Politics LIVE: Badenoch's maternity pay blunder sparks blue-on-blue spat as Tory rivals weigh in

Tugendhat takes swipe at Sue Gray as Labour face fury at Tory conference

Tory leadership hopeful Tom Tugendhat has taken a swipe at Sir Keir Starmer's Chief of Staff Sue Gray as he continues to court Conservative support.

Speaking at a Conservative Women’s Organisation event, the Shadow Security Minister said: “To be fair to Sue, she’s demonstrated that she really is an impartial civil servant.

“I mean, she, after all, brought down one prime minister who was a Conservative, and now she’s working on bringing down another one who happens to be Labour.

“I think she’s demonstrating the kind of political balance that we expect for the civil service, destroying political careers, wherever they may be found.”

Robert Jenrick separately took aim at the Prime Minister.

Joining attendees at a fringe event hosted by the CPS think tank, the former Immigration Minister quipped: “The freebies are so good at this conference, it’s only a matter of time before Keir Starmer arrives.”

Ex-Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden interviewed in Tory better probe

Former Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden has been the latest Tory to find himself embroiled in the Conservative Party's election date betting scandal.

Ex-MP Craig Williams and former Downing Street Chief of Staff Liam Booth-Smith were both questioned by the Gambling Commission amid reports of betting ahead of July 4.

Sky News revealed that Dowden was questioned but a source claimed that the Hertfordshire MP was never under investigation himself.

Dowden reportedly spoke to the police to assist with their inquiries as part of their investigation into others.

This is said to have taken place in early summertime and the officers involved were part of the Gambling Commission.

The inquiry is expected to conclude in between three and six months.

Sadiq Khan's 'problems' with Keir Starmer exposed as Tories unveil masterplan to take back London

City Hall Conservatives believe Sadiq Khan's "problems" since Sir Keir Starmer entered No10 have been exposed as they look to take back the capital in 2028.

London's top Tories gathered in the ICC on the first day of the party's 2024 conference in Birmingham for a fringe meeting hosted by ConservativeHome.

Assembly Member Neil Garratt, who was chairing the event, launched a furious attack against Khan just months after the former Tooting MP returned to City Hall to serve for a third-term.

Garratt said: "He's entering his third-term. He spent two-terms as Mayor of London, every single thing that went wrong was the fault of the Government.

"He now has a new Government that has created for him two problems. Problem number one, he can't just blame the Labour Government for all the problems for the Labour Mayor.

"Problem number two, just before the Labour conference, Keir Starmer told him there is no more money, there's no more money for housing, no more money for police, no more money for 101 mad-crazy schemes that he wants money for."

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Jenrick appears to outflank Tory rivals with 'rebel speech' outside conference

Tory leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick has launched an audacious bid to outflank his Conservative challengers by holding a "rebel speech" outside of the party's 2024 conference in Birmingham.

The former Immigration Minister, who topped the second ballot of Tory MPs earlier this month, was cheered by a crowd of his supporters carrying “Jenrick for leader” placards as he arrived in Birmingham with his wife Michal Berkner yesterday.

A Jenrick campaign source confirmed the Newark MP will hold another event in a bid to shore up support ahead of the next round of voting from members of the parliamentary party.

The source told The Telegraph: “Throughout this conference, Jenrick will not shy away from the debates the party needs to have.

“He will resist the dumbing down of the contest that some seem intent on. It is ridiculous that there has been so little policy debate between the candidates.

“It’s plain wrong that the party has given each candidate just 20 minutes to set out their vision.

“He strongly believes the party needs to thrash out where it stands on the big issues facing our country, and that this should be done – respectfully – in public.

"Brushing disagreement under the carpet is a recipe for neither unity nor recovery.

“CCHQ can brand it a rebel speech if they want. They can even attempt to block it. But, really, this is just step one in bringing the Conservative party closer to the members.”

All four remaining contenders - including Kemi Badenoch, Tom Tugendhat and James Cleverly - will address the conference ahead of MPs whittling down the contenders to the final two on October 10.

Robert Jenrick slams 'selfish' Keir Starmer for 'shameful' Winter Fuel Payment cuts

Robert Jenrick has scolded Sir Keir Starmer for "taking money from poor pensioners" and "giving money to placate his union paymasters", amid Labour's scrap of the Winter Fuel Payment.

Speaking to GB News from the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, Jenrick hit out at the Labour Government and claimed Starmer is making a "bad" and "selfish" choice by paying the unions more whilst taking a key benefit away from Britain's elderly.Jenrick fumed:

"The point here is that Keir Starmer is making a choice. I think it's a bad choice, a selfish choice, and it reveals a lot about his personality and his politics.

