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The Battle for Mid Beds is gloriously dirty, with Sunak increasingly hopeful Labour and Lib Dem mud wrestling could let him retain Nadine Dorries' abandoned realm. I'm told Tory focus [...]

Incapable of feeling shame, Liz Truss is 'doing a Thatcher' and meeting Tory candidates to build a cadre of next-generation MPs sympathetic to her failed economics. The 'lunch with Liz' [...]

Most village fetes are larger than the tiny exhibition area at the Lib Dem's Bournemouth conference, with Dignity in Dying and Wessex Water among the few outsiders buying space. The [...]

Globe-trotting Keir Starmer returned to Earth with trade unions pushing for workers' rights to include those of Sam Tarry, the MP partner of Labour's deputy leader, Angela Rayner. High-stakes negotiations [...]

SNP chat is of Scottish and Westminster leaders Humza Yousaf and Stephen Flynn hoping to cajole the expelled MP Angus MacNeil back into the fold to prevent him running in [...]

So good so far for Sue Gray. Starmer's steal from Whitehall is impressing shadow ministers with textbook propriety in meetings. If he's no-drama Starmer, then his new chief of staff [...]

The ghosts of premierships past continue to spook Rishi Sunak. No 10 has asked Tory HQ to keep it briefed on the self-justification tour of Truss, and loopy Liz's next [...]

Nursing cuts, bruises and wounded pride, a Commons and Lords rugby team captained by the Lib Dem peer Dominic Hubbard, aka the 6th Baron Addington, is holding an inquest after [...]

Desperate times, desperate measures in Tamworth, where Tories are scrambling for a by-election candidate after Christopher Pincher's resignation. Eddie Hughes, selected to stand in the vacant seat at the general [...]

Boris is dead. He passed away peacefully after a distinguished life. Not Johnson, obviously. The ex-PM isn't reputable. It's Boris the 15year-old jackapoo, owned by ex-defence minister Alec Shelbrooke. Doggy [...]

Starting on the railways only after a false start in the construction industry, train-stopping electrician Mick Lynch quipped at a TUC fringe event that he'd be general secretary of Unite [...]

Largely slipping under the radar of Starmer's reshuffle, Fabian Hamilton's removal and the abolition of his post as shadow minister for peace and disarmament beat the final Jeremy Corbyn-era ploughshare [...]

Tory morale was lowered not raised by the recent away day at earth-shifter JCB's Midlands HQ. Back in Westminster one participant described the path to victory outlined by the strategist [...]

Wry Labour smiles after Keir Starmer, stung by Unite union firebrand Sharon Graham's jibe that he's a Blair tribute act, denied the charge with a classic Tonytastic line. Pushing back [...]

Rishi Sunak putting sweary Gillian Keegan on the naughty step reflects the battered PM's hardening view that few of his ministers are any good. It's an opinion widely shared by [...]

Swallowing her pride, Lisa Nandy has accepted her demotion in Keir Starmer's reshuffle rather than spitting out her dummy and the switch is bitter-sweet. The word in the Labour Party [...]

Cabinet ministers gripe that Jeremy Hunt's letter inviting bids for the Autumn Statement stipulated that all requests must be to spend other people's money (eg pension funds), as the Chancellor [...]

Armando Iannucci's The Thick of It is a docudrama next to the farcical reality of a crumbling Conservative government, yet the show has inspired a No 10 salvage operation. Keeping [...]

Chess champion Rachel Reeves thinks several moves ahead, ruling out wealth taxes in the Telegraph before appearing at a Financial Times conference disrupted by youthful Green New Deal Rising activists [...]

Westminster wit Kevin Brennan is pulling Northern Irish unionist MPs' legs. The Cardiff West Labour MP asked if they're worried that Just Stop Oil is giving the colour orange a [...]

Brown protege Douglas Alexander, who is planning a Westminster return by retaking East Lothian from the SNP, has irritated the SW1 sisterhood. Wee Dougie's crime was to overlook Labour's Selby [...]

Foundering stop-the-boater Suella Braverman, a Home Secretary who spent the summer trying to put deeper clear blue water between herself and Labour, is the partisan's partisan. One of 850 guests [...]

On a flight to Edinburgh (don't tell the Scottish Greens) the pilot introduced himself to Gordon Brown as a former student of the Labour peer Stewart Wood, onetime Oxford tutor [...]

