Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

Andrew Bailey joins retail bosses in opposing the Chancellor’s ‘unsustainable’ plans Daily Telegraph 20/05/26 Andrew Bailey has warned Rachel Reeves against capping supermarket food prices. The governor of the Bank of England said freezing the price of essentials would be “unsustainable” and risked backfiring. The intervention comes after grocers were asked to cap how much they charge shoppers for staple items such as bread, eggs and milk amid growing alarm in Government about soaring prices. Addressing MPs on the Treasury select committee, Mr Bailey conceded that there could be reasons in the “short run” to control prices. However, he added: “I think the question you have to think through with this sort of thing is: are you doing it for some well-grounded, very temporary reason? “I think if you start doing it as a matter of course, then you’re effectively artificially moving prices relative to costs, and that’s not a sustainable thing in the long run.” Another official at the ...

Daily Telegraph 20/05/26 Sir Keir Starmer’s failures will put Nigel Farage in power, Wes Streeting has warned. The former health secretary used his resignation speech to declare that the Labour Government must change course or risk handing Reform UK the keys to No 10. Mr Streeting, who quit Sir Keir’s Cabinet last week in the wake of Labour’s dire local election results, insisted he had “no regrets” over his resignation. He told MPs: “I left the Government because we are in the fight of our lives against nationalism, and it is a fight that we are currently losing. Unless we change course, we risk handing the keys of No 10 to Reform, and I do not want that on our consciences.” Mr Farage is on track to become the next prime minister, with Reform having enjoyed a comfortable lead in the polls for more than a year. The party won more than 1,450 council seats on May 7, taking control of 14 councils – nine of which it gained from Labour. Mr Streeting’s speech will be seen as the bas...

Manchester Mayor’s push for public ownership relies on taxes and borrowing Daily Telegraph Published 19 May 2026 During the 2024 general election campaign, I worked as an adviser to Jeremy Hunt and remained at the Treasury to help ensure the basic machinery of government continued to function. But as the outcome of that election was pretty obvious, it was clear Treasury officials were starting to prepare for Labour. Now that Andy Burnham has a reasonable shot at quickly becoming prime minister, something similar will be happening at 1 Horse Guards Road. Civil servants will already be asking themselves what a Burnham premiership would mean for the next Budget, the fiscal rules and the tax system. The bond markets appear to have given their verdict. Ten-year gilt yields have remained above 5pc for days, prompting increasingly awkward attempts at reassurance from the Mayor of Greater Manchester. He first offered a vague commitment to “fiscal rules” in general before aides later c...

Starmer’s party is caught between Rejoiner instincts and Leave-voting heartlands it cannot afford to alienate Daily Telegraph 18/05/26 Brexit is an issue that divides us, both as a nation and as political factions within that nation. Europe was the key fault line within the Conservative Party from the late 1980s until our withdrawal from its political structures was finally achieved in January 2020. The downfall of at least four Tory prime ministers – Thatcher, Major, Cameron and May – can be attributed to internecine conflict about our place in Europe. Today it is Labour’s turn to suffer. The party has a problem that cannot be squared. Sir Keir Starmer and all his leadership rivals seemingly believe that Brexit was a colossal mistake and that they must do all within their power to reverse it in spirit if not in name. But natural Labour supporters in the party’s traditional heartlands overwhelmingly voted to take back control, to regain our sovereignty, in 2016. Most would do so a...

Labour must grasp markets, incentives and the Government’s part in our economic malaise Daily Telegraph 17/05/26 This week promises to be a significant one, both politically and economically. The news and political sections of just about all the media are, of course, dominated by the wranglings over who, if anyone, will succeed Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister. But this subject has come to dominate the economics and business pages as markets try to assess the significance of the various candidates for economic and market performance. The truth of the matter is that there is probably not a cigarette paper to be put between them. On what we have heard so far, their different posturings correspond to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. The fundamental reason is that all of the leading candidates for the top job are, unsurprisingly, shot through with Labour’s basic ideology, namely that fairness and the distribution of income are the main issues before us. And state-led acti...

