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Lucy Dunn

Starmer clears out Home Office in reshuffle

On Friday, former Deputy Prime Minister and housing minister Angela Rayner resigned after an ethics probe into her tax affairs was published. The move prompted Prime Minister Keir Starmer to begin a mass reshuffle of his government, with his new cabinet appointments here. Starmer’s timing made it a rather coincidental coup, with the news overshadowing the first day of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK conference in Birmingham. And if Farage thought day two of his conference would pass uninterrupted, he was mistaken. Today the PM is reshuffling his junior ministers and the first set of appointments have just been published. The most significant changes are in the Home Office which is

John McTernan

Starmer has played this reshuffle well

Keir Starmer knows not to waste a crisis. The loss of Angela Rayner has been a huge blow to his government. She was the most charismatic politician on the front bench of the Labour government. Her ability to go toe to toe with populist politicians was a huge asset, particularly as the relentless rise of Reform continues. And on the backbench she will still be one of the most charismatic politicians in the country. Yet the waters close swiftly over former politicians as Keir Starmer’s ruthless reshuffle shows. There was an elegance in the moves that reflected deep thought about the shape of the cabinet that the Prime Minister wanted.

Nigel Jones

Reform needs ex-Labour people too

Back in July I wrote in these pages that if too many Tories joined Reform, Nigel Farage’s party would risk looking like a rescue raft for rats leaving the sinking Conservative ship. Since then, the trend for repentant or redundant Tories to desert their old party – so comprehensively rejected by the voters – and flee to the rising Reform rebels has only accelerated. Recent Reform recruits include the former Conservative party chairman Jake Berry, former Tory Welsh secretary David Jones, and senior former Tory MP Adam Holloway. Ex-Tory minister Dame Andrea Jenkyns is now Reform’s mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, and Reform’s latest MP, Sarah Pochin, who won the Runcorn

Paul Goodman

The problem with Reform’s Lords plan

Not so long ago, an MP was free to earn whatever he liked however he liked, push off without impediment to work for businesses that he’d been responsible for regulating, and could hold his seat comfortably for the best part of 50 years. No longer. One might have thought that the stock of MPs would therefore have risen. But it hasn’t: the more ethically we compel them to behave, the more unpopular they seem to become. So congratulations to Zia Yusuf, Reform’s former party chairman – and one of Nigel Farage’s closest colleagues – for taking our detestation of MPs to its logical conclusion: namely, stopping them governing us altogether.

Druin Burch

A farewell to aspirin

At last weekend’s European Society of Cardiology conference in Madrid, a quiet funeral bell tolled for aspirin. The drug has already been largely dropped as a painkiller, on the basis of having more side effects than paracetamol. Most often now it’s taken to prevent a heart attack. Now, a new study, published in the Lancet and presented in Spain, shows another drug, clopidogrel, does it better. The difference is small, but medicine, like life, is often about finessing small differences. They sum together, and aspirin is part of why living a long, healthy life has become the norm when it used to be unusual good luck. The history of aspirin