Steerpike

Poor Keir Starmer. One of the first things he did after becoming prime minister was to stuff the unions’ mouths with gold – with his government signing off bumper pay rises for striking train drivers, teachers and junior doctors. Still, as he should probably have known at this Labour conference in Liverpool: money can’t buy you love.  It certainly didn’t stop the RMT’s Mick Lynch from sticking the knife in over the growing controversy over wardrobe-gate this weekend.  On Friday, Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Angela Rayner were all forced to announce that they would no longer accept clothes as gifts, after receiving thousands of pounds worth of freebies from the Labour donor Lord Alli.

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.