How Catherine West became a stalking horse – then reined herself in

When Catherine West announced she would challenge Keir Starmer, she was labelled a stalking horse, the slightly arcane political slang for someone testing out a bid on behalf of others. A couple of days on, and some Labour MPs say the better equine analogy is a Grand National competitor that has shed its rider and bringing chaos to the race.Some colleagues of the north London MP are even blunter in their assessment of her attempt to bounce others into a leadership challenge by launching her own, a plan scaled back on Monday to instead involve an attempt to make Starmer set a date for his departure.“Fundamentally unserious. It has made everything worse,” one MP said

We need a voting system that serves citizens first and foremost | Letter

Your editorial (The Guardian view on Britain’s multiparty politics: the Westminster voting system needs to catch up, 6 May) summarises the position perfectly. But what about a solution?Fortunately, this has been thought of by the all-party parliamentary group for fair elections. This has been Westminster’s largest APPG since its formation a few months after the 2024 general election. More than half of its 159 members are Labour MPs, but it also includes Liberal Democrats, Greens, the SNP, Plaid Cymru, an independent and a Conservative vice-chair.The APPG is calling for the government to urgently set up a national commission on electoral reform, with a ready-made terms of reference setting out how to go about it

Investment is key to the renationalisation debate | Letters

If Julian Coman is old enough to remember the privatisation of British Gas (Reversing Thatcher’s failed legacy of privatisation can be a Labour vote-winner. If you see Keir, tell him, 5 May), he’ll surely also remember the running national joke that was British Rail, or the six-month wait to have a landline installed by the publicly owned British Telecom.His “private ownership bad, public ownership good” analysis overlooks the key point that, under either ownership model, what matters is the level of investment in the service.Pressure on regulators by successive governments to suppress investment allowances in the interests of keeping down utility bills has dwarfed the behaviours of some owners as factors in determining service levels.To argue that renationalisation will deliver substantial improvements requires one also to identify where in its over-stretched budgets the government will find the billions of pounds of extra investment on top of those currently being provided by private investors

Letter: Sir Hayden Phillips obituary

Sir Hayden Phillips took delight in nurturing and encouraging younger, junior staff – a rare quality in any walk of life.In establishing in 1992 the Department of National Heritage, where I worked for him setting up the national lottery, he created a flatter structure by removing a senior layer, so giving us all more responsibility. It was a thrilling and joyous place to work, attracting people from across Whitehall.Without the freedom that Hayden gave, and the ambition that he stimulated, I and many others would not have had the careers we had. The civil service has never consistently shone at inspirational leadership, but Hayden truly loved his staff, supported and helped them

Desperate to please but pleasing no one, Starmer’s latest reset could be his last | John Crace

Was that it? Reset number … I forget where we’re up to now. Much the same as the last reset. And probably much the same as the next reset. That’s if there is one. The signs are that most Labour MPs think they’ve seen enough

Seven people barred from coming to UK for far-right rally

Seven people hoping to attend a far-right rally in central London on Saturday have been blocked from entering the country by the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood.Keir Starmer, the prime minister, promised on Monday to block “far-right agitators” hoping to attend the Unite the Kingdom event on 16 May organised by Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.Joey Mannarino, a US-based commentator, and Valentina Gomez, a Maga influencer, had their authorisation to enter the UK withdrawn on the grounds that their presence “would not be conducive to the public good”. The identities of the other five banned people are not known.In a speech aimed at resetting his premiership, Starmer said he would ban extremists from coming to Britain to speak at the nationalist march on Saturday