Tim Shipman

Nigel Farage is signing football shirts when I arrive at Reform’s campaign headquarters in Millbank Tower, the building where New Labour prepared for power before 1997. The black shirts are emblazoned with ‘Farage 10’ in gold. ‘Someone called them Nazi colours,’ the leader complains. ‘This always happens when we do well.’ As favourite to be

The week ends as it began, with Keir Starmer outlining plans to curb child poverty, news that Rachel Reeves won’t face a formal investigation into whether she misled the markets over her Budget, ministers growing bolder about opposing Brexit and questions about the future of the war in Ukraine. For me the most interesting question

It is easy to criticise the Budget. The process was a chaotic mess. For many on the right, Rachel Reeves’s £26 billion tax raid to placate Labour MPs was a form of madness as well as badness. But good politics means understanding your opponents. One former No. 10 Tory thinks there was method in the

Rachel Reeves is lucky that the name ‘omnishambles Budget’ has already been taken. When the entire document was published long before she got to her feet in the Commons, the only thing that would have made this most chaotic pre-Budget period more shambolic would have been if the Deputy Speaker had banned her from making

While Westminster is consumed by the fallout from the Budget, I can reveal there is another major headache on the horizon for Keir Starmer – a new confrontation with the armed forces over defence spending. I’m told there was an extraordinary meeting on Tuesday in the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in which the Chief of

Denis Healey’s ‘caretaker Budget’ on 3 April 1979 is an odd focus for Labour nostalgia. It came a week after Jim Callaghan’s government had lost a vote of no confidence, paving the way for Margaret Thatcher’s arrival in No. 10. Healey was reduced to merely introducing the finance bill to maintain normal tax collection functions,

Keir Starmer is stuck in a catch-22. If he is to avoid the threat of continual leadership challenges, the Prime Minister will need to deal with what every poll shows are the public’s three overriding concerns: the cost of living, rampant illegal immigration and the state of the NHS. But if serious progress is made

Welcome to my first Evening Blend. Unless there are earth-shattering events each Friday, my intention is to try to cut through the events of the week and say what really mattered over the past five days. This week, it was the Treasury’s relentless efforts to ‘roll the pitch’ for the Budget. But the frenetic pace

Washington, D.C. When John Swinney, the SNP leader, and Peter Mandelson visited Donald Trump in the Oval Office a few months ago, the President showed them three different models for his planned renovation of the East Wing of the White House, which he has demolished to build a new ballroom. ‘If you’re going to do

On the day of the local elections in May, when the Tories suffered a historic setback, Kemi Badenoch went to the gym and got her hair done. A screenshot of the Tory leader’s diary, leaked by a disgruntled Conservative, shows she planned a Harley Street dental appointment at 9 a.m., followed by 90 minutes at

On the face of it, the Caerphilly by-election result is a disaster, a drubbing and a humiliation for Keir Starmer’s Labour party. A once secure bastion of the Welsh Labour heartlands fell without a squeak from the governing party. Their vote collapsed to a miserable 11 per cent, while Plaid Cymru won with 47 per

In a week where political attention was on espionage and anti-Semitism, the cri de coeur from one Treasury official was notable. Recalling how Budgets were made during the years of Gordon Brown, before the 2010 coalition created the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the number-cruncher complained: ‘All they had to do was fiddle their own

As I revealed in the Spectator cover story this week, the US House of Representatives select committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has written to the acting British ambassador in Washington, James Roscoe, expressing dismay at the decision to drop the Cash-Berry spying case. The letter concludes by demanding whether US politicians were compromised

British politics often resembles a golden-age murder mystery, with multiple parties sitting anxiously on the sofas/green benches waiting for the detective/electorate to crack the case. The Reform, Labour and Tory conferences provided a plethora of clues. But just as Sherlock Holmes solved ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze’ by diving into the significance of the dog

Kemi Badenoch is in ebullient form. She promises the Conservative party conference, which begins this weekend in Manchester, will be ‘more fun than usual’. But that does not mean the Tory leader plans to sweep on stage like Reform’s Andrea Jenkyns. ‘I won’t be wearing any jumpsuits with sequins on,’ Badenoch says. ‘I won’t be

The consensus before Keir Starmer’s speech to the Labour party conference was that he needed to make ‘the speech of his life’. He did so. It was not the greatest conference speech I’ve seen, far from it, but it was the best Starmer has made and not because it was shot through with content. However,