Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has been paid £189,000 for a part-time job as a “brand ambassador” for a gold bullion firm, it has emerged today.Rowena Mason revealed that Farage had taken on the job in a Guardian story last month, but we now know how much the MP is being paid because he has declared the job in the latest edition of register of MPs’ interests.Farage says, since being elected as an MP, he has been spending no more than four hours a month doing this job, although he was also working for the company before the election, he says.Farage also earns considerable sums as a GB News presenter and the Mail has calculated that, since the election, he has earned more than £500,000 from second jobs, in addition to the £91,000 a year he earns as MP for Clacton.The register also confirms that, as well as being broadly aligned politically with Elon Musk, Farage and some of his Reform UK colleagues earn money from Musk’s social media company X by providing it with popular tweets.

X pays users for content that generates engagement, and populist politicians can generally do this very effectively,Farage say he received £140 from X in December, taking his total earnings from the platform since the election to £5,481,Lee Anderson has received £1,720 from the company since the election,And Rupert Lowe has been paid £4,644 by X since the election,Donald Trump has described Elon Musk as a “smart guy” and played down the significance of Musk’s scathing online comments about Keir Starmer.

(See 5,54pm,)Tories have privately accused Robert Jenrick of stoking divisions to fuel his own leadership ambitions, as community groups condemned the shadow justice secretary for describing Britons of Pakistani origin as “people from alien cultures”,The Liberal Democrats have said Jenrick should be sacked from the shadow cabinet for his comments,There should be no more inquiries into grooming gangs because it would further delay action by government, the former chair of an inquiry into child sexual abuse in England and Wales has said.

Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, has said the government’s target for 1.5m new homes would only leave “a dent” in the country’s housing need.Speaking to the Commons housing committee, Rayner said:Even if I achieve and this government achieves the 1.5m homes target, it is a dent.It is a dent in what we need to achieve as a whole country to deliver the houses we desperately need.

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has been paid £189,000 for a part-time job as a “brand ambassador” for a gold bullion firm, it has emerged today.(See 4pm.)Ketamine, the anaesthetic taken by Elon Musk to control his moods, could be reclassified as a class A drug by the Home Office after illegal use reached record levels last year.Donald Trump has played down the significance of Elon Musk’s comments about Keir Starmer, the BBC’s Faisal Islam reports.Trump asked about Elon Musk’s “provocative statements” about Europe… “Elons a smart guy… he said some negative things about a couple of people, not si unusual” - avoids endorsing or repeating anything Musk said re UK.

Trump is speaking at a press conference.Chris Stein has more coverage on our US politics blog.Lord Forsyth, a Tory cabinet minister in the 1990s, has told peers that Americans should not interfer in British politics.In a reference to Elon Musk, Forsyth told the Lords during questions:It’s time we looked at the rules regarding foreign contributions to political parties, albeit through domestic companies which they may own.And that we should also perhaps try and tell our nearest and dearest ally, the Americans, that just as we supported them in their resentment of Russian interference in their elections, so also we should expect American citizens not to interfere in our political process.

Lady Smith, the leader of the Lords, told Forsyth the government was looking “very seriously” at ensuring the rules about foreign donations to political parties are “fit for purpose”.In his LBC phone-in Wes Streeting, the health secretary, also said he was “ashamed” of the way some people are treated by the NHS.Asked if the NHS was facing a state of emergency, he replied:I am never going to pretend for as long as I’ve got this job, when there are problems, that everything’s all right, and I’m not going to try and gloss over problems as they exist.I will do everything I can, and am doing everything I can, to make sure that year on year we see consistent improvement.It is going to take time, and in the meantime I feel genuinely distressed and ashamed, actually, of some of the things that patients are experiencing.

And I know that the staff of the NHS and social care services feel the same, because they go to work, they slog their guts out, and it’s very distressing for them seeing people in this condition as well.Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has said accepted that the way some families have to pay huge costs for care for elderly people is unfair.He was speaking during an LBC phone-in, when he accepted there was an “imbalance” in the current system.Last week Streeting announced that he has appointed the former civil servant Louise Casey to head a commission on social care that it supposed to come up with a cross-party plan for reform by 2028.A report on the same topic was published 14 years ago.

Andrew Dilnot’s review focused on the fact that, under the current system, some families face potentially unlimited bills to pay for care for an elderly relative, and he proposed a cap on the amount any family would have to pay in these circumstances,Streeting has said little about the outcome he would like the Casey commission to recommend,But in the Commons yesterday he said the Dilnot report was “valuable” and that it might provide a guide for Labour,Speaking on LBC, Streeting said some families faced “eye-watering” costs,And he conceded this was a problem.