"Giving money to placate his union paymasters, taking it away from poor pensioners - I think that's shameful."

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Lord Alli let Starmer's allies use another property after lamenting 'entitled' MPs over expenses scandal

Lord Alli has been accused of letting Sir Keir Starmer's allies stay at another luxurious London property as the Labour peer's damning comments about the MPs' expenses scandal resurface.

Alli, 59, who gave the Prime Minister £32,000 to pay for clothing, criticised MPs over the 2009 scandal.

Speaking to The Financial Times in 2011, the Labour peer suggested people who were involved in the riots that swept across the UK that year felt able to steal from shops because they believed politicians were “on the take”.

He said: “When you’re at the bottom of the heap and you see people can bankrupt your economy and still take huge bonuses, when MPs can help themselves to expenses which they think they’re entitled to but are probably not right."

Alli, who gave Starmer access to his £4million Soho townhouse, also invited senior aides and MPs to visit the property for meetings ahead of the 2024 General Election.

Starmer's Chief of Staff Sue Gray reportedly held separate meetings at the property, The Times has claimed.

The total number of properties owned by Alli that were used by Labour MPs now stands at three, with the Prime Minister using his £18m Covent Garden penthouse for his son's studies and Angela Rayner spending time at his £2m Manhattan apartment on holiday.

There is no suggestion of wrongdoing by Lord Alli but the row over his gifts has damaged the Government’s popularity and overshadowed Labour's annual party conference in Liverpool earlier this week.

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Yousaf accused of breaking ministerial code after parents-in-law put on 'priority list' for Gaza evacuation

Humza Yousaf has been accused of breaking the ministerial code after using his office to lobby Whitehall to put his parents-in-law on a "priority list" for evacuations from Gaza.

Official documents have revealed the former Scottish First Minister attempted to get his family moved "nearer the front of the queue" as his parents-in-law sought refuge via neighbouring Egypt.

Documents, released through Freedom of Information requests, revealed Yousaf's private office tried to lobby Foreign Office officials and Ministers.

Yousaf secured a personal phone call with former Foreign Secretary James Cleverly on November 1.

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Kemi Badenoch makes her feelings clear on Robert Jenrick after making 'incorrect' migration claims

Kemi Badenoch has vowed to crack down on "free speech boundaries" as she criticised the "messy" legislation put in place by the outgoing Conservative government.

The Tory leadership hopeful spoke to GB News from the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, where she claimed that the party are "talking right, but governing left".

When asked by Tom if she believes Jenrick should receive a "yellow card" for taking aim at her, Badenoch responded: "I’m very happy to correct the record, but it shows that he's not actually reading or listening to what I'm saying.

"Whenever people do things that are about other candidates, people can see I'm just focused on my own campaign, and it's for the party authorities to decide."

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Keir Starmer is 'already destroying Britain' with his 'socialist control', Tom Tugendhat claims

Sir Keir Starmer is "already starting to destroy Britain" and is a "clear socialist" keen to "take control", Tom Tugendhat has claimed.

Speaking to GB News from the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, the Tory leadership hopeful took aim at the Prime Minister and claimed he will "be standing to be Prime Minister in four years' time".

Hitting out at the Labour Government, Tugendhat told GB News that the Prime Minister's "socialism" and "control" is "very clear", and they plan to "take control away from the British people".

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Tory chief issues grovelling apology after ‘giving Reform UK oxygen’ in election catastrophe

Tory Party chairman Richard Fuller will today admit to having “given Reform UK oxygen” in a grovelling apology following the Conservatives’ catastrophic 2024 General Election result.

Fuller, who held onto his North Bedfordshire seat by 5,414 votes, will use his keynote speech at the ICC in Birmingham to apologise to activists after the Tory Party was reduced to just 121 MPs on 24 per cent of the vote.

The result, worse than Sir John Major’s in 1997, was confounded by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK as the populist party returned five MPs and received 14 per cent of the vote.

In his apology, Fuller is expected to say: “I am profoundly sorry to you, the members of the Conservative Party.”

He added: “What matters now is that we learn from those difficult days and draw inspiration and insights on how we rebuild.”

The 62-year-old, who previously held the seat of Bedford from 2010 to 2017, is also expected to concede the need to win back supporters from Reform UK.

“We gave them oxygen,” he will say. “We gave them space.”

However, Fuller will likely argue that the next Tory Party leader will win back supporters lost to both Reform UK and the Liberal Democrats.

The Tory Party remains split on whether to focus on retrieving the 25 per cent of 2019 Tory voters who backed Reform UK on July 4 or the seven per cent of those who instead supported the Liberal Democrats.

