Afternoon summary
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Keir Starmer is holding a private meeting with the family of Henry Nowak this afternoon. Kemi Badenoch met Nowak’s father, mother and stepmother this morning. Afterwards she said they agreed with her about the need “to bring common sense back”. (See 11.41am.)
For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.
New trans guidance 'unworkable and unjust', Sarah Owen, chair of women and equalities committee, tells MPs
New guidance on single-sex spaces is “unworkable and unjust”, the chair of the Commons women and equalities committee has said. As the Press Association reports, Labour’s Sarah Owen said the new Equality Act 2010 draft code of practice contains inconsistencies, leaving questions about how it would work in the real world.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) statutory guidance, published in May, confirmed that single-sex spaces must be on the basis of biological sex, PA says.The supreme court ruled in April last year that the words “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer to biological woman and biological sex.
Speaking during a Pride Month debate in the Commons Owen said:
Take the latest iteration of the EHRC code of practice. The inconsistencies are in there and make it unworkable and unjust.
Challenge someone, but don’t cause harm or embarrassment challenging. How is that possible? How do you prove? How do you disprove?
Ask trans people to use a third space, but somehow get them to keep their rights to a private life.
The Luton North MP described a constituent of hers who is having to “walk considerable distances to use a toilet outside of her place of work”.
This is causing not just an emotional impact, but also a physical and potentially a financial one if she cannot remain in the place of work without being outed against her will.
Where is her right to privacy?
The minister [Olivia Bailey] spoke about the supreme court being very clear that this should not impact a trans person’s right to privacy.
Where is her right to privacy being protected? Because it’s currently not.
As PA reports, Owen also told MPs about an 83-year-old trans woman in her constituency who discharged herself from hospital because she was “terrified of being put on a man’s ward”. She asked:
Where would she have been put to be treated? Which ward would she have been put on?
She would never have felt comfortable on a man’s ward. Would it have been dignified for her to receive treatment on a man’s ward?
Owen said the government, and the EHRC, have to provide answers to the trans community, to businesses, to organisations and the public “on how this sorry saga ends and is not inflamed further”.
All I see is more litigation, more pain, more uncertainty, and more time and money spent solving a problem that most people didn’t prioritise above the actual problems the country should be dealing with, such as the 97% of reported rapes that go unpunished.
Cis male perpetrators don’t have to disguise themselves as anyone or anything to get away with the most hideous of crimes in this country, because they already are doing it, and on the whole, unfortunately, getting away with it.
This distortion of the arguments about women’s safety have had a devastating impact on trans people, with a focus on trans women, and with trans men completely forgotten from this conversation, not to mention non-binary and intersex people.
Responding to the debate, education minister Olivia Bailey said trans people’s safety matters.
It’s protected in law, and we have strengthened the hate crime laws, and we are clear that trans people should not be left without facilities, and the code does give a number of examples of how service providers can do this.
Key event
And while we’re on the subject of donations (see 11.53am and 4.34pm), a reader asked (or asked earlier):
Andrew, or anyone that knows, why do none of the Northern Ireland parties have donations accepted?
The reader is referring to the DUP, UUP, Sinn Féin and SDLP all declaring no donations.
Without knowing the details, I suspect it is because there have been no elections in Northern Ireland this year (council elections or Stormont elections), and so the parties have not had to campaign.
Also, these parties have had public funds.
It is probably not relevant, but you could also argue that people may not want to give them any money because they are doing a lousy job in Stormont at managing power sharing. Rory Carroll wrote about this a couple of months ago.
What are 'public funds' included in political donation figures and how are they allocated?
Earlier I posted the full Q1 2026 political party donation figures published by the Electoral Commission. (See 11.53am.)
That prompted various questions BTL about the ‘public funds accepted’ part of the table containing the figures. In particular, people wanted to know why the Conservatives got so much and Labour so little?
There are two main sources of money.
Short money etc
For many years money has been available to opposition parties represented in the House of Commons to enable them to function in parliament. It is there to pay for the researchers needed to brief opposition spokespeople speaking in debates, for some travel, and to enable the leader of the opposition to run a proper office. It is called Short money because Ted Short set up the scheme when he was the Labour leader of the Commons in 1975. Before that, parties had to raise the money for these activities themselves.
