Tory donations twice as high as Labour’s in last part of 2024

The Conservatives raised twice as much in donations as Labour at the end of last year, including £250,000 from Michael Ashcroft.Despite some Tory donors flirting with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and others switching to Labour at the election, the party managed to raise almost £2m in the last three months of 2024 as Kemi Badenoch took over the leadership.Labour raised £1m from donors, at least half of which came from trade unions. One party source said Labour had struggled to gain enthusiasm from businesses to donate amid worries about the impact of the national insurance rise and other tax choices.Lord Ashcroft, a dual British and Belizean citizen and former Conservative party treasurer who is also a pollster and political publisher, donated more than £5m to the Tories in the decade running up to 2010 before cutting back during the David Cameron years

Revealed: peer’s offer to get meetings with ministers for potential client

A member of the House of Lords offered to secure meetings with ministers for a potential commercial client who wanted to lobby the government, the Guardian can reveal.Richard Dannatt, a former head of the British army, was secretly filmed telling undercover reporters he could make introductions within the government and that he would “make a point of getting to know” the best-placed minister, despite rules prohibiting peers from lobbying.He added he could easily “rub shoulders” with the right people in the Lords if he needed to approach a minister in order to promote the potential client.Lord Dannatt also said he had previously introduced a company, in which he was given a shareholding, to a minister and civil servants.At the beginning and end of the meeting with the reporters, the crossbench peer said he was “very wary and nervous” because he had been the target of an undercover sting by the press more than a decade ago

Mike Steele obituary

My father, Mike Steele, who has died aged 88, was a lobby correspondent and worked in the Houses of Parliament over a period of five decades.An Australian by birth, he joined the lobby in 1962, eight years after arriving in the UK. He began as a correspondent in the Commons for the Northcliffe group of provincial newspapers and then, after an interlude working in the Liberal party’s communications team, returned to report on parliamentary matters as a freelance for the Newspoint organisation, supplying stories for HTV Wales, the Leicester Mercury and Ulster Television.He also presented the BBC’s Politics West studio discussion and news interviews, and contributed diary items to the Evening Standard, Guardian, Telegraph and Times newspapers.Born in Adelaide, Mike was the son of William, a clerk, and Shirley (nee Morris), a barrister, but was raised in Perth, where he went to Guildford grammar school

Conservative peer accused of using antisemitic tropes in Lords debate

A Conservative peer has been accused of using antisemitic tropes after saying in a debate in the Lords that Jewish people should pay for a proposed Holocaust memorial in London because they have “an awful lot of money”.Archie Hamilton, who served as a minister under Margaret Thatcher and John Major and was made a peer in 2005, was criticised after the debate, which was about whether to put the memorial and education centre in Victoria Tower Gardens, next to parliament.Lord Hamilton said he lived nearby and the park was too small for the memorial, before adding: “I do not understand why the government have volunteered taxpayers’ money, when there is so little of it, to finance this.“The Jewish community in Britain has an awful lot of money. It has a lot of education charities that would contribute towards this

Politics about class, not identity, are better for the young adults I teach | Letters

Ash Sarkar is right to point out that the left’s sanctimony has alienated sections of the working class (The left keeps getting identity politics wrong – and the right is benefiting from that, 3 March). The young adults I teach include white working- and middle-class boys, and also girls, who struggle to find purpose, place and pride in their identity.In this increasingly atomised society, many of us have lost our allegiances to broad groups and seek to define our identities in ever-shrinking niches. And in unsafe times, belonging becomes so high-stakes that to be cast from the group for some perceived infringement is terrifying. The need we all have to feel a sense of belonging battles with the desire to be seen for “who you really are”

Workers’ rights bill overlooks funding for legal advice and tribunal service | Letters

“Trade unions have declared victory as Labour bolstered a string of measures in its workers’ rights bill,” says your report (4 March). However, there are two facts that the government has failed to take on board and the bill fails to address.First, that without union assistance or incurring substantial costs, it is almost impossible to obtain anything more than the most cursory advice, let alone representation, in relation to the understanding and enforcement of what are often complex rights.Second, that underresourced employment tribunals are already overwhelmed by their current workload and will be incapable of dealing with the massive increase in claims which, it is acknowledged, will follow when the rights are in force.It is well established that, for every £1 spent on legal advice, there is nearly a threefold saving on the public purse