On 12 March 2006, readers of the Sunday Times learned that Dr Chai Patel, a businessman who had planned to give Labour a straightforward donation, had been asked — shortly before being told a peerage was coming his way — to make it an unsecured loan instead. Nothing else about the transaction
Somewhere inside the Cabinet Office there is a position, unpublished in full but summarised often enough, explaining why the government will not build a kill switch for artificial intelligence. The phrase is doing work. It makes the idea sound like something from a Bond film, a red button under glass,
For the best part of a year, two undercover reporters worked their way into Reform UK's fundraising circle, posing as wealthy Americans with British connections looking to back the right horse. It ended, in September, with a lunch in Birmingham during conference week — Nigel Farage at the table,
Ben Delo wrote his cheque to Reform UK and then wrote an article about it, which is the correct order of operations for a donor who wants credit as well as access. In the Telegraph he explained that he wanted "a fair fight and a level playing field"
On the Today programme this week, Kemi Badenoch was asked what happens to the people her housing benefit cuts land on. "Without national security, there aren't going to be any benefits," she said. "We're all going to be in danger, far more people
The footage is not complicated. A senior Reform aide, at a lunch arranged by people posing as an American donor and his British-based son, discusses whether that son might funnel £500,000 to the party, a sum that, structured that way, would fall foul of the rule that only permissible
On Tuesday afternoon Ed Miliband stood at the despatch box and told the House of Commons that Britain would ban the import of goods from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, sanction the financiers of settlement expansion, forbid the advertising of settlement property in the UK, and pause free
Angela Rayner stood up in the Commons to announce that a policy she introduced, then handed to a successor who expanded it, has now been paused by the government she still serves in, for reasons that amount to this: our lawyers are worried, and the new prime minister may want
On the first day of September, David Lammy stood up as Foreign Secretary and announced restrictions on trade with West Bank settlements. It read like a decision: a minister, a microphone, a policy with his name attached. It wasn't quite that. Behind the announcement sits a Trade Remedies
Robert Jenrick stood on a stage in Birmingham and promised to be careful. Reform UK, he told the conference, would cut £80bn of public spending within five years, and would do it "in a careful way, not a cack-handed way." He wants tax cuts too, starting with a
On 27 June 2012, Nick Clegg stood at the dispatch box to introduce the House of Lords Reform Bill, and for a few weeks that summer it looked as though something might actually happen. The bill was not a sketch. It proposed a 300-member chamber, 80 per cent elected by
Friday morning at the NEC in Birmingham, delegates were queuing for photographs with a cardboard cutout of Nigel Farage while, somewhere off camera, James Orr and Dan Jukes were clearing their desks. Two senior Reform UK officials, gone within hours of a Channel 4 broadcast, over a sum that would