It is difficult to fully know whether Reform UK voters would support the Tory Party again.

However, given almost 80 per cent of the populist party’s voters backed Boris Johnson, it is reasonable to believe that more than 100 seats were lost due to a Reform UK candidate contesting the seat.

Tory leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick is regarded as the key candidate to watch in the fight for the right.

The ex-Immigration Minister, who vowed to put Reform UK “out of business”, appeared to outflank Reform UK by announcing plans for mass deportations of illegal immigrants.

Despite hemorrhaging support to Farage, the marginal numbers who instead sided with the Liberal Democrats ensured Sir Ed Davey returned 72 MPs to the House of Commons.

Writing in The Times ahead of the first day of conference, former Prime Minister Theresa May claimed that the Tories had spent “too long tacking to the right in order to appease potential Reform voters” and “forgot that we are not a right-wing party but a centre-right party”.

She added “Just as Ingebrigtsen was focused on Kerr and failed to see that his action against him would open up other threats, so the Conservative Party has been focused on Reform and failed to see the threat from the Liberal Democrats – losing 60 seats to them at the election.”

Boris Johnson no longer sure about 'medieval' lockdowns as ex-PM convinced Covid was 'botched experiment'

Boris Johnson has said he is no longer sure about "medieval" lockdowns as the former Prime Minister becomes increasingly convinced Covid was a "botched experiment" from a Chinese lab.

Johnson, 60, described pandemic restrictions as "literally medieval in their savagery and consequences" as he likened himself to King Canute and questioned whether it was possible for Whitehall to "repel the waves of a highly contagious disease".

Writing in his explosive tell-all memoir 'Unleashed', the former Prime Minister appeared to demonstrate a significant change of thinking compared to the time he was leading the UK's response to the pandemic.

At the Covid inquiry last December, Johnson acknowledged "appalling harms on either side of the decision" and apologised for his mistakes.

However, with extracts of his memoir being serialised in The Mail on Sunday, Johnson seemingly took a harsher approach on the effectiveness of lockdowns.

“It was only later that I started to look at the curves of the pandemic around the world - the double hump that seemed to rise and fall irrespective of the approaches taken by governments”, he said.

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James Cleverly launches scathing attack on David Lammy's 'identity politics'

James Cleverly has launched a scathing attack on Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Labour's desire for "tokenistic identity politics", claiming the minister "made it all about him" during his recent trip to the UN General Assembly.

During his speech to delegates at the United Nations' HQ in New York City, Lammy focussed his statement on his African heritage and how his ancestors "rose up and fought in a great rebellion of the enslaved".

Hitting out at Lammy, Conservative leadership hopeful James Cleverly claimed the Labour Party are "bruised" by the diversity of the outgoing Tory cabinet, and only care about "tokenistic identity politics".

Cleverly told GB News: "It's all about David, isn't it? I cannot believe the UK Foreign Secretary went to the United Nations in a debate about Ukraine, and somehow managed to make it about himself.

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Labour to end BBC licence fee prosecutions that 'unfairly penalise women'

Ministers are preparing to end BBC licence fee prosecutions amid claims that they unfairly prosecute women.

Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, and Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, are understood to agree that failure to pay the licence should no longer be a criminal offence.

Nearly 1,000 people are prosecuted every week for not paying their licence fee, which costs £169.50.

This made it the most common crime in the country, second only to motoring offences.

Of that amount, 70 per cent are women, with concerns being raised that they are being unfairly pursued.

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JK Rowling weighs in on Duffield debacle - 'Keep her name out your mouth!'

JK Rowling has clashed with Labour MP Nadia Whittome over Rosie Duffield's decision to resign the Labour whip with "immediate effect".

Duffield, 53, penned a blistering resignation letter to Sir Keir Starmer, accusing the Prime Minister of being embroiled in a "sleaze" scandal and enacting "cruel policies".

Rowling, a longstanding ally of Duffield and fellow women's rights activist, took to social media to blast Whittome after the Nottingham East MP criticised Duffield.

Whittome, who differs with Duffield on issues of gender, said: "No matter your views on her stated reasons for quitting, Rosie Duffield has made a political career out of dehumanising one of the most marginalised groups in society.

She added: "She should never have been allowed the privilege of resigning. Labour should have withdrawn the whip long ago."

Weighing in on the row, Rowling wrote: "Rosie Duffield was one of the few female Labour politicians with the guts to stand up for vulnerable women and girls, while self-satisfied numbskulls like you fought to give away their rights and spaces. Keep her name out of your mouth."

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