After Reeves and Starmer desperately tried to revive faith in investors in St Paul’s Cathedral’s crypt last night, they’ll be waking up to some grim reading. The talk of tax rises in the upcoming Halloween Autumn Statement has left bosses nervously counting the cost. According to the Office for National Statistics, annual wages grew by just 3.8% in the three months to August. The slowest rate since the pandemic…
Meanwhile, Britain’s unemployment rate edged down to 4% and vacancies plummeted by 34,000 to 841,000, the lowest since spring 2021. Payroll numbers aren’t looking much better either, with 35,000 fewer workers employed between July and August. Labour’s doom-mongering and tax hike chatter has businesses running scared…
Hacks are busy writing up the guest list for Starmer’s “glitzy event” in St Paul’s Cathedral this evening to close the one-day investment summit. The King and Elton John are due to attend…
What they don’t mention is that the dinner, to be cooked by three Michelin-starred chef Clare Smyth, is being held in a repository for dead bodies. The Crypt at St Paul’s is the only seated dining venue large enough for the delegates. More grave than gold-digging…
The Crypt is usually hired out for about £10,000 and is advertised proudly as “the final resting place of some of the world’s greatest heroes, poets and scientists.” Labour’s skill in optics continues to be on display as it attempts to resurrect UK investment from a place where the dead go to be buried…
The debate between Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick on The Sun’s Never Mind the Ballots has been pulled, just over a week before it was set to air next Thursday. Naturally, there’s spin coming from both leadership camps as to why…
Guido hears Kemi dropped out having complained of host Harry Cole being “overly-critical” of her in previous interviews, while Team Kemi insist she was “happy to do” the debate, and that it was NewsUK who pulled it. BBC Question Time have offered to fill the slot, which Jenrick has already accepted. Wherever the debate, co-conspirators can be sure to expect some blue-on-blue attacks...
Another day, another Labour sleaze scandal. Guido is told Labour MP for York Outer Luke Charters recently handed a cushy job to Owen Trotter, a Labour donor who’s coughed up over £55,000 to the party since 2019. Trotter, who chucked nearly £8,000 Charters’ way just this summer for his campaign – all properly declared – now conveniently finds himself as the MP’s Parliamentary Office Manager. It seems Charters has followed in the footsteps of others in the party with donors elevated to plum positions…
Unsurprisingly, local Tories are furious. Chris Steward, Leader of the Conservative Group on York Council, said:
“Luke Charters is the latest Labour MP to throw his morals down the toilet. Why on earth has he given a job in Parliament to a man who handed him almost £8,000? Luke urgently needs to clarify whether Owen Trotter is being paid by the taxpayer in his role as Office Manager. We also need to know what process was followed in appointing him to this role and whether the job was fully opened up to other candidates.”
Trotter certainly has a lot on his plate outside his new role. He’s already a Managing Partner at Key Capital Partners, a Leeds-based private equity firm involved in private healthcare, and also serves on the governing body of the University of York. He also stood to be the Labour candidate for North Yorkshire Mayor in 2023, though clearly didn’t make the cut. He’s finally made it into the walls of Westminster now though…
Guido contacted both offices of Luke and Owen for a comment.
Ellie Reeves has ‘updated’ the Commons on rule changes Labour is pursuing in the ongoing freebiegate scandal. Reeves blames the Tories for an anodyne discrepancy between ministerial declarations and MP declarations…
Reeves says the government will close Tories’ “freebie loophole” with a new version of the register of ministers’ gifts and hospitality – to function on a “broadly equivalent” basis to the MP register. The ministerial register is only different in that the value of gifts is not declared and it is published every quarter as opposed to every fortnight. Altering that system does nothing to address Labour’s rank hypocrisy over months of freebies revelations…
Seeing as the Tories managed to get an Urgent Question in Shadow Paymaster General John Glen asked Reeves for a few clarifications, including:
Reeves launched on the Tories in response and said she’d “take no lectures” as Labour backbenchers are rolled out to list historic Tory freebie-taking. Pressed on Swiftgate, Reeves stuck to the line that the top-level security motorcade was an “operational matter” for the police, despite the fact that the Attorney General, Mayor of London, Sue Gray, and the Home Secretary all personally got involved in lobbying the Met. Labour’s lines on the latest freebiegate scandal are going as well as all the last ones…
The Guardian reported last week that the Treasury was toying with hiking Capital Gains Tax to anywhere from 30% to 39%. Triggering rampant speculation with no tangible firefighting effort from the government…
Wealth advisers have reported a sharp spike in the number of business owners looking to sell up and leave the UK ahead of a CGT raid at the budget. A quarter of firms polled by wealth mangers Evelyn Partners said they were fast-tracking their share offloads in response to a possible tax hike, while directors at UK-listed copmanies have sold off £440 million of shares since Labour came to power. Over double the value of disposals in the previous six months…
Only now Starmer is attempting to calm flighty investors by telling Bloomberg’s Stephanie Flanders that the 39% figure is “getting wide of the mark.” Funnily enough he broke his usual no-comment-on-the-budget policy to assuage those concerns over capital gains before immediately swerving a question on whether he’d hike Employer National Insurance. Curious…
It is widely known that, according to the government’s own modelling, a 10% hike in CGT rates would actually cost Treasury coffers £2 billion in a couple of years. When CGT rates were hiked by 10% in 1988, revenues had dropped by more than a half three years later. No wonder investors are fleeing…
Former leader of the SNP in Westminster Ian Blackford told Times Radio why he believes Nicola Sturgeon’s claim that she spent no time in the kitchen and therefore didn’t see any of her husband’s purchases:
“She doesn’t have a passion for cooking.”