Shabana Mahmood: lord chancellor with political nous unafraid to shake up system

Shabana Mahmood’s potential as a future cabinet minister was first noticed by the former deputy Labour leader Tom Watson in the 90s over tea and samosas at her family’s end-of-terrace Birmingham home.Watson, a seasoned fixer, had become a close friend of her father, Mahmood Ahmed, the chair of Birmingham Labour party. When political problems arose, Watson and fellow Labour party organisers would be guided through to comfy sofas in the family sitting room.He said the group, nearly all middle-aged men, would “start babbling” about the latest ructions and discuss how to negotiate multilayered West Midlands politics involving factions and complex community alliances.Inevitably, Ahmed would turn towards his daughter, who had appeared with a fresh pot of tea

What a leftwing leader needs to do to earn credibility | Letters

Owen Jones makes the case that a credible leftwing leader needs to win over alienated voters and dodge culture wars (The left needs to halt the UK’s slide into Farageism. This is the kind of leader who could do it, 3 April). That starts by rejecting the terms left and right – where people sat in revolutionary France’s national assembly does not accurately define today’s politics.The leadership team of any new political movement must convince voters of two things. One: “I trust these people to run the country

Call for expansion of Royal Navy surveillance after Kremlin spy devices found

Britain is “behind the curve” in tracking Russia’s deep-sea operations, an ex-minister has said, after spy sensors targeting Royal Navy submarines were found in waters around the UK.Tobias Ellwood, a former defence and Foreign Office minister, called for a huge expansion of the navy’s surveillance capability after it was revealed that a number of Kremlin spy devices had been seized by the military.He said the revelation, revealed by the Sunday Times, confirmed that Britain was “now in a greyzone war with Russia”.Vladimir Putin’s regime is believed to have been trying to spy on the navy’s four Vanguard submarines, which can carry nuclear missiles, with the sensors. The Sunday Times reported that some of the devices had been located by the Royal Navy, while others washed ashore

UK ministers consider abolishing hundreds of quangos, sources say

Ministers could introduce legislation to abolish a swathe of quangos in one go as part of the UK government’s plans to restructure the state and cut thousands more civil service job cuts, the Guardian understands.Government sources said they were considering a bill that would speed up the reorganisation of more than 300 arm’s-length organisations that between them spend about £353bn of public money.Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, has written to every Whitehall department asking them to justify each quango or risk being closed, merged, or having powers brought back into the department.Ministers will have to demonstrate the necessity of each one, operating under the presumption that these bodies will be affected unless there is compelling justification for their separate existence, sources said.Keir Starmer told his cabinet last month that they should stop “outsourcing” decisions to regulators and quangos and take more responsibility for their own departments

Badenoch draws cross-party criticism for backing Israel’s expulsion of Labour MPs

Labour and the Tories have become embroiled in a war of words after the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, defended Israel’s decision to deny two MPs entry into the country and deport them.The UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, criticised the decision to expel the Labour MPs Yuan Yang and Abtisam Mohamed, and said he had taken the matter up with the Israeli government.He was subsequently angered by Badenoch’s comment that “every country should be able to control its borders”, which was also contradicted by one of her shadow ministers.Speaking about the deportation of Mohamed and Yang, who were part of an MPs’ delegation coming to visiting humanitarian aid projects and communities in the West Bank with UK charity partners, the Conservative leader said: “I think that every country should be able to control its borders, and that’s what Israel is doing, as far as I understand.”Badenoch told Sky News’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips programme she understood they “were coming in to do something that they were not allowed to do, and so I respect that decision”

Lib Dems hoping anti-Trump stance will give them boost in local elections

The Liberal Democrats are stepping up their anti-Donald Trump messaging this weekend in the hope of using dislike of the US president among Tory and Labour voters to make big gains in England’s council and mayoral elections on 1 May.Ed Davey’s party believes it could overtake the Tories in terms of the number of councils under its control, partly by highlighting the reluctance of Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch to criticise Trump on issues such as tariffs, his dealings with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, over the war in Ukraine and his attitude to the Israel-Gaza crisis.With global stock markets tumbling after Trump’s imposition of punitive tariffs on the rest of the world last Wednesday, the local elections are set to take place in a period of economic uncertainty unmatched since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic.While local government issues will inevitably still dominate on 1 May, Trump’s actions are now rebounding directly on ordinary voters, not just in the US but internationally, as the economic clouds gather and the value of their pensions and other savings become far less certain.Yesterday – as her party continues to look for novel ways to engineer a “Trump bump” on 1 May – a Liberal Democrat MP called for a special visa route to allow Americans fleeing the Trump presidency to come to the UK