Any party with at least two seats, or one seat and at least 150,000 at the last general election, can qualify.
The money is allocated according to a formula taking into account the number of seats a party has, and the number of votes it got at the election. But seats count for a lot more than votes, which means the Lib Dems get a lot more than Reform UK – even though Reform UK got more votes in 2024. Here are the allocation figures for 2025/26.
There is also an equivalent in the House of Lords, called Cranborne money. In 2025/26 the Tories were allocated £888,000 from this pot, and the Liberal Democrats £443,000. Reform UK don’t have any peers, and so they don’t get anything.
There are equivalent schemes for opposition politicians in the Scottish parliament and the Northern Ireland assembly.
Labour does not qualify for Short money or Cranborne money, and that is why its Q1 public funds accepted total in today’s chart is so low.
Policy development grants
The other main source of public money is policy development grants. These were introduced in 2000, when Labour was in government, and these are available to all parties, including the government, to fund work on policies for their manifestos. All UK parties get the same (just over £300,000 in the last financial years), with smaller sums available for the Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland-only parties. The total available under this scheme is £2m, so it is worth less than Short money.
With all these schemes, parties claiming the money have to submit evidence showing they have have spent it properly. That means they won’t necessarily get the same amount every quarter.
SNP agrees to launch proceedings to try to recover £400,000 stolen from it by Peter Murrell
Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.
The Scottish National party will try to recover the £400,000 Peter Murrell stole from its accounts, after its ruling national executive committee backed a proposal to do so from John Swinney.
Meanwhile the Scotsman has reported that Murrell’s assets and funds have been frozen under a restraint order under the Proceeds of Crime act, pending his sentencing hearing later this month.
A document has been lodged with the Registers of Scotland stating that Murrell, the SNP’s chief executive for 22 years, has two pensions worth £613,500, the luxury motorhome seized at Murrell’s mother’s home, and the home he owns jointly with his estranged wife Nicola Sturgeon “up to the value of £88,632”.
John Scullion KC, Murrell’s defence advocate, told the high court earlier this week “the value of the property in terms of restrained petition suggests that there will be repayment of embezzlement in this case.”
That valuation of their former marital home at Uddingston near Glasgow implies Sturgeon has managed to protect her share of the property. The couple paid £228,000 for it in 2005.
It is unclear how the SNP’s legal action could succeed given the crown will be pursuing a proceeds of crime recovery order but the party said its solicitors will begin court action to recover the money.
An SNP spokesperson said:
Our party was betrayed by Peter Murrell and while this may take some time, if we are successful we will use that money for the purpose in which it was donated - securing Scotland’s rightful place as an independent country.
Sturgeon told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg programme on Sunday she expected that her assets would be protected:
There will now be, I would imagine, a legal process to recover the money from Peter that he embezzled from the SNP. [I] am not guilty of that embezzlement, so nothing that belongs to me should be part of that, rightly, it should not be part of that.
But will that process impact on me? Of course it will.
Swinney has been under intense pressure from opposition parties to reimburse party members and yes supporters who donated money then stolen by Murrell and agree to a Scottish parliament or Westminster inquiry into the SNP’s mishandling of its finances.
Murrell’s theft has been tangled up with Swinney’s admission that over £600,000 in donations raised to fight for a second independence referendum was swallowed up by the SNP’s general financing, and was never ring-fenced.
The fate of that £600,000 sparked the initial Police Scotland investigation which saw Murrell’s subsequent prosecution.
Europe’s far right exploit Henry Nowak murder in UK with populist rhetoric on race
Polish far-right politicians have claimed that the murder of Henry Nowak symbolises “Britain’s descent into the depths of the earth” as populists from France, Spain and Japan focused on harrowing clips of his dying moments, Rajeev Syal and Kim Willsher report.
This is from Paul Morgan-Bentley, head of forensic journalism at Channel 4 News, on today’s political donation figures.
