wellnessfitpro
Farage warned his ‘establishment hit job’ jibe about unregistered gift allegations could lead to harsher punishment
Good morning. Two weeks today (unless there is some news development in the totally unexpected category) Keir Starmer will formally resign as PM, and the king will appoint Andy Burnham to replace him. Starmer has been forced out in part because of the rise of Nigel Farage; Labour MPs might have forgiven bad local election results, but not when they implied a new insurgency party was on course to win in 2029, with a far-right agenda that might tear up liberal democratic norms cherished by Labour MPs (and many others).
By some cruel twist of fate, Starmer is now on his way out just as the electoral threat from Farage is, while not disappearing, certainly falling back a bit.
At the weekend Rowena Mason, Ben Quinn and Peter Walker published a good long read looking at all the reasons why some people in Reform UK are starting to think that the Farage era is nearing its end.
And then Sunday Times published its own investigation with more, potentially damaging allegations about Farage.
Daniel Greenberg, the parliamentary standards commissioner, is already investigating claims that Farage broke Commons rules when he did not disclose a £5m donation from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne. Greenberg is now being urged to investigate the latest allegations as well.
Last night, in a statement to the Daily Express, Farage claimed he was the victim of “establishment hit job”. He also said:
I have done no wrongdoing, followed the rules and I am now considering legal action against The Sunday Times.
It’s now clear the establishment will stop at nothing to hurt Reform – we want to smash their cosy consensus.
(In the past, when Farage has threatened to sue newspapers over negative stories, those threats have normally turned out to be empty.)
On the Today programme this morning Harriet Harman, the Labour peer and a former chair of the Commons standards committee, said that it was a mistake for Farage to respond to the allegations in the way he did. She said that while the parliamentary commissioner (who investigates allegations about MPs breaking Commons rules) and the standards committee (which decides what punishment should apply if the rules have been broken) were willing to be lenient where MPs make an honest mistake, attacking the system could be seen as an aggravating factor that could lead to a higher punishment.
She said:
By Nigel Farage saying this is an establishment hit job – what he should be saying is ‘These rules are important, they keep our parliament clean, I’m going to at all times comply with them, I have complied with them. I’ll cooperate with the investigation, and I’m confident I’ll be found not to have broken the rules.’
But he’s not doing that. He’s attacking and trying to delegitimise the system.
And if it comes to a finding by the commissioner that he has been in breach of the rules, the way he’s conducted himself whilst he’s been under investigation will be taken as an aggravating fact when it comes to the penalty.
There is no precedent for an MP wrongly failing to declare a donation worth as much as £5m and, if the commissioner does find against Farage, it is possible that the committee could decide to suspend him from parliament for more than 10 days – which would allow the voters in Clacton to trigger a recall byelection.
Here is the agenda for the day.
10am: Angela Rayner, the former deputy PM, hosts a phone-in with LBC (where she is one of several politicians standing in this week for James O’Brien, who is away.)
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2.30pm: Dan Jarvis, the defence secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (between 10am and 3pm), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
Key events
Starmer faces likely row at Nato summit after US rebuke on defence spending
Keir Starmer is likely to face a diplomatic row at his final major international summit this week after Washington’s ambassador to Nato called for alliance members who are “lagging behind” on defence spending to step up. Peter Walker has the story.
The former Labour minister George Howarth has died at the age of 77, MPs have been told. As the Press Association reports, the Commons speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, described his death last week as “another sad loss” to the House of Commons.
Howarth served as a member of parliament for almost four decades, after he was first elected to represent the Merseyside constituency of Knowsley North in 1986, PA says. He left the Commons at the last general election in 2024, when he was MP for Knowsley.
As Andy Burnham works on his plans for government (but not very much in public – alas), Arguably, the Substack for progressive debate, has published a list of 20 ideas he should adopt, proposed by 20 policy experts. It is a good round-up, and at least some of the ideas are likely to reach Burnham’s in-tray.
