The prison system