Politics

For parents with young children, it’s been a game of grandmother’s footsteps. First they heard from the new Labour government that they will open 300 new state nurseries in England to cater for the 30 hours of free childcare that families with children aged nine months and upwards are eligible for. Now they hear Naomi Eberstadt, high priestess of New Labour’s early years programme Sure Start, proclaim the home, not the nursery, as the best place for a child under one.   The ‘yes but no but yes’ approach of policy makers risks further confusing working parents. The 30 hours of free childcare was the previous Conservative government’s response to

It’s day three of the Conservative party conference, and so far the blue-on-blue has been kept to a minimum — not least thanks to the ‘yellow card’ threat, Mr S is sure. But one Tory grandee and former MP isn’t holding back on his thoughts on the future of his party following a disastrous election result — and Jacob Rees-Mogg had some firm words for Kemi Badenoch in particular…  In conversation with the Telegraph’s Daily T podcast this morning, Rees-Mogg first criticised the four leadership contenders for not focusing enough on issues like net zero or the economy, before slamming his party’s ’appalling failure’ on immigration over the last 14

Back in the 1980s, the American business guru Tom Peters came up with the advice to companies to ‘under-promise and over-deliver’. The idea behind it was that there was an asymmetry in customer responses to service standards which depended on what they had been guaranteed. A long delivery time could, for example, be perfectly acceptable to them unless they had been promised the purchased item sooner, in which case the reputation of the company involved would be badly harmed. The very best outcome for a company’s reputation was often when it set seemingly modest goals for itself in public but then outperformed them. The government’s failure to sustain any progress on