New donation figs show the Tories got £1.1m from a donor who’s not appeared before: Mary V Doran
Turns out Mary died in 2023, aged 76. She lived in a bungalow, with no next of kin. The £1.1m was left in her will
Source (a mean one) says Tories are “the new Battersea Dogs Home”
DfE figures show private school numbers down since VAT on fees introduced - but by far less than Labour's critics predicted
The number of pupils in private schools in England has fallen to the lowest point in at least a decade, the Press Association says. PA reports:
It is the second consecutive year the number has dropped, after the government’s policy to impose 20% VAT on private school fees was introduced in January 2025.
The overall number of pupils in schools in England – including state and private schools – continued to fall, dipping below the nine million mark for the first time since 2020.
The Department for Education (DfE) data also showed the percentage of pupils who are eligible for free school meals and the number of children who are “young carers” continued to rise.
There were more than 22,000 fewer pupils in independent schools in January compared with the same point last year.
The number has decreased by 3.8% – from 582,477 in 2025 to 560,255.
This is the lowest figure in at least 10 years.
Private school pupils now account for 6.3% of the school population.
But there were 41 more independent schools at the beginning of this year compared with the last.
There were just over 8.9 million students in schools across England in January – 112,200 fewer than the same time last year.
Sam Freedman, the political commentator and a former policy adviser at the DfE, says the fall in the number of pupils going to private school is way below what the government’s opponents were saying before the VAT on private school fees policy came into force.
DfE pupil data is out today and shows that the number of private school pupils has dropped 5.6% since VAT was introduced.
Not 25% like the independent schools council predicted. Or the 50% we saw in some right-wing papers.
Note that state school numbers are down 1.9% due to falling birth rates over the same time period so the fall in private school numbers attributable to VAT is at most 3.7%.
The 50% figure came from polling, carried out by a consultancy working with private schools, published in the Daily Telegraph in 2024 shortly before the general election. The headline, referring to Labour’s plan to put VAT on private school fees, said: “Private schools will lose nearly half their pupils under Labour, poll finds.”
Updated
Starmer urges England's mayors to press on with plans to drive growth
Keir Starmer has been addressing mayors from England at a meeting of the mayoral council in York today. In a briefing issued in advance, Downing Street said he would be urging them to push on with growth plans. No 10 said:
Mayors will be urged to go further and faster, with a clear message: where local leaders bring forward credible plans to drive growth, the government will back them and get projects built.
Today’s discussions at the mayoral council come alongside a wider shift of power out of Westminster and into the hands of local leaders, including the first ever ‘right to request’ process – allowing mayors to propose new devolved powers to drive growth in their areas.
The council will play a central role in driving this agenda by ensuring local leaders have the power, backing and certainty they need to deliver at scale, at pace, and for the long term.
And Starmer said:
For too long, Britain has been held back by a system that says no, delaying projects, blocking growth and leaving communities behind.
We’re turning that on its head by backing our mayors to get Britain building again, with spades in the ground and more jobs across the country. There will always be the naysayers and the blockers, but we cannot afford to give into them - because it will be the next generation that suffers.
Burnham dismisses claims he's too worried about being liked to be able to take tough decisions facing a PM
The New Statesman has published an interview with Andy Burnham. It is by Ailbhe Rea, the magazine’s political editor, who accompanied Burnham while he was canvassing in Makerfield for the byelection. It is very long, more revealing than most Burnham interviews have been, and full of nuance. Here are the main points. But if you are at all interested, do read it in full.
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Burnham has dismissed claims that he is too worried about being liked to be able to take the tough decisions you need to take as PM. This has become one of the main criticisms voiced about Burnham since he made it clear that he wants to replace Keir Starmer, partly as a result a widely-praised long read about Burnham published last month by Joshi Herrmann, founder and editor of the Mill, an online news website covering Manchester. Herrmann concluded that Burnham has exactly the skills needed to be a very good mayor, but not necessarily a very good PM. He said:
To me, the tragedy of Burnham’s wish to return to Westminster is that it means leaving a job that seems custom designed to take advantage of his skills and to mitigate his weaknesses.
