Keir Starmer to hold first Labour cabinet meeting and address the media – live

Conservative leadership contest, saying they want the candidates to be tested.

Prospective candidates, including Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Suella Braverman, Tom Tugendhat, Priti Patel, and Victoria Atkins, are among the long list of names believed to be preparing possible bids.

The contenders are readying themselves for a speedy contest to appoint a successor to Rishi Sunak by the early autumn in an effort to challenge the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party.

But senior figures are pushing for the contest to take place over a longer period to allow candidates to pitch themselves to the grassroots membership in a “beauty contest” at the Conservative conference in early October.

George Osborne, the former Conservative chancellor, said on Friday that Cameron was part of a “big effort … to get Rishi Sunak to just delay the moment when the new leader is chosen”.

He said: “The contest can start, but it doesn’t have to conclude. It’s very important, because these people, these candidates, they’re all government ministers who have now been kicked out of office. None of them have been in opposition.

“None of them have proved their mettle. I think over the next few months, it’s essential, and I know David thinks this and others do too, we just see how these candidates now perform on the opposition benches and use the party conference in the same way that Michael Howard did, to his eternal credit, in 2005.”

You can read the full report by Rowena Mason and Eleni Courea here:

bulldoze planning rules, with a flurry of changes expected within days to “get Britain building” millions of new homes.

Nick Boles, who was a planning minister in David Cameron’s coalition government, has been approached for a review of the UK’s National Planning Policy Framework, with the aim of making it easier to build homes, laboratories, digital infrastructure and gigafactories.

Keir Starmer is preparing to announce immediate changes to planning regulations as early as next week, including reinstating mandatory targets for local authorities to build more homes and making it easier to build on green belt land.

Labour is also planning to launch a consultation to decide where to build a series of new towns, with the aim of selecting sites by the end of the year.

Rachel Reeves, the new chancellor, has put planning reform at the heart of her growth plans, arguing that none of the party’s broader housebuilding and infrastructure plans will work without it.

Party sources said that Boles, who switched his allegiance from the Tories to Labour in late 2022 shortly after Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget, could be made a “planning tsar” to help pilot a broad-ranging review of the system.

Boles, who made his name as a minister by pushing for wide-ranging planning reform, has criticised the Conservative party for dropping the agenda under pressure from backbench MPs.

You can read the full piece by Richard Partington and Kiran Stacey here:

Labour won the general election.

Crerar explains how each decision made in “the cell” was framed by three key messages and pushed along by a well-disciplined operation.

Take a look inside the campaign that led to “Starmergeddon” here:

Liz Truss and the leadership of Boris Johnson, whose loose moral compass had allowed Downing Street to party while the rest of the UK was locked down.

The economic situation was dire – inflation at 11%, mortgages threatening to soar by £5,000 a year – and the political inheritance more desperate. But since then the 44-year-old prime minister has failed to turn around the Conservative’s fortunes. Lacking a transformative touch, he led the party to a historic defeat.

“Undoubtedly, Rishi had a difficult hand,” said Lee Cain, a former No 10 director of communications under Johnson who has also advised Sunak and now runs his own firm, Charlesbye Strategy.

“But he played it poorly. He had broadly the wrong strategy from the start, in an environment where people were crying out for change. You heard it in every focus group, but Rishi came in and positioned himself as the status quo candidate.”

Team Sunak’s original plan was to under-promise and over-deliver. On the day he started, his Conservatives were 30 points behind the Labour opposition in the polls. In his first address to the nation as prime minister, Sunak promised “integrity, professionalism and accountability” and said: “Trust is earned. And I will earn yours.”

There are arguably two Sunaks. The first is an immigrant success story: a British Asian from Southampton, Hampshire, a practising Hindu, the son of a GP and pharmacist, who made the historic achievement of becoming the UK’s first non-white prime minister. At the age 42, he was the youngest leader of the country in more than 200 years.

The other is a full member of Britain’s old fashoned establishment, who studied at the fee-paying Winchester College, then Oxford, before a career in the City of London and California’s Silicon Valley and a plum seat in parliament. This is the man married to a wealthy heiress, Akshata Murty, whose shareholding in the Indian IT business her father co-founded is worth nearly £600m.

Liberal Democrats, Munira Wilson, acknowledged the party benefited from voters wanting to turf out a Conservative government.

According to the PA news agency, the Twickenham MP told Sky News:

We were very clear that after the previous Conservative government, which was frankly full of chaos and incompetence and had broken the trust of the British people and broken our economy, time was up for them and in many of those seats where we won we made it very clear to voters that if they wanted to turf out the Tories they had to vote Liberal Democrat and they did.

So obviously in every election it’s a combination of the two, but I am also confident that our messages around cost-of-living, sewage, health and care did really resonate with voters.”

Wilson also told the broadcaster that the Conservatives will be “tearing themselves apart” working out a new leader and what direction they are going in, but Lib Dem MPs will be “focused” on being an opposition party.

She said:

It’s really important for the British people that there are opposition MPs asking tough questions and scrutinising the legislation that Labour are going to bring forward, and I can assure you that every Liberal Democrat MP in the House of Commons will be doing that and will be focused on the job and not worried about where the party’s going.”

She told Sky News the Lib Dems surpassed everyone’s expectations, “including my own”, and that the party hopes to bring its record number of MPs up from 71 to 72 after the recount in the final seat to declare – Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire.

Labour cabinet in 14 years will also only have two ministers of Asian descent – Shabana Mahmood, one of the UK’s first Muslim female MPs, and Lisa Nandy.