I think that where we’ve got to as a country is a situation where I think the burden on individuals and families and the state is imbalanced, and it’s almost a game of pot luck and chance.He also defended the government’s decision to take time on the new review, saying a consensus with other political parties was needed because “politics has torpedoed good ideas” in the past.The Financial Times has published an interesting long read on the state of the Conservatives, under the headline ‘Can Kemi Badenoch unite the right in Britain?’.In their article, George Parker and Lucy Fisher don’t seem confident the answer is yes.They say that some Tory donors have been surprised to discover quite how strongly she feels about trans issues.

Badenoch is also extremely animated on transgender issues, including her defence of single-sex toilets,Some believed she was elevating the issue in an attempt to appeal to rightwing Tory activists, but those close to her say that is not the case,One Tory insider says this focus has dismayed some of the party’s deep-pocketed backers,“Several donors assumed her ‘anti-woke’ obsession was clever tactics – that it was about values alignment with the party membership in order to win the contest,But they received a rude shock to find that behind closed doors she’s exactly the same,” the person adds.

Parker and Lucy also quote Badenoch telling the FT in the past that her definition of racism is narrower than other people’s.She is the first black leader of a UK-wide party, but says she looks forward to a time when that is not the subject of comment.Badenoch told the FT earlier this year she had not faced racism “in any meaningful sense”.She explained then: “So what I just call bad behaviour – rude behaviour, unpleasant – other people add the skin colour on top of it and say it’s racism.So my threshold for racism is quite high.

”The UK government’s long-term borrowing costs have reached the highest level since 1998 amid investor concerns over Britain’s sluggish growth prospects and stubbornly high inflation, Richard Partington reports,And this is from Pippa Crerar on the government’s response,No 10’s response to UK’s long-term government borrowing costs hitting highest level since 1998“There’s no doubt about the government’s commitment to economic stability and sound public finances… We will not repeat a budget like this one again,”But it creates problem for Rachel Reeves who plans to borrow hundreds of billions of pounds to fund higher public investment and spending,The government has spent £80,000 repainting the media briefing room at 9 Downing Street, Christopher Hope from GB News reports.

The blue boards in the Number 9 media briefing room made famous by those Covid 19 TV press conferences have now been painted grey and others covered in new panelling in a one off refresh to make it a “politically neutral setting” according to the PM’s official spokesman,The cost is under £80,000,Number 10 says this spending must be set against the Government taking £80m a year out of its communications budget,The PM is now likely to hold press conferences there,Here are before and after pictures.

🚨 NEW: The blue boards in the Downing Street media briefing room have been repainted grey and others covered in new panelling to make it ‘politically neutral’ at a cost of under £80,000[@christopherhope] pic.twitter.com/YslfIevYgLUPDATE: This is the new media briefing room pic.twitter.com/xbmRh7EeKONigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has been paid £189,000 for a part-time job as a “brand ambassador” for a gold bullion firm, it has emerged today.

Rowena Mason revealed that Farage had taken on the job in a Guardian story last month, but we now know how much the MP is being paid because he has declared the job in the latest edition of register of MPs’ interests.Farage says, since being elected as an MP, he has been spending no more than four hours a month doing this job, although he was also working for the company before the election, he says.Farage also earns considerable sums as a GB News presenter and the Mail has calculated that, since the election, he has earned more than £500,000 from second jobs, in addition to the £91,000 a year he earns as MP for Clacton.The register also confirms that, as well as being broadly aligned politically with Elon Musk, Farage and some of his Reform UK colleagues earn money from Musk’s social media company X by providing it with popular tweets.X pays users for content that generates engagement, and populist politicians can generally do this very effectively.

Farage say he received £140 from X in December, taking his total earnings from the platform since the election to £5,481.Lee Anderson has received £1,720 from the company since the election.And Rupert Lowe has been paid £4,644 by X since the election.Vijay Rangarajan, chief executive at the Electoral Commission, gave evidence to the Commons public administration and constitutional affairs committe with some of his colleagues this morning.They were asked about the way the 2024 election was run.

It was the first general election where photo ID was required but, as Peter Walker reports in posts on Bluesky, Rangarajan struggled to defend the policy introduced by the Conservative government.At the Electoral Commission hearing, Lib Dems’ Luke Taylor cites statistics for the tiny numbers of voter personation offences before voter ID, and asks if it was worth the effort.There is a *very* long pause before Vijay Rangarajan, the chief exec, starts answering a slightly different question.Labour MP Chris Curtis asks the Electoral Commission bigwigs to reassure him that the negatives created by voter ID were worth it given the tiny amount of fraud.EC chair John Pullinger says the rollout was “better than many feared it would be”.

Well, that’s one answer, I suppose.Curtis isn’t especially satisfied with the answer, and repeats the question: given the lack of personation fraud, or voter worries about it, why did the EC recommend voter ID? Pullinger’s answer, as far as I could follow it, seems to be: well, other countries have it.In the closest this hearing has yet seen of some apparent self-awareness from the Electoral Commission, Pullinger concedes that voter ID as implemented was “more of a divisive policy than it needed to be” eg given the last govt’s insistence it was in place at speed.