Alluding to a Logan Roy quote in Succession, Herrmann went on:
My impression after six years of writing and thinking about Andy Burnham is that he’s many good things, but he’s not a killer. He has an endearing emotional vulnerability that is rare among politicians I’ve met, and a wonderful sense of how to take hold of a moment. He’s brilliantly instinctive, as he said to me on that phone call, and he genuinely listens. He’s offered a brand of moral, pastoral leadership to the city that I think is not properly understood in modern politics and that is reflected in his popularity.
But to be prime minister – a job that involves making impossible choices every day and surrounding yourself with tough, calculating people who don’t mind asking hard questions and telling you when you’re wrong – you have to be a killer.
Rea says, when she asked Burnham about the article, she realised she had struck a nerve. Burnham told her Herrmann was “not sympathetic” and that he had not read it. But in the interview he contested the claim that he cannot take tough decisions. At one point he said:
I’ve been in politics 25 years, you know, and the idea that I just do easy things … I went to Hillsborough on the 20th anniversary [where he was heckled about Labour not approving a public inquiry into the tragedy] … I’ve taken risks on various things, you know, infected blood. Most people would say if you want to be liked, you wouldn’t take on things like that.
And at another point he said that he had raised taxes in Manchester “significantly” more than any other metro mayor, to fund the £2 cap on bus fares.
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Burnham said doing politics “the right way” was important to him. He suggested that it was not so much being popular that mattered to him as being seen to act with integrity. He explained:
If you say you’re going to do something, do it. You know, when people say I like to be liked, I like to be recognised to do things the right way. I don’t just want to do the politically expedient thing. I stood for election as mayor and said: ‘I’ll regulate the buses.’ I have regulated the buses. I went to Anfield and said, ‘I’ll fight for justice.’ I did.
He also cited the decision to campaign on the basis that he would put up taxes to fund a £2 bus fares cap (which happened) as an example of this.
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Burnham suggested that a Reform UK general election victory could lead to an “irreversible” change in UK politics. He said:
I am concerned that if a certain brand of politics is dripped into the streets, then it’s a sort of irreversible thing, or it could be with us for a long time. Look at the US and just how kind of far gone it is.
Rea said that, when campaigning, Burnham never mentioned Nigel Farage or Reform UK by name. Instead he talked to people about fighting “divisive politics”.
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Burnham said that he thought Labour’s 2024 manifesto was too restrictive on tax – but that it had to be honoured. In another point about the importance of integrity, he said:
I look back at the manifesto, and I wouldn’t have written it like that myself when it comes to tax. I think it was quite restrictive. I think people put a premium now on honesty rather than, you know, things that are crafted for political reasons.
Burnham also said “the manifesto has to be stuck to”.
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Burnham said that his view of “Manchesterism” (the term used to describe the economic revival of the city, a process which started years ago under the city council and which has continued since he has been mayor) was not just focused on getting inward investment. There had to be “good growth”, he said, which meant investors could not just “siphon out”.
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Burnham said he had “an open mind” on whether Labour should allow more oil and gas drilling from the North Sea.
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He said that, even if he had become Labour leader in 2015, leave might have still won the 2016 referendum. Some people argue that remain lost because Jeremy Corbyn was leading Labour at the time, and he was unenthusiastic about the EU and his pro-remain campaigning was relatively half-hearted. Rea said she had been told that Burnham is haunted by the sense that history might have turned out differently if he had won the 2015 Labour leadership contest. (When it started, he was the favourite.) But Burnham told Rea: “I don’t know whether 2016 may have played out differently.” Burnham also said he was a “reluctant remainer”, in part because the arrival of Polish workers caused particular problems with Catholic primary schools in his constituency being over-subscribed. Burnham is a Catholic.
At the Downing Street lobby briefing No 10 refused to comment on reports saying the long-awaited defence investment plan will be published next Thurday. The PM’s spokesperson just said that it would be coming before the Nato summit in July.
The spokesperson also refused to comment on claims that it won’t be worth the full £18bn that had been set as a target. In a story for the Times Larisa Brown and Steven Swinford report:
Sir Keir Starmer is considering watering down plans to boost defence spending by £18 billion over concerns that they are unaffordable.