Here is an extract from the contribution from Ruth Curtice, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation thinktank. She says:
[Burnham] should start by helping the one million young people currently not in employment, education or training (NEET). The politics of ending the triple lock can be made easier if this is used to significantly boost the government’s support package for NEETs. The extra funding could help to quadruple the number of places available via the youth jobs grant to 80,000 and widen the jobs guarantee to those on health-related benefits and universal credit for 12 months rather than 18.
He can also tackle an immediate housing crisis – low-income families’ struggle to pay rising private rents. Pegging housing support to local rents would help a million families and can be funded by increasing the taper rate on universal credit.
Finally, he can reduce the cost of a key essential – energy bills – by removing £2.3bn of levies from households’ energy bills. This can be covered by closing loopholes in the capital gains tax regime – a straight transfer from the very wealthy to the everyday economy.
Burnham has committed to keeping the triple lock for the rest of this parliament, as Labour promised in its manifesto. But he has not said what he would like Labour to say about the triple lock in its next manifesto.
On her LBC show this morning, Angela Rayner, the former deputy PM, said the controversy about Nigel Farage’s unregistered gifts (see 10.58am) was going to keep running as a news story. She said:
[These are] eye-watering amounts of money. The obvious question to that is, [what are] his donors getting in return? And why has he tried to cover them up and to avoid legitimate questions?
I don’t think that Nigel can shrug this scandal off and hope that it goes away. I think this one’s got lots of legs and it’s gonna carry on running.
Trump’s Fifa intervention to overturn Balogun’s red card ban ‘goes against spirit of game’, says Rayner
Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister, was a guest host on LBC’s morning show earlier today. Speaking about Donald Trump intervening to get Fifa to overturn the ban on the US striker Folarin Balogun playing in tonight’s US-Belgium game (see 1.54pm), Rayner said that was “not fair’’. And that was not “the way we should do it”, she said.
She went on:
The red card was given. To reverse it because someone powerful says, “You need to reverse it” – I think that goes against fairness and it goes against the spirit of the game.
At 3.30pm in the Commons there will be an urgent question on calls for the law to be changed to allow the deportation of Shabir Ahmed, the leader of the Rochdale grooming gang who has just been released from jail.
After that, starting from around 4.15pm, there will be three ministerial statements: from Samantha Dixon, a communities minister, on the government’s response to the Rycroft review on foreign interference in UK politics; from Sarah Jones, the policing minister, on policing; and from Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Cabinet Office minister, on civil service pensions.
Two councils still have no party in charge in aftermath of May local elections
Two councils in England are still without a leader or ruling party two months on from May’s local elections, in further evidence of Britain’s fragmented politics, the Press Assocation reports. PA says:
The elections on 7 May left 64 local authorities – almost half the number that held contests this year – without a single party holding a majority of seats, leaving them in what is known as “no overall control”.
Deals between local parties have seen administrations formed in almost all of those councils, with many being run by one or more groups on a minority basis.
But in Oldham in Greater Manchester, and Kirklees in West Yorkshire, repeated attempts to elect a new leader have failed.
Labour had run Oldham since 2011 but May’s elections left them as the largest party on the council with 18 seats, well short of the 31 needed to form a majority. Attempts to elect a leader failed on 20 May, 15 June and most recently on 1 July .
At Kirklees, the elections left Reform the largest party with 29 seats, ahead of Independents on 14, the Greens on 12, the Tories on nine and the Lib Dems on five. No party has the 35 seats needed for a majority and attempts to elect a leader failed on 20 May and 28 May.
Both Oldham and Kirklees are due to meet again on 15 July for another vote.
No 10 implicitly criticises Trump for intervening to get Fifa to lift World Cup match ban for star US striker
Downing Street has implicitly criticised Donald Trump for intervening to get Fifa to lift a ban that would have stopped a star US striker, who received a red card, playing in tonight’s World Cup match against Belgium.
As Matt Hughes, Paul MacInnes and Alexander Abnos report, Trump called Fifa three times before it took the highly unusual decision to overturn the one-match ban imposed on Folarin Balogun, boosting the US’s prospects in tonight’s game.
