Steerpike

'Anything you can do, I can do better.' Throughout 2025, both Reform and the Conservatives have slugged it out, trading blows and scrapping for every inch of territory. With the future of the right at stake, neither party wants to be seen as losing political momentum ahead of 2029. Reform has comfortably led in the polls since April – but one boast that the Tories have always had is that they are significantly better at fundraising. No longer it seems... The latest figures from the Electoral Commission are out covering the third quarter of 2025. They show that Reform bagged £10.3 million in donations in just three months – though that is largely down to the largesse of Christopher Harbone who gave £9 million, in what is believed to be the single largest donation of modern times.

To the parties of opposition, about whom some rather interesting stories have emerged. The Financial Times has reported today that Nigel Farage has told his donors that he expects Reform UK to do an election deal with the Tories. The report describes how a donor claimed the Reform leader thought a pact with Kemi Badenoch's lot could be done if it was on his terms, while an associate who met with Farage recently insisted the Clacton MP thought a deal was inevitable. But those willing the two groups to put aside their differences and warmly embrace may be feeling disappointed today, after both sides have publicly stated they are opposed to an electoral pact.

Oh dear. It seems that the horror never ends for the Andrew formally known as Prince. Mountbatten-Windsor – as he must now be called – was formally stripped of his last remaining royal titles last night, as the anger over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal shows no sign of abating. And today it has got even worse for Andrew as MPs try to get in on the act too. Did someone say 'photo opportunity'? The public accounts committee has this afternoon announced plans to launch a wide-ranging inquiry into the Crown Estate property leases held by the Royal Family. The onetime former Duke of York only paid a 'peppercorn rent' for his Windsor Estate before surrendering his tenancy amid the ongoing storm surrounding his friendship with Epstein.

Well, well, well. The official review of the leaked Budget documents that circulated last Wednesday ahead of Rachel Reeves's fiscal statement has been published – and its findings are significant. It transpires that the 'inadvertent' error that led to the OBR report going live ahead of time was a result of IT weaknesses. But more than that it has emerged that the 'worst failure' in the organisation's 15-year history had, er, happened before: back in March, with the release of their economic forecasts for Rachel Reeves's Spring Statement. Good heavens… As the Chancellor was preparing to deliver her Budget, eagle-eyed observers spotted that the online PDF version of the OBR report was reachable by swapping out 'March' in the URL for the Spring Statement with 'November'.

Oh dear. It seems that Rachel Reeves' Sunday media round has done nothing to answer questions about whether she misled the country about the national finances. The Chancellor – or 'the Chancer' in the words of the Sun – has repeatedly denied lying about the size of the fiscal black hole in the run-up to the Budget. But her protestations of innocence have not been enough to convince a growing band of sceptics, which now, er, include members of her own front bench. Talk about losing the faithful... A series of ministers have told the Times that the cabinet was misled in the weeks ahead of Wednesday's Budget.

Yesterday’s release of immigration figures by the ONS didn’t make for particularly pleasant reading. While net migration had fallen to around 200,000 in the 12 months to June, much of this was down to an unusually high exodus of people, with 693,000 leaving the country over the same period. Many of those leaving were under the age of 30. That news, however, seemed to prompt something approaching gloating over at the New York Times, which published a piece yesterday headlined: ‘The British Public Thinks Immigration Is Up. It’s Actually Down, Sharply.’ To labour the point, the piece was accompanied by a picture of anti-migration protestors in Scotland. The not-so-subtle subtext being: what a bunch of gammon thickos the anti-migration lot are in the UK.

The Chancellor's Budget may have gone down well with Labour backbenchers, but its 'smorgasbord' approach has managed to rather annoy a rather lot of people – including, it appears, those resident in Gibraltar. The gambling tax reforms announced by Rachel Reeves have sparked concerns about the impact these will have on the overseas territory. A scathing press release has been put out by the Friends of the British Overseas Territories (Fotbot) slamming the 'severe overreach' by the UK government that could lead to a 'disproportionate impact' on the territory. 'There is no indication that the Government has considered how these decisions will affect the Overseas Territories,' the organisation fumed. Oo er. The statement didn't end there.

Kemi Badenoch had a head-start in preparing her response to Rachel Reeves's Budget after this morning's OBR leak. It was an opportunity she made the most of. The Tory leader's blistering response in the Commons tore what was left of the Budget apart. But it wasn't just Reeves' policies that Badenoch went after: the attacks got pretty personal… Badenoch blasted Reeves's statement as an 'exercise in self-delusion', before mocking the Chancellor over a recent series of interviews in which she claimed she was fed up of being 'mansplained' too. In a quite stunning evisceration, Badenoch tore into a rather uncomfortable looking Reeves: Madam Deputy Speaker, let me explain to the Chancellor. Woman to woman. People out there aren't complaining because she's female.

To the Commons, where this afternoon parliamentarians have spent some time discussing the G20 and Ukraine. The Prime Minister updated politicians on his trip to the G20 summit in South Africa, while politicians focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine given what has been widely interpreted as a Vladimir Putin-friendly peace proposal from the US. While Sir Keir Starmer's statement was as, er, lacklustre as ever, one of his own MPs decided to inject a little more passion into the session. Dr Rupa Huq, the Labour MP for Ealing Central and Acton, started by lamenting the conflict in the East – noting the heartbreaking stories of child abductions by Russia that have been a feature of the war since it started. But then her intervention took a rather, um, peculiar turn.

So much for a simple Chinese takeaway. In his never-ending search for growth, Sir Keir Starmer has finally alighted on the obvious answer: cosying up to the liberal-minded democrats of Tiananmen Square. The Prime Minister is expected to fly to Beijing in the new year, once the long-awaited Chinese super-embassy in Tower Hamlets secures planning approval next month. No wonder 2025 is the year of the snake, eh? But there now seems to be a spanner in the works, ahead of the mooted approval on 10 December. For a group of American politicians are up in arms about the possible threat to global financial security. Steerpike has been shown a letter by a quartet of Nebraskan congressmen addressed to Scott Bessent, the Secretary of the Treasury.