There are ten pages of Lord Mandelson’s 2003 birthday message to the late convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein (Mandelson, the UK’s ambassador to the US in Washington, appointed by the PM, says he much regrets ever being introduced to Epstein). Here is the first Second

Quadrature Capital Ltd made a £4m donation to Labour on 28 May 2024. It was reported to the Electoral Commission on 30 July 2024. It has only just been revealed by Open Democracy. I have just looked up Quadrature’s UK accounts. The firm says it’s receives remuneration for “investment management services” and that profits are driven by “the performance and assets of the funds under management”. According to its most recent filings (see attached) it paid tax of a paltry £5.3m in 2022/3 on profits of £231m and just £35m of tax on profits made in the previous year of £560m. In other words it has been paying a fraction of what was the UK corporation tax rate of 19% - which at the time was low by UK standards. There will be Labour members and supporters who will be surprised and disappointed that the party is funded by a business that pays considerably less in tax than the official rate Attached is Quadrature’s more detailed explanation of the seemingly low tax it reported

Downing St has taken the highly unusual step of declassifying the list of Boris Johnson’s proposed peers that was approved by the House of Lords Appointments Commission (attached). They did this to “prove” that the PM had not lied to Johnson when telling him he would approve… the ex PM’s list, when they met earlier this month - and to reinforce Downing St’s claim that Sunak had not interfered to prevent Alok Sharma, Nadine Dorries or Nigel Adams receiving peerages. But it does not add up. The important points are 1) that this list was sent to the PM…

Johnson’s peerages for ultra loyalists. Not clear whether Dorries and Sharmer asked that they be removed from list. If so it seems unlikely Dorries will get now get a deferred one given she today triggered by-election Sunak needs like hole in head. Downing St says list… is nothing to do with them. PM’s press secretary: “As is convention, the Prime Minister forwarded the former Prime Minister’s peerage list to HOLAC unaltered. HOLAC then passed back their approved list. The Prime Minister then accepted HOLAC's approved list and forwarded…

The seizure of Telegraph and Spectator by Lloyds is a humiliating close to the Barclay family's control of two trophy media assets. Aidan and Howard Barclay have been removed from the businesses, because debts running to hundreds of million pounds haven't been serviced... The legal transfer of control to Lloyds happened in last couple of hours. The debt was originally provided by and still sits in Lloyds' Bank of Scotland subsidiary. It's like watching the slowest motion car crash in history, because the debt or leverage all stems from...

Too much of government is arguably
aimed at clearing up supposed problems of their own making. An example is today's announcement by Braverman to abolish the right of overseas students on undergraduate and non-research courses to bring spouses and children to the UK. 🧵 1/18 Here is the important background.
In their 2019 general election manifesto, Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party pledged to reduce net migration to the UK to less than the 212,000 per annum prevailing when they wrote that manifesto. 2/18

Sue Gray suspended co-operation with the Cabinet Office investigation into the circumstances of her departure because she found out the investigation was already using info - on dates of her meetings with Starmer etc - that she had supplied to ACOBA via the Cabinet Office. She…

https://twitter.com/peston/status/1653451667583688704

viewed this, understandably, as a breach of process and confidentiality. This hijack of her ACOBA disclosure also undermined the impartiality of ACOBA, the advisory body on how long government and Whitehall defectors should stay in the wilderness. Gray’s…

By the way, when Deputy PM Dowden says Sue Gray has chosen not to supply information to a civil service investigation into the circumstances of her departure, I am not sure that's sinister. My understanding is it's because that information will be supplied to Dowden and... Cab Sec Simon Case via ACOBA - the government body that advises on whether ministers and senior officials should spend time in the wilderness before taking new jobs. She has given ACOBA all relevant info on her talks with Starmer and Labour, and that will be passed back to...

More or less the entire thrust of Jeremy Hunt’s first official budget today is to increase the growth rate of the economy over coming years and prevent long-term stagnation. 1/17 Ever since the financial crash of 2007-8, growth in the UK has been significantly lower than in the preceding 15 years, by at least a third. 2/17

Many have remarked on the seeming contradiction between Lord Sugar’s continuing role as Apprentice host and Lineker’s suspension, despite Sugar’s public attacks on Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour between 2017-19. For what it’s worth, the BBC regards Lineker as somehow “representing” it… in a way that it thinks is not true of Sugar. But I am not sure this argument is sustainable. Sugar was a successful businessman before working for the BBC, as Lineker was a world class striker, but he would not have had the same impact on the public consciousness, often…

