Starmer to meet Nowak’s family this afternoon, No 10 says
Keir Starmer is going to hold a meeting with the family of Henry Nowak, No 10 has said. The private meeting will take place in Downing Street this afternoon.
Key events
Starmer urges England’s mayors to press on with plans to drive growth
Keir Starmer has been addressing mayors from England at a meeting of the mayoral council in York today. In a briefing issued in advance, Downing Street said he would be urging them to push on with growth plans. No 10 said:
Mayors will be urged to go further and faster, with a clear message: where local leaders bring forward credible plans to drive growth, the government will back them and get projects built.
Today’s discussions at the mayoral council come alongside a wider shift of power out of Westminster and into the hands of local leaders, including the first ever ‘right to request’ process – allowing mayors to propose new devolved powers to drive growth in their areas.
The council will play a central role in driving this agenda by ensuring local leaders have the power, backing and certainty they need to deliver at scale, at pace, and for the long term.
And Starmer said:
For too long, Britain has been held back by a system that says no, delaying projects, blocking growth and leaving communities behind.
We’re turning that on its head by backing our mayors to get Britain building again, with spades in the ground and more jobs across the country. There will always be the naysayers and the blockers, but we cannot afford to give into them – because it will be the next generation that suffers.
Burnham dismisses claims he’s too worried about being liked to be able to take tough decisions facing a PM
The New Statesman has published an interview with Andy Burnham. It is by Ailbhe Rea, the magazine’s political editor, who accompanied Burnham while he was canvassing in Makerfield for the byelection. It is very long, more revealing than most Burnham interviews have been, and full of nuance. Here are the main points. But if you are at all interested, do read it in full.
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Burnham has dismissed claims that he is too worried about being liked to be able to take the tough decisions you need to take as PM. This has become one of the main criticisms voiced about Burnham since he made it clear that he wants to replace Keir Starmer, partly as a result a widely-praised long read about Burnham published last month by Joshi Herrmann, founder and editor of the Mill, an online news website covering Manchester. Herrmann concluded that Burnham has exactly the skills needed to be a very good mayor, but not necessarily a very good PM. He said:
To me, the tragedy of Burnham’s wish to return to Westminster is that it means leaving a job that seems custom designed to take advantage of his skills and to mitigate his weaknesses.
Alluding to a Logan Roy quote in Succession, Herrmann went on:
My impression after six years of writing and thinking about Andy Burnham is that he’s many good things, but he’s not a killer. He has an endearing emotional vulnerability that is rare among politicians I’ve met, and a wonderful sense of how to take hold of a moment. He’s brilliantly instinctive, as he said to me on that phone call, and he genuinely listens. He’s offered a brand of moral, pastoral leadership to the city that I think is not properly understood in modern politics and that is reflected in his popularity.
But to be prime minister – a job that involves making impossible choices every day and surrounding yourself with tough, calculating people who don’t mind asking hard questions and telling you when you’re wrong – you have to be a killer.
Rea says, when she asked Burnham about the article, she realised she had struck a nerve. Burnham told her Herrmann was “not sympathetic” and that he had not read it. But in the interview he contested the claim that he cannot take tough decisions. At one point he said:
I’ve been in politics 25 years, you know, and the idea that I just do easy things … I went to Hillsborough on the 20th anniversary [where he was heckled about Labour not approving a public inquiry into the tragedy] … I’ve taken risks on various things, you know, infected blood. Most people would say if you want to be liked, you wouldn’t take on things like that.
And at another point he said that he had raised taxes in Manchester “significantly” more than any other metro mayor, to fund the £2 cap on bus fares.
If you say you’re going to do something, do it. You know, when people say I like to be liked, I like to be recognised to do things the right way. I don’t just want to do the politically expedient thing. I stood for election as mayor and said: ‘I’ll regulate the buses.’ I have regulated the buses. I went to Anfield and said, ‘I’ll fight for justice.’ I did.
He also cited the decision to campaign on the basis that he would put up taxes to fund a £2 bus fares cap (which happened) as an example of this.
I am concerned that if a certain brand of politics is dripped into the streets, then it’s a sort of irreversible thing, or it could be with us for a long time. Look at the US and just how kind of far gone it is.
Rea said that, when campaigning, Burnham never mentioned Nigel Farage or Reform UK by name. Instead he talked to people about fighting “divisive politics”.
I look back at the manifesto, and I wouldn’t have written it like that myself when it comes to tax. I think it was quite restrictive. I think people put a premium now on honesty rather than, you know, things that are crafted for political reasons.