Asked about Trump’s intervention at the No 10 lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson said World Cup disciplinary decisions should remain a matter for Fifa.
Asked whether Trump’s actions were acceptable, the spokesperson replied:
Those decisions are a matter for the football world governing body and should stay that way, and we are clear in that position.
Asked if Keir Starmer felt Fifa’s integrity had been undermined, the spokesperson said: “That is a matter for Fifa to respond to.”
The spokesman also told reporters that Starmer was a “touch sleep-deprived” after staying up with his son at their Downing Street flat to watch England’s 3-2 victory over Mexico in the early hours of Monday morning.
He said:
The prime minister watched the match last night and stayed up to do so. He watched it upstairs in the Downing Street flat with his son and he’s a touch sleep-deprived this morning, but incredibly proud of the team, and incredibly proud to be English after that performance.
He’s seen England play over many years but this morning’s victory in the heat of the Azteca Stadium, and at altitude and against a host nation, was up there for him as being one of England’s best-ever performances.
He’s very much looking forward to the quarter-final on Saturday.
In the coming days, the St George’s Cross will hang high and proudly over No 10, and Downing Street will look glorious in St George’s Day bunting in the July sun.
‘Most’ women in jail in England and Wales shouldn’t be there, says prisons minister Lord Timpson
“Most” women who are in prison in England and Wales should not be there, Lord Timpson, the prisons minister, has said.
In an interview for the Lord Speaker’s Corner podcast, Timpson said that many women sentenced to jail were also victims in some respects and that the system should potentially find an alternative way of dealing with them.
He also said there was too much turnover in government, pointing out that if he lasted three years, he would be the longest-serving prisons minister for a quarter of a century.
Timpson was a surprise appointment when Keir Starmer formed his government two years ago. Given a peerage so that he could join the government, Timpson had no record in Labour politics (his brother had been a Tory MP), but he had been CEO of the family shoe repair company, the Timpson Group, which is widely admired for its record employing ex-offenders.
Confirming his reputation as a penal justice liberal, Timpson told Michael Forsyth, the lord speaker, in their interview:
If you take women in prison, so we’ve got roughly 4,000 women in prison in England and Wales. I believe most of them should not be there.
There are so many addicted women in prison. Most of them are victims; probably all of them are victims.
But the reason why there are so many people in prison is because the system has not worked for far too long.
Timpson said prisons were not good at dealing with addiction and mental health issues.
People are in the criminal justice system because of addiction. We haven’t dealt with addiction. We haven’t dealt with the mental health. We haven’t done this cycle of just re-offending, re-offending.
That was why the Probation Service had such an important role to play in rehabilitation, he said.
Timpson said it was “absolutely bonkers” that between 2010 and 2022 prison ministers were being replaced at the rate of one a year. “If I’m doing this job at the end of May next year, I’ll be the longest-serving prisons minister in 25 years,” he said. He also said he hoped he would also be seen as the most radical.
UK imposes sanctions on Russian scientists involved in producing novichok for 2018 Salisbury attack
The UK is imposing sanctions on seven Russian scientists and officials, and two organisations, involved in producing the novichok nerve agent used in the 2018 Salisbury assassination, the Foreign Office has announced.
The Russians are also being targeted because of their role in producing the toxin epibatidine that was used to poison the Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny.
Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, said:
Russia’s repeated use of chemical weapons is a sickening violation of international law and a direct threat to global security.
From the use of novichok nerve agents in Salisbury to epibatidine in Siberia, poisoning Dawn Sturgess and Alexei Navalny, Russia continues to use barbaric tools to inflict death and suffering on innocent civilians, including in Ukraine.
We will continue to call out Russia’s violations of the Chemical Weapons Convention, hold those responsible to account, and work with allies to deter further use of these dangerous weapons.
#Farage #warned #attack #establishment #unregistered #gifts #lead #harsher #punishment #politics #live #Politics