Gary Lineker was pulled off air by the BBC because he refused to issue a public apology for his tweets criticising the government’s Illegal Migration Bill, according to sources close to him. Lineker rejects the idea he breached social media guidelines, which is what… today’s BBC statement claims - partly because his contract does not contain those guidelines. Also the BBC’s statement more-or-less confirms he has not been subject to such guidelines because it says he won’t be back on MOTD till “there is an agreed and clear position…

One of the PM’s answers at #PMQs made my jaw drop. It was his response to the DUP leader @J_Donaldson_MP - who said he wanted a change to the Brexit treaty to take Northern Ireland out of the EU’s single market for goods. Rather than confront the DUP leader with the facts,… which is that there is zero chance of that, Sunak implied he agreed with Donaldson and said reforms to address the “democratic deficit” in Northern Ireland was at the heart of what he and his colleagues are negotiating with Brussels. Really? Surely the PM…

Johnson’s Northern Ireland Protocol Bill may be what blows up Sunak’s attempt to reform the NI Protocol. On the one hand, the EU won’t do a deal with him if he doesn’t scrap it. On the other, Johnson, Braverman and other Tory Brexiters are saying he must permanently… keep it as a reserve power with which to pummel the EU. In the end Sunak will have to choose between the Johnson-led Tory faction that loathes him, but which he can ill-afford to provoke, and an EU that looked to him to be a welcome break from that anti-EU faction. If…

Public sector borrowing in the 10 months to the end of January was £30.6bn less than the Chancellor expected, based on OBR forecasts, just in November. This will ratchet up pressure on him from Tory MPs to cut taxes in the March budget and from public sector unions to… agree more generous pay settlements. Jeremy Hunt is trying to fend off the pressure! He says “with debt at the highest level since the 1960s, it is vital we stick to our plan to reduce debt over the medium-term…It is crucial to reduce the amount spent on debt interest”.

Matt Hancock was paid £400,000 before tax by ITV for his appearance on “I’m a Celebrity”, although his entry in the register of MPs’ interests say he was paid £320,000. 🧵1/4 I asked Matt Hancock to explain the discrepancy. He said he received £320,000, and gave no further information. 2/4

The expected changes to configuration of the economic side of government will be announced mid morning. Four departments will emerge where there are three. There’ll be a new energy dept to focus on UK energy security and a new science and technology dept, which Sunak has… signalled for some time as a priority. The business dept loses energy and re-gains trade (the DTI reborn). DCMS loses “digital” to the science and tech dept and returns to being simply Culture, Media and Sport. So there’s a new addition of one to the Secretaries of...

One of Liz Truss’s big lessons from the economic disaster of her short time as PM is that there should be “more opportunity for the government itself to be creating the [economic] forecasts”. That is she wanted to be able to mark her own homework rather than be subject… to the deficit forecasts of the @OBR_UK. This is a slightly curious argument especially since she and Kwarteng refused to let the OBR generate forecasts about the impact on the deficit of their unfunded tax cuts. But more importantly she is suggesting - which…

Liz Truss is completely right about one thing. It is astonishing that the Bank of England, the Pension Regulator and HM Treasury were so wrong footed by pension funds’ fire sale of government bonds and other assets as a result of their massive over-use of LDI hedging… strategies. This was the most serious regulatory failure since the 2007/8 banking crisis. As Truss says, it contributed to the very real danger that the UK government would be unable to service its debts after investors reacted badly to her mini budget. This does not mean…

This leapt out at me from HMRC boss Jim Harra's evidence to the PAC about Zahawi. He was asked by @Meg_HillierMP about when tax assurance commissioners adjudicate on tax settlements. He said: "I suspect you are referring to a particular case" - which means the Zahawi... case. He continues: "We have published our code of governance for how we govern decisions in disputes with taxpayers, and when the tax assurance commissioners and other commissioners will make the decision. And all cases are subject to that governance without exception". You...

One part of @nadhimzahawi’s statement about his multi-million pound YouGov tax settlement, which included a penalty, puzzles me. He says HMRC concluded he was “careless” in his tax arrangements rather than being “deliberate”. His… statement implies this “carelessness” is about the division of founder shares in the polling company YouGov between him and his dad - who had no management role at YouGov - when the shares were placed in an offshore trust. What I can’t understand is how anyone…

If the National Education Union votes to strike today - which seems likely - that will be a huge headache for the government, and will be massively disruptive to parents and the functioning of the economy. 🧵 1/9 It will be the biggest vote in this winter of discontent by any group of public sector workers. There are 350,000 teachers eligible to vote and a mandate for strike action requires a huge 175,000 to have voted either yea or nay and 140,000 to have voted yea. 2/9