Burnham also said “the manifesto has to be stuck to”.
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Burnham said that his view of “Manchesterism” (the term used to describe the economic revival of the city, a process which started years ago under the city council and which has continued since he has been mayor) was not just focused on getting inward investment. There had to be “good growth”, he said, which meant investors could not just “siphon out”.
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He said that, even if he had become Labour leader in 2015, leave might have still won the 2016 referendum. Some people argue that remain lost because Jeremy Corbyn was leading Labour at the time, and he was unenthusiastic about the EU and his pro-remain campaigning was relatively half-hearted. Rea said she had been told that Burnham is haunted by the sense that history might have turned out differently if he had won the 2015 Labour leadership contest. (When it started, he was the favourite.) But Burnham told Rea: “I don’t know whether 2016 may have played out differently.” Burnham also said he was a “reluctant remainer”, in part because the arrival of Polish workers caused particular problems with Catholic primary schools in his constituency being over-subscribed. Burnham is a Catholic.
At the Downing Street lobby briefing No 10 refused to comment on reports saying the long-awaited defence investment plan will be published next Thurday. The PM’s spokesperson just said that it would be coming before the Nato summit in July.
The spokesperson also refused to comment on claims that it won’t be worth the full £18bn that had been set as a target. In a story for the Times Larisa Brown and Steven Swinford report:
Sir Keir Starmer is considering watering down plans to boost defence spending by £18 billion over concerns that they are unaffordable.
The Times has been told that Starmer and Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, met on Tuesday for the second time in a week to discuss the long-delayed defence investment plan (DIP).
Against a background of concern about the state of the public finances and the impact of the Iran war on the economy, the government is considering reducing the package to an extra £15 billion over the next four years.
Starmer to meet Nowak’s family this afternoon, No 10 says
Keir Starmer is going to hold a meeting with the family of Henry Nowak, No 10 has said. The private meeting will take place in Downing Street this afternoon.
Here are the full political donation figures for the first quarter of 2026 from the Electoral Commission. (See 9.31am.) There are more details here.
Reform UK attracted £9.3m in donations, but the Conservatives are proud of getting £4.2m. They received money from 174 people “from a variety of backgrounds”, they say.
Kevin Hollinrake, the Tory chair, said:
Under Kemi’s leadership, the Conservative party is attracting a real breadth and depth of donors. Unlike other parties, we are not reliant on foreign based crypto-billionaires or trade union paymasters. We are backed by a wide range individual job creators and risk-takers, both large and small, across the country who make a deliberate choice about who they back to lead this country.
Badenoch says she has met with Nowak’s parents and they agree with her about ‘need to bring common sense back’
Kemi Badenoch has posted a message on social media saying she met Henry Nowak’s father, mother and stepmother this morning. She praises their courage, and says:
Henry’s family do not want anger to tear communities apart. They are a family who have friends across faith and race, and so did Henry. His family want his memory to help bring our society together.
Everyone knows I have strong views about how we should deal with equality under the law. What the family agreed with me on is that we need to bring common sense back, and that is what we should all be fighting for.
What bringing ‘common sense back” might actually mean isn’t set out by Badenoch in her post.
Robert Jenrick, the former Tory who is now Reform UK’s Treasury spokesperson, was doing a media round this morning. One of his former colleagues in the Conservative party, Simon Hoare, shared this thought about him on social media this morning.
At “best” Jenrick is a political chameleon. Others words beginning with C might also be appropriate. I still remember him begging for my vote in the leadership (he called me on the day of the last MPs round) when he described Kemi as being too of the right & he was the moderate
In his pooled TV interview, Keir Starmer refused to discuss the leaked messages from Darren Jones, chief secretary to the PM, to Peter Mandelson. Asked about the revelations (see 10.31am), Starmer just said:
We just had a big process in parliament where many, many documents have been put before parliament, probably the biggest exercise of transparency ever by any government. That is open now. The material is there for everybody to see.
Starmer criticises Elon Musk for trying to ‘whip up division’ in UK in light of Nowak murder
Keir Starmer has criticised Elon Musk for trying to “whip up division” in the UK following the murder of Henry Nowak and the conclusion of the trial of his killer.
The PM spoke out after it was revealed that Musk has written more than 110 posts retweets and replies on X, the social media platform that he owns, about British politics since last Wednesday. That is far more than he has written about SpaceX, his company which is about to launch on the stock market.