The Times has been told that Starmer and Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, met on Tuesday for the second time in a week to discuss the long-delayed defence investment plan (DIP).Against a background of concern about the state of the public finances and the impact of the Iran war on the economy, the government is considering reducing the package to an extra £15 billion over the next four years.
Starmer to meet Nowak's family this afternoon, No 10 says
Keir Starmer is going to hold a meeting with the family of Henry Nowak, No 10 has said. The private meeting will take place in Downing Street this afternoon.
Here are the full political donation figures for the first quarter of 2026 from the Electoral Commission. (See 9.31am.) There are more details here.
Reform UK attracted £9.3m in donations, but the Conservatives are proud of getting £4.2m. They received money from 174 people “from a variety of backgrounds”, they say.
Kevin Hollinrake, the Tory chair, said:
Under Kemi’s leadership, the Conservative party is attracting a real breadth and depth of donors. Unlike other parties, we are not reliant on foreign based crypto-billionaires or trade union paymasters. We are backed by a wide range individual job creators and risk-takers, both large and small, across the country who make a deliberate choice about who they back to lead this country.
Badenoch says she has met with Nowak's parents and they agree with her about 'need to bring common sense back'
Kemi Badenoch has posted a message on social media saying she met Henry Nowak’s father, mother and stepmother this morning. She praises their courage, and says:
Henry’s family do not want anger to tear communities apart. They are a family who have friends across faith and race, and so did Henry. His family want his memory to help bring our society together.
Everyone knows I have strong views about how we should deal with equality under the law. What the family agreed with me on is that we need to bring common sense back, and that is what we should all be fighting for.
What bringing ‘common sense back” might actually mean isn’t set out by Badenoch in her post.
Robert Jenrick, the former Tory who is now Reform UK’s Treasury spokesperson, was doing a media round this morning. One of his former colleagues in the Conservative party, Simon Hoare, shared this thought about him on social media this morning.
At “best” Jenrick is a political chameleon. Others words beginning with C might also be appropriate. I still remember him begging for my vote in the leadership (he called me on the day of the last MPs round) when he described Kemi as being too of the right & he was the moderate
In his pooled TV interview, Keir Starmer refused to discuss the leaked messages from Darren Jones, chief secretary to the PM, to Peter Mandelson. Asked about the revelations (see 10.31am), Starmer just said:
We just had a big process in parliament where many, many documents have been put before parliament, probably the biggest exercise of transparency ever by any government. That is open now. The material is there for everybody to see.
Starmer criticises Elon Musk for trying to 'whip up division' in UK in light of Nowak murder
Keir Starmer has criticised Elon Musk for trying to “whip up division” in the UK following the murder of Henry Nowak and the conclusion of the trial of his killer.
The PM spoke out after it was revealed that Musk has written more than 110 posts retweets and replies on X, the social media platform that he owns, about British politics since last Wednesday. That is far more than he has written about SpaceX, his company which is about to launch on the stock market.
Musk champions far-right politicians and parties on X, and most of his posts have been about the Nowak case, where he has strongly endorsed the view that the student was a victim of anti-white racism by the police. Although once close to Nigel Farage, Musk is now promoting Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party, which is even more extreme and anti-migrant than Reform UK.
Starmer normally avoids commenting on Musk, who has been fiercely critical of Starmer on X since early last year, when his tweets played a huge role in putting the grooming gangs scandal at the top of the political agenda.
But today, asked about Musk, Starmer said:
We need to also assert who we are as a country, because Musk, again, has been interfering in our politics in the last few days, trying to whip up division, that is not who we are in Britain.
In Britain, we are reasonable, tolerant people.
When we have a terrible case like Henry’s case, Henry Nowak, we react calmly as his family have done.
Today the Financial Times has published a report about Musk’s recent interventions. In their story, Amy Borrett, Rachel Rees and Joel Suss say:
Elon Musk’s interventions in UK politics have reignited over the past week, prompting concerns about the influence of the world’s richest man ahead of a byelection that could trigger a change in prime minister.