Still licking his wounds after Labour crashed in the west London parliamentary contest he drove, the shadow justice secretary Steve Reed will wince at the dark humour of colleagues, their [...]

He couldn't get her to go, now Rishi Sunak can't shake off Nadine Dorries. The Prime Minister's would-be assassin, accused of rarely visiting Mid Beds or speaking in parliament, is [...]

Tory wannabe candidates are revolting. One on the approved list grumbled that they had been ordered to pay at least four visits to a by-election seat. When selection is increasingly [...]

Labour's all-white male line-up for four forthcoming by-elections (should dithering Nadine Dorries ever get around to resigning in Mid Beds) is upsetting socialist sisters. Over at the Lib Dems, the [...]

The Tories' deputy chair '30p Lee' Anderson swerved the launch of the ultra-reactionary New Conservatives parliamentary group due to a 'terrible sick bug'. It was, gasped a horrified One Nation [...]

Under the cosh and fearing suspensions, Labour lefties seeking fresh allies are putting it about that Starmer might not appoint Angela Rayner as his deputy PM. Brown never gave the [...]

The latest Labour sun-and-spritzer natter on the terrace is about how Keir Starmer had started by being close to Gordon Brown but is now nearer to Tony Blair. The party's [...]

Having bought a house in Hartlepool, where he is plotting to unseat Tory by-election snatcher Jill Mortimer and deny Labour hopeful Jonathan Brash, the Reform UK party head Richard Tice [...]

The dwindling pack of Johnsonsite hounds threatening to deselect Tories who voted to condemn Boris the liar jogged the memory of ex-Lib Dem MP Nick Harvey. He recalled how in [...]

Muffled alarm bells are ringing at Pestminster after a female Labour MP named 31 male members of the House of Commons on a list of shame. The roster was posted [...]

Rhondda nimbler Chris Bryant going nowhere is bad news for footloose colleague Beth Winter. Bryant, the chair of the Commons Standards Committee, was briefly linked with a back-to-the-future return to [...]

Beleaguered Rishi Sunak is braced for another dishonours scandal with the Liz Truss resignation list, whispered by civil servants to be pencilled for release on the last day of parliament [...]

Labour grandee Dame Margaret Beckett led 60 MPs, peers and former parliamentarians into a Whitehall pub to celebrate Nick 'Newcastle' Brown's 40 years in Westminster. The knees-up was a defiant [...]

Chicken-run former Tory minister Eddie Hughes is flapping from butchered Walsall North to a fresh, safer perch in Tamworth, currently occupied by Chris Pinchen Party HQ is praying Pincher 'doesn't [...]

The short-lived chancer of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng, who cost the nation 30bn [pounds sterling], berated a TalkTV organiser when his cab was a few minutes late. 'This is poor,' [...]

The woman in the video dancing to 'Fairytale of New York' at a bash at Tory HQ during Covid restrictions was lobbyist Malin Baker Bogue, daughter of an American squillionaire. [...]

The first grumbles are being heard in a backlash against Penny 'Biceps' Mordaunt as the coronation swordswoman soars in Conservative popularity polls. At least two Tories have criticised the Leader [...]

EU flags are suddenly fluttering in a picturesque corner of Oxfordshire. The outbreak of a circle of 12 golden stars on a blue background hoisted on poles above ancient homes [...]

Over in Labour-land, the betting is that Partygate investigator Sue Gray will receive a six-month cooling-off ruling from Acoba, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, allowing her to start as [...]

Lionised by culture warriors as an anti-woke martyr after losing a school job for repeatedly misgendering a transgender pupil, being dismissed from another for a YouTube video in which he [...]

Now living rent-free in the head of Tory Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen, the Labour MP Andy McDonald is like a Rottweiler with a bone. The member for Middlesbrough, a [...]

The old New Labour band continues to reform. Expelled during the Corbyn interregnum for voting Lib Dem in the 2019 European elections, Alastair Campbell is poised to rejoin his old [...]

Starved of Russian roubles, Rishi Sunak's launched a Conservative Party lottery. First prize includes, seriously, a ten-minute phone call with the PM. Is the second prize half an hour? Kevin [...]

'Absolute nightmare', 'loose cannon' and 'law unto herself' are three of the more printable descriptions of freewheelin' Suella Braverman's home secretaryship. These comments come not from exasperated civil servants, but [...]