Musk champions far-right politicians and parties on X, and most of his posts have been about the Nowak case, where he has strongly endorsed the view that the student was a victim of anti-white racism by the police. Although once close to Nigel Farage, Musk is now promoting Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party, which is even more extreme and anti-migrant than Reform UK.
Starmer normally avoids commenting on Musk, who has been fiercely critical of Starmer on X since early last year, when his tweets played a huge role in putting the grooming gangs scandal at the top of the political agenda.
But today, asked about Musk, Starmer said:
We need to also assert who we are as a country, because Musk, again, has been interfering in our politics in the last few days, trying to whip up division, that is not who we are in Britain.
In Britain, we are reasonable, tolerant people.
When we have a terrible case like Henry’s case, Henry Nowak, we react calmly as his family have done.
Today the Financial Times has published a report about Musk’s recent interventions. In their story, Amy Borrett, Rachel Rees and Joel Suss say:
Elon Musk’s interventions in UK politics have reignited over the past week, prompting concerns about the influence of the world’s richest man ahead of a byelection that could trigger a change in prime minister.
Musk has written more than 110 posts, retweets and replies about British politics since last Wednesday on his social media platform X, with a focus on the murder of student Henry Nowak.
UK politics accounted for more than one-third of his X activity over the past week, according to FT analysis – almost three times the share devoted to SpaceX, even as Musk sought a $1.8tn valuation in his satellite and AI company’s highly anticipated IPO on 12 June.
Starmer was speaking in a pooled TV interview, and he criticised Musk’s interventions in the Nowak scandal after being asked about the decision by the Labour MP Jess Asato to take legal action against Musk’s xAI company over its Grok tool being used to produce a fake sexualised pictures of her.
Starmer said he fully supported what Asato was doing. He said:
Jess Asato is absolutely right in the action that she is taking. Disgusting images were created in her particular case by Grok. And I’m really pleased that we took Grok on a few months ago, because that’s the fight we should be in.
Referring to Grok turning off its sexualised image generating function earlier this year, in response to pressure from the UK government and others, Starmer said:
Taking on some of these platform providers, some of these disgusting images … we won that.
But Jess is right, she’s a parliamentarian, and I’m 100% behind the action that she has taken …
When it comes to disgusting images on Grok, we take Grok on and fight because that’s who we are as a country.
NHS to curb political symbols on uniforms after antisemitism report
The NHS is taking action to tackle antisemitism after a government-ordered report found that Jewish patients and staff face “routine ostracism” in the service, Denis Campbell reports.
Minister won’t fully defend Darren Jones over embarrrassing Mandelson texts, but suggests he was exaggerating
At the start of the week, the Times reported that Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury, was thinking of standing to be the next Labour leader. The prospect of Jones replacing Keir Starmer always seemed a bit of a long shot. But today it is safe to say the Jones campaign is definitely over. It has been killed off by Tim Shipman, the Spectator’s political editor.
In an article published today, Shipman reveals some messages that Jones sent to Peter Mandelson that must have made him squirm with embarrassment. Jessica Elgot has all the details in her story here.
These messages were not disclosed on Monday, as part of the humble address release, because Jones used disappearing messages. It is also understood that he got a new phone when he moved from being a Treasury minister to being chief secretary of the PM. But the recipient of the messages will have had them too. The Cabinet Office won’t need a leak inquiry to work out where Shipman got his info.
Jones was speaking in the Commons yesterday, winding up the debate on the Mandelson files. The Shipman article was not out at that point, but in his speech Jones included an apology which would only have made proper sense to anyone (like Jones) who knew what the Spectator was about to publish. Jones said:
Did I consciously ignore the stories [about Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein] that followed Peter Mandelson, or indeed know about many of them, from many, many years ago? I do not think that I did.
Did I ever ignore warnings that were put to me about Peter Mandelson? I did not receive any, to do so.
But as I reflected on [Alex Davies-Jones’ speech in the debate, in which she read out a statement from one of Epstein’s victims], it made me think: did I at best subconsciously treat Peter Mandelson differently because I believed him to have influence and power within the Labour party? I think the answer to that question is yes, I did.
Have I benefited from that relationship in the time I have been an elected politician? I think in part the answer to that question is yes, I did.
For that I would like to apologise to the house, to the victims … and commit to then doing something about it.
Lucy Rigby, the chief secretary to the Treasury, was asked about the Jones messages in interviews this morning. Speaking to Times Radio, she said: “I don’t think it’s necessarily right to over-index on some of these messages.” Commenting on the messages where Jones was critical of colleagues, she said:
Who hasn’t come out of a work meeting at some point and sent a message to a colleague or a family member or whatever, sort of, you know, letting off steam, letting off a bit of frustration. You may well choose to exaggerate, or whatever, for effect.