Musk has written more than 110 posts, retweets and replies about British politics since last Wednesday on his social media platform X, with a focus on the murder of student Henry Nowak.
UK politics accounted for more than one-third of his X activity over the past week, according to FT analysis – almost three times the share devoted to SpaceX, even as Musk sought a $1.8tn valuation in his satellite and AI company’s highly anticipated IPO on 12 June.
Starmer was speaking in a pooled TV interview, and he criticised Musk’s interventions in the Nowak scandal after being asked about the decision by the Labour MP Jess Asato to take legal action against Musk’s xAI company over its Grok tool being used to produce a fake sexualised pictures of her.
Starmer said he fully supported what Asato was doing. He said:
Jess Asato is absolutely right in the action that she is taking. Disgusting images were created in her particular case by Grok. And I’m really pleased that we took Grok on a few months ago, because that’s the fight we should be in.
Referring to Grok turning off its sexualised image generating function earlier this year, in response to pressure from the UK government and others, Starmer said:
Taking on some of these platform providers, some of these disgusting images … we won that.
But Jess is right, she’s a parliamentarian, and I’m 100% behind the action that she has taken …
When it comes to disgusting images on Grok, we take Grok on and fight because that’s who we are as a country.
NHS to curb political symbols on uniforms after antisemitism report
The NHS is taking action to tackle antisemitism after a government-ordered report found that Jewish patients and staff face “routine ostracism” in the service, Denis Campbell reports.
Minister won't fully defend Darren Jones over embarrrassing Mandelson texts, but suggests he was exaggerating
At the start of the week, the Times reported that Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury, was thinking of standing to be the next Labour leader. The prospect of Jones replacing Keir Starmer always seemed a bit of a long shot. But today it is safe to say the Jones campaign is definitely over. It has been killed off by Tim Shipman, the Spectator’s political editor.
In an article published today, Shipman reveals some messages that Jones sent to Peter Mandelson that must have made him squirm with embarrassment. Jessica Elgot has all the details in her story here.
These messages were not disclosed on Monday, as part of the humble address release, because Jones used disappearing messages. It is also understood that he got a new phone when he moved from being a Treasury minister to being chief secretary of the PM. But the recipient of the messages will have had them too. The Cabinet Office won’t need a leak inquiry to work out where Shipman got his info.
Jones was speaking in the Commons yesterday, winding up the debate on the Mandelson files. The Shipman article was not out at that point, but in his speech Jones included an apology which would only have made proper sense to anyone (like Jones) who knew what the Spectator was about to publish. Jones said:
Did I consciously ignore the stories [about Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein] that followed Peter Mandelson, or indeed know about many of them, from many, many years ago? I do not think that I did.
Did I ever ignore warnings that were put to me about Peter Mandelson? I did not receive any, to do so.
But as I reflected on [Alex Davies-Jones’ speech in the debate, in which she read out a statement from one of Epstein’s victims], it made me think: did I at best subconsciously treat Peter Mandelson differently because I believed him to have influence and power within the Labour party? I think the answer to that question is yes, I did.
Have I benefited from that relationship in the time I have been an elected politician? I think in part the answer to that question is yes, I did.
For that I would like to apologise to the house, to the victims … and commit to then doing something about it.
Lucy Rigby, the chief secretary to the Treasury, was asked about the Jones messages in interviews this morning. Speaking to Times Radio, she said: “I don’t think it’s necessarily right to over-index on some of these messages.” Commenting on the messages where Jones was critical of colleagues, she said:
Who hasn’t come out of a work meeting at some point and sent a message to a colleague or a family member or whatever, sort of, you know, letting off steam, letting off a bit of frustration. You may well choose to exaggerate, or whatever, for effect.
But, asked specifically about the message commiserating with Mandelson on the day he was sacked, she said: “I wouldn’t have used those words.”
And, asked about it on Sky News, she replied:
You asked me how I feel about that? Not great is the honest answer.