You cannot endlessly tax and borrow your way to prosperity, no matter how worthy the spending sounds daily Telegraph 15/05/26 The King of the North is assembling his troops, preparing to march on Westminster. Andy Burnham has finally found a seat for his long-awaited chicken run, hoping Labour’s National Executive Committee selects him as the candidate for Makerfield after Josh Simons stepped aside in the Wigan constituency. Simons was once touted as a Labour rising star before allegedly attempting to smear journalists investigating questionable accounting at Labour Together, the think tank he used to run. Simons says he is making way for a leader with the “radicalism, energy and immense courage to meet the moment”. Burnham certainly thinks he is the country’s saviour. He claims Labour has already “made changes to make life better” during its first two years in Government. Really? Voters appear unconvinced. At last week’s local elections, Reform secured 50 per cent of the vote ...

Politics is supposed to be about ideas and visions for dealing with the country’s challenges. Where is the great debate about these? Daily Telegraph 15/05/26 Winston Churchill famously wrote of the role of prime minister: “The loyalties which centre upon number one are enormous. If he trips he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes they must be covered. If he sleeps he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good he must be pole-axed.” Good advice. And we all now know that Keir Starmer is no good at being Prime Minister. When he trips, he blames others. When he makes mistakes, it’s in the full glare of daylight. He’s a dud. Yet even now the Labour Party seems reluctant to conclude that he has to go. Even now Wes Streeting can’t quite bring himself to launch a leadership challenge and calls instead for a transition timetable. Personally I’m convinced Starmer is done for, but who could blame him for trying to tough it out against opponents so infirm of purpose? Things could ge...

Starmer won power on a deceptively moderate manifesto but paved the way for a full Left-wing takeover Daily Telegraph 13/05/26 Hurrah! Sir Keir Starmer is surely history, his catastrophic, incompetent premiership almost over, his catalogue of lies, obfuscations and untruths having finally caught up with him. There is still, it would seem, some justice in this world, some penalties for utter, abject failure. And if he does trigger a leadership contest this week as expected, I will commend Wes Streeting for calling time on the Prime Minister. The Health Secretary might well have grasped that this was his one chance to take the top job before Andy Burnham could make a return to Westminster, but in a Cabinet of cowards, charlatans and narcissists, he will still have displayed an unusual amount of courage. Yet I doubt Streeting, a social democrat, will end up in No 10; when Starmer eventually goes, we are far more likely to be left with a proper socialist like Angela Rayner, Ed Miliba...

His refusal to step down is an act of contempt for the public. Spiked 13/05/26 So this is how technocracy ends – not with a bang but with the whimpering of one of its chief proponents as he hunkers down, hiding from the judgement of the people. This is the vision we now have of Keir Starmer: alone, reviled, skulking in his bunker at Downing Street. He’s a dead man blathering, talking about staying the course even though the people and much of his party would rather he didn’t. He’s ‘resolute’, say his dwindling band of apologists, but to the rest of us it just looks like pathological vanity. These are extraordinary events. Following last week’s local and devolved elections – in which Labour lost vast swathes of territory to Reform UK and others – the heat has been on Sir Keir. As if it wasn’t humiliating enough to lose council seats across England, and control of the Senedd in Wales, and four seats in the Scottish parliament, polls now suggest 70 per cent of Brits view Starmer ‘unf...

Labour’s prince over the water is the embodiment of the very political class that voters are desperate to eject. Spiked 12/05/26 Are there two other words that better capture just how lost the Labour Party is than ‘Andy Burnham’? Yes, that Andy Burnham – the long-lashed, Blair-era frontbencher who crashed and burned in two successive Labour leadership contests (in 2010 and 2015), before decamping from parliament to become mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017. At the time, he described life in Westminster as ‘poisonous’ and a ‘living nightmare’. As incredible as it may seem, a party that once roundly rejected Burnham as its leader is now touting him as Britain’s next prime minister. Inside the Labour Party and among its media sympathisers, this hitherto unremarkable career politician is being presented as the answer to their party’s and the nation’s woes. It doesn’t even matter that he is not actually an MP at the moment. With the Parliamentary Labour Party finally set to evict Kei...

The PM risks sliding into irrelevance as potential successors battle for his crown Daily Telegraph 11/05/26 Sometimes in Westminster, politicians latch on to a buzzword that spreads like a particularly nasty virus from every mouth. Today that word is timetable. One after the other, Labour MPs are calling on the Prime Minister to set a timetable for his departure. The reason is obvious: they want him gone, but not until Andy Burnham has returned to Parliament to be crowned as Sir Keir Starmer’s successor. The alternative of having a leadership contest immediately would mean having to choose between Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner, neither of whom they much fancy. So the phrase “resign now” is very much out of fashion. The problem is that if Sir Keir granted their request, announcing what would probably be a summer leadership contest and a change of leader around September, he would be not so much a lame duck as a dead duck. There would quickly be a new buzzword in Westminster, a...