Only two ministers in Starmer’s cabinet went to private school – Louise Haigh, who attended Sheffield High School, and Anneliese Dodds, who went to Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen.

Large numbers of Conservative MPs being replaced by Labour candidates means the proportion of state-educated members has risen from 54% to 63%.

That is still far short of the 88% of people among the general public who went to comprehensive schools, but it represents the highest proportion of state-schooled members ever recorded in parliament.

The Labour veteran and Britain’s first black female MP, Diane Abbott, will become mother of the house in the new parliament, having served her Hackney North and Stoke Newington constituency for almost 40 years.

More than 40% of seats in the Commons will be held by women, a record that includes 46% of Labour MPs and 24% of their Conservative counterparts.

You can read the full piece by Aletha Adu and Michael Goodier here:

Wes Streeting, has declared the NHS is broken as he announced talks with junior doctors in England would restart next week.

The Ilford North MP said patients were not receiving the care they deserved and the performance of the NHS was “not good enough”.

But in his first speech in the job he stressed that the problems could not be fixed overnight after the health service had gone through “the biggest crisis in its history” after the pandemic.

Streeting said: “This government will be honest about the challenges facing our country, and serious about tackling them. From today, the policy of this department is that the NHS is broken.

“That is the experience of patients who are not receiving the care they deserve, and of the staff working in the NHS who can see that – despite giving their best – this is not good enough.”

The new health secretary delivered on his promise to call junior doctors in England on “day one” of a Labour government.

Health leaders have urged the government to resolve the long-running dispute with junior doctors as a “priority” after it emerged that tens of thousands of appointments were postponed as a result of the latest strike.

“I have just spoken over the phone with the BMA [British Medical Association] junior doctors committee, and I can announce that talks to end their industrial action will begin next week,” Streeting said in a statement.

“We promised during the campaign that we would begin negotiations as a matter of urgency, and that is what we are doing.”

Keir Starmer, is expected to hold the first meeting of his new cabinet as starts working on Labour’s manifesto pledges and preparing for a Nato summit next week. The new cabinet is expected to meet at 11am.

soon to depart Rishi Sunak?

The likely main contenders, broadly listed from centre to right, are: Jeremy Hunt, Tom Tugendhat, Victoria Atkins, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel, Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman and Nigel Farage*.

* Farage is, very obviously, not a Conservative member and now leads his four Reform UK MPs in the Commons. Could the remaining Tories welcome him as a leader? Would Farage want the job? The answer to both is most probably no. But stranger things have happened.

Peter Walker runs you through the main contendersfor the Tory leadership and weighs up their chances and what a run for the job might look like:

a range of urgent priorities both home and abroad, from a prison’s overcrowding crisis and huge NHS waiting lists to the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.

Starmer’s team is one of the most experienced in recent times, with many MPs who served Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

My colleague David Batty has listed the members of the new cabinet and the main tasks that await them in this handy explainer:

had been declared in Thursday’s general election, Labour had a majority of 176. Labour had 412 seats and the Tories 121 – the worst result in the Conservative party’s history. The Liberal Democrats were on a record 71, the Scottish National party (SNP) on nine, Reform UK on five and the Greens on four.

Starmer entered Downing Street on Friday with a promise to use his historic election victory to rebuild Britain “brick by brick” and provide security for millions of working-class families.

“My government will fight, every day, until you believe again,” Starmer said in a speech outside No 10 which had echoes of Tony Blair’s vow to act as the servants of the people in 1997.

In other developments:

• The election turnout figure stood at 59.8% at last count, a sharp decline from an overall turnout of 67.3% at the last election in 2019. A recount in the seat of Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire seat was not to restart until 10.30am on Saturday, delaying the general election’s final result. The Liberal Democrats are poised to win the seat.

• Starmer’s other ministerial appointments included John Healey as defence secretary; Shabana Mahmood as justice secretary; Wes Streeting as health secretary; Bridget Phillipson as education secretary and Ed Miliband as energy secretary.

• Among the most high-profile Tory cabinet ministers unseated by opposition candidates were Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, and Penny Mordaunt, the Commons leader. Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, Lucy Frazer, the culture secretary, and Michelle Donelan, the science secretary, were also ousted. Former prime minister Liz Truss lost her seat in South West Norfolk. The Conservatives lost every seat they had held in Wales.

• After the Tories’ disastrous results, former Conservative party chairman Eric Pickles warned that the party could face “oblivion” at the next general election. He said there were now no “safe seats”.

• Rishi Sunak, the former prime minister, used his final speech in Downing Street to apologise to the British people and the Conservative party. Sunak confirmed he was standing down as Conservative leader but would stay in place while his replacement was elected. The Guardian has been told that prospective Conservative party leadership candidates are preparing for a speedy contest to appoint a successor to Sunak by the autumn in an effort to challenge the rise of Reform. Nigel Farage, the Reform UK party’s leader, said his priority was to now target Labour votes.

• Scottish first minister and SNP party leader John Swinney described the party’s election results – the SNP’s worst since 2010 – as “very damaging” and tough.

• Sinn Féin has become Northern Ireland’s largest party in Westminster after voters turned against the Democratic Unionist party (DUP). The DUP lost three of its eight Westminster seats in the election, including the North Antrim stronghold held by Ian Paisley and before that his late father since 1970.

• Ireland’s premier, Simon Harris, said the Labour government’s election in the UK could herald a “great reset” in Anglo-Irish relations.
  PA Media contributed to this report

Source: theguardian.com