Steerpike

Sir Keir Starmer is having a tough time of it, what with his ongoing freebie fiasco, the cronyism row and bad briefings about his chief of staff. Now his fortunes have got even worse — literally. It turns out that the PM’s approval rating is at its lowest level yet, dropping a whopping 45 points since Sir Keir’s lot won the general election. It’s hardly the news Starmer would have hoped for as his Labour conference kicks off today…  New polling by Opinium reveals that the Prime Minister’s approval rating has dropped down to -26 since Sir Keir became the country’s leader. It now makes him — by a point — less popular than former PM Rishi Sunak which, er, after his party’s electoral defeat just three months ago says quite something.

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’.

It's a gaffe a day with David Lammy. Now the Foreign Secretary has come under fire after he hailed Azerbaijan for being able to 'liberate' territory – in an ongoing conflict widely viewed as an ethnic cleansing operation – in a recent Substack post. Lammy took to his blog to express his unsolicited musings about the Nagorno-Karabakh region, writing: The states of Central Asia look increasingly east and south. Azerbaijan has been able to liberate territory it lost in the early 1990s. Georgia and Moldova are engaging with Nato and [the] EU. Crikey. Talk about bad wording, eh?

To Westminster, where more trouble is afoot. It now transpires the Prime Minister is paid less than, er, his own chief of staff. Sue Gray has once again made headlines after the Beeb revealed the former top civil servant has been given a salary of a whopping £170,000 – which is £3,000 more than the man in the top job. How curious... Gray's wage – higher than that of her Conservative predecessor Lord Booth-Smith, who earned between £140,000 and £145,000 a year – has sparked an uncomfortable row in government, with frustration amongst other advisers who believe they are being underpaid.

Back to the Foreign Secretary, who seems unable to keep himself out of the headlines these days. It transpires that as well as being rather gaffe-prone on the subject of international relations – having described Donald Trump in the past as a 'neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath' – David Lammy has today taken it upon himself to wax lyrical about the dangers of the climate crisis. In fact, the Foreign Secretary even appeared to imply that climate change is a more urgent threat than Vladimir Putin or, er, terrorism. Quite the comparisons to choose...