Party’s Left wing fears a Blue Labour stitch-up if leadership contest is rushed through Daily Telegraph 10/05/26 Allies of Wes Streeting say that he is planning, but not plotting, to take on the leadership of the Labour Party. This week could be the moment when he has to decide whether to throw his hat into the ring – or rue the day he missed the chance. On Sunday afternoon, the need for urgency became clearer than ever. In a much-anticipated intervention, Angela Rayner attacked the “toxic culture of cronyism” in Sir Keir’s Downing Street and hinted at a possible pact with Andy Burnham, the other darling of the Labour Left. In a sign that the two potential leadership contenders could now be working together, she urged Sir Keir to allow Mr Burnham to return to Parliament from his current role as mayor of Manchester – a move that could pave the way for the pair to launch a joint ticket to run the country. The stage is now set for a leadership contest that would pitch Mr Streeting...

Allister Heath Daily Telegraph 09/05/26 Sir Keir Starmer lives on another planet if he thinks he can keep going as PM and leader of the Labour Party. His allies are equally deluded: Operation Save Sir Keir Starmer can only end in tears. His election results were abysmal, Labour has been obliterated in swathes of the country and decimated in the rest, and Starmer must carry the blame. The party has a crucial choice: either ditch him as soon as possible, and hope that it can somehow extricate itself from its death spiral, or face guaranteed oblivion and perhaps even total extinction. Labour is now in an even worse position than the Tories, with Starmer’s party bereft of any purpose, or any unique selling point in a fragmenting society and a multi-party system. Labour has nothing to lose by throwing him out; its problem, of course, is the poor quality of the alternatives on offer. Greater Manchester and the North West were a disaster for Labour yesterday: Andy Burnham, the so-call...

Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting among senior Labour figures facing a fight to cling on to their own seats at the next general election Daily Telegraph 08/05/26 In the immediate aftermath of what is promising to be the worst set of local election results in Labour’s history, Sir Keir Starmer has vowed “not to walk away” from No 10. Whether Sir Keir gets to choose the timing or manner of his eventual departure remains to be seen, but the election results also contain portents of doom for his leadership rivals. The swing away from Labour to Reform in areas where Labour front-runners have their constituencies means they may well be facing a fight to cling on in their own seats at the next general election. In the interim, what any successor to Sir Keir is set to inherit is a depleted and demoralised Labour Party that has lost a large swathe of its activist base and will continue to fight on two flanks – Reform to the Right and the Greens to the Left Angela Rayner Tameside In quick...

Daily Telegraph 08/05/26 Labour has lost control of its first five councils following a surge in support for Reform UK. Sir Keir Starmer’s party no longer has a majority on councils in Tameside, Exeter, Redditch, Hartlepool or Tamworth. The Prime Minister is expected to face calls to resign should Labour perform as badly as predicted in the run-up to polling day. Tameside, which covers Angela Rayner’s constituency of Ashton-under-Lyme, had been under Labour control for 47 years. Reform won all 12 of the seats up for election in Hartlepool, a traditionally safe Labour “Red Wall” territory, with Sir Keir’s party losing seven. Both parties now have 15 seats on the council. Reform also gained all nine seats up for election in Tamworth. Out of nine of the 27 seats on Redditch Council up for election, Reform won eight. Six of those were from Labour, which will now have to govern as a coalition or minority administration. A Reform spokesman said: “It’s clear that Labour voters are s...

Only the Right will do what is required to lance the boil of Islamic extremism Daily Telegraph 05/05/26 We can’t go on like this. That’s what everyone I speak to says. But why bother voting when things are so bad and there are another three years of this grotesque incompetence and barefaced lying to go? If you think you may have better things to do than popping to the polling station – refilling the bird feeder, say, or power-washing the patio – I beg you to make the effort. On Thursday, we have the chance to register our dismay at this appalling Labour Government and our complete and utter rejection of the sanctimonious, anti-British lawyer who leads it (or tries and fails to). The Prime Minister’s presence was not wanted on the campaign trail by Labour councillors who have twigged that Sir Keir is to voters what hantavirus is to cruises. Both are poisonous. Instead, the PM was in Armenia doing his favourite thing, pledging to give away money we don’t have to the EU. My, how he ...