But, asked specifically about the message commiserating with Mandelson on the day he was sacked, she said: “I wouldn’t have used those words.”
And, asked about it on Sky News, she replied:
You asked me how I feel about that? Not great is the honest answer.
Jenrick claims it’s ‘ludicrous’ to say Reform UK stoking divison over Nowak murder
Robert Jenrick, the Reform UK Treasury spokesperson, was doing a media round this morning. Asked to respond to Labour claims that Nigel Farage was stoking divison in his response to the murder of Henry Nowak, Jenrick said that was a “ludicrous” claim. He said:
I was absolutely stunned by those ludicrous comments. There’s nothing that Nigel Farage has done which has encouraged division.
He has simply shown leadership in setting out the course of action that now needs to be taken to make sure that we fix this problem and treat everybody equally before the law.
In a TV address on Tuesday morning, Farage said people should respond to the killing with “pure cold rage” and he said he was afraid what would happen to Britain if “anti-white prejudice” was not stamped out quickly.
There will be one urgent question in the Commons, at 10.30am, on Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure. A Foreign Office minister will reply. Then, after business questions, Josh MacAlister, minister for children, will give a statement on a family reunion scheme for children in care.
Reform UK gets £9m in donations in first quarter of 2026, including £7m from two crypto billionaires
The Electoral Commission has published its figures for donations to political parties in the first quarter of 2026 and they show that Reform UK was given £9m. Lucy White from Bloomberg was the first with the numbers.
NEW: Reform UK has once again smashed party donation totals, raising more than £9m in the first quarter. Boosted by another £3m from Thailand-based crypto investor Harborne – just before Labour capped donations from overseas – and £4m from crypto entrepreneur Ben Delo
We knew about the Delo donation. As Rowena Mason reported in April, Delo, a British billionaire convicted in the US for failing to implement adequate anti-money-laundering controls in his cryptocurrency business, said that he had given Reform UK £4m this year.
Delo has also said that he is going to move back to the UK so that he won’t be affected by the Labour legislation imposing a £100,000 a year cap on how much people living abroad can donate to political parties.
The ban came into force on 25 March, the day it was announced by Steve Reed, the communities secretary. It will affect Christopher Harborne, another cryptocurrency billionaire who is Reform UK’s biggest donor. He is a British citizen but lives in Thailand and he gave the party £12m last year.
Today’s figures show that he also gave Reform UK £3m in the first quarter of this year – suggesting that the money was handed over shortly before the cap came into force.
Minister dismisses ‘two-tier justice’ claim in light of Henry Nowak tragedy as ‘slur’ on police
Good morning. The most interesting event of the day may well turn out to be one taking place late tonight, when Andy Burnham, the Labour candidate for Makerfield and potential next PM, takes part in a BBC byelection Question Time special. Yesterday, Burnham said that at some point today he would give a more considered response to the Henry Nowak murder, and the issues it has raised about policing and race equality. It is not clear yet whether we will get that response on QT, or before.
But this morning the government seems to be firming up its opposition to those claiming that what happened to Nowak was evidence of “two-tier justice”. Reform UK is the main party using this phrase, but some Tories have made the same argument. Yesterday, Keir Starmer said he did not accept that Britain has two-tier policing. This morning Lucy Rigby, the chief secretary to the Treasury, has been doing an interview round, and she told Sky News this allegation was a “slur” on the police. Asked about the claim, she said:
Fundamentally, I think that is a slur on the thousands of police officers that go out to work every day, putting themselves in harm’s way to serve the public, to try and prevent crime, and to keep us all safe.
The suggestion that we have two–tier policing, which suggests at its heart that the police are on a sort of systemic basis pushing the interests of one group above another – I genuinely think is a slur on all those police officers that are serving this country day and night, seven days a week.
Here is our overnight story on the Nowak controversy, by Vikram Dodd, Peter Walker and Steven Morris.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.30am: Emma Reynolds, the environment secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
9.30am: The Department for Education publishes annual figures on the number of pupils and staff in schools.
Morning: Keir Starmer is on a visit in North Yorkshire, before attending the mayoral council, a summit with mayors from England.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
Lunchtime: Peter Kyle, the business secretary, is speaking at a lobby lunch.
2pm: John Swinney, the Scottish first minister, takes questions from MSPs.
Afternoon: Kemi Badenoch is on a visit in Warwickshire.
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