Updated
Jenrick claims it's 'ludicrous' to say Reform UK stoking divison over Nowak murder
Robert Jenrick, the Reform UK Treasury spokesperson, was doing a media round this morning. Asked to respond to Labour claims that Nigel Farage was stoking divison in his response to the murder of Henry Nowak, Jenrick said that was a “ludicrous” claim. He said:
I was absolutely stunned by those ludicrous comments. There’s nothing that Nigel Farage has done which has encouraged division.
He has simply shown leadership in setting out the course of action that now needs to be taken to make sure that we fix this problem and treat everybody equally before the law.
In a TV address on Tuesday morning, Farage said people should respond to the killing with “pure cold rage” and he said he was afraid what would happen to Britain if “anti-white prejudice” was not stamped out quickly.
There will be one urgent question in the Commons, at 10.30am, on Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure. A Foreign Office minister will reply. Then, after business questions, Josh MacAlister, minister for children, will give a statement on a family reunion scheme for children in care.
Reform UK gets £9m in donations in first quarter of 2026, including £7m from two crypto billionaires
The Electoral Commission has published its figures for donations to political parties in the first quarter of 2026 and they show that Reform UK was given £9m. Lucy White from Bloomberg was the first with the numbers.
NEW: Reform UK has once again smashed party donation totals, raising more than £9m in the first quarter. Boosted by another £3m from Thailand-based crypto investor Harborne - just before Labour capped donations from overseas - and £4m from crypto entrepreneur Ben Delo
We knew about the Delo donation. As Rowena Mason reported in April, Delo, a British billionaire convicted in the US for failing to implement adequate anti-money-laundering controls in his cryptocurrency business, said that he had given Reform UK £4m this year.
Delo has also said that he is going to move back to the UK so that he won’t be affected by the Labour legislation imposing a £100,000 a year cap on how much people living abroad can donate to political parties.
The ban came into force on 25 March, the day it was announced by Steve Reed, the communities secretary. It will affect Christopher Harborne, another cryptocurrency billionaire who is Reform UK’s biggest donor. He is a British citizen but lives in Thailand and he gave the party £12m last year.
Today’s figures show that he also gave Reform UK £3m in the first quarter of this year – suggesting that the money was handed over shortly before the cap came into force.
Updated
Minister dismisses ‘two-tier justice’ claim in light of Henry Nowak tragedy as ‘slur’ on police
Good morning. The most interesting event of the day may well turn out to be one taking place late tonight, when Andy Burnham, the Labour candidate for Makerfield and potential next PM, takes part in a BBC byelection Question Time special. Yesterday, Burnham said that at some point today he would give a more considered response to the Henry Nowak murder, and the issues it has raised about policing and race equality. It is not clear yet whether we will get that response on QT, or before.
But this morning the government seems to be firming up its opposition to those claiming that what happened to Nowak was evidence of “two-tier justice”. Reform UK is the main party using this phrase, but some Tories have made the same argument. Yesterday, Keir Starmer said he did not accept that Britain has two-tier policing. This morning Lucy Rigby, the chief secretary to the Treasury, has been doing an interview round, and she told Sky News this allegation was a “slur” on the police. Asked about the claim, she said:
Fundamentally, I think that is a slur on the thousands of police officers that go out to work every day, putting themselves in harm’s way to serve the public, to try and prevent crime, and to keep us all safe.
The suggestion that we have two-tier policing, which suggests at its heart that the police are on a sort of systemic basis pushing the interests of one group above another – I genuinely think is a slur on all those police officers that are serving this country day and night, seven days a week.
Here is our overnight story on the Nowak controversy, by Vikram Dodd, Peter Walker and Steven Morris.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.30am: Emma Reynolds, the environment secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
9.30am: The Department for Education publishes annual figures on the number of pupils and staff in schools.
Morning: Keir Starmer is on a visit in North Yorkshire, before attending the mayoral council, a summit with mayors from England.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
Lunchtime: Peter Kyle, the business secretary, is speaking at a lobby lunch.
2pm: John Swinney, the Scottish first minister, takes questions from MSPs.
Afternoon: Kemi Badenoch is on a visit in Warwickshire.
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.
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