Sacking Mel Stride and Priti Patel signals Badenoch is building a serious government-in-waiting Daily Telegraph 31/08/26 If you were leader of the Opposition, would you rather have: a) shadow ministers that the public had never heard of, or b) shadow ministers they had heard of and disliked? This week, as rumours of an imminent reshuffle swirled, those appeared to be Kemi Badenoch ’s only two options. Dame Priti Patel , for instance, suffers – rather unfairly – from a lingering association with the Boriswave, at least in the Tory assessment. At the other end of the spectrum, most voters would be unable to tell you whether Mel Stride was a man or a woman. Well, on Monday both were sacked (though Patel was handed a new “international role”). With Reform bleeding from self-inflicted wounds, this tells us something about Badenoch’s ambition for the party, not to mention her emerging strategy and determination to succeed. Both Stride and Patel were appointed in the aftermath of the ...
Burnham says he won’t allow early release of some dangerous criminals – but this does not go far enough Daily Telegraph 30/08/26 The new Prime Minister told the BBC on Sunday that his latest plan to exclude dangerous criminals from early release does not go far enough. Quite an admission, made worse by the fact that this is Andy Burnham ’s fifth policy position on the scandal since he took office. This is meant to be a final resolution of the crisis. But we have been told that by Labour several times before. Why should we believe them now? First, we had a review of Sir Keir Starmer’s original plan, which would see thousands of criminals set loose after serving as little as one third of their sentences. Advertisement Then a pledge to exclude rapists and paedophiles, when we were told Labour had gone to the “very limits” of what was possible. Then another review, this time of grooming gang perpetrators. Then a further pause, when it became clear Pc Andrew Harper ’s killers would s...