’s inbox touting Farage’s latest trip across the pond. The former MEP is billed as one of the headliners at the New York Young Republican Club’s gala dinner in December. Tickets at the black tie bash at Cipriani Wall Street start from $499 and go up to $30,000 for varying levels of exclusivity. Kerching! Farage is billed on the event as ‘a great friend of President Trump and leader of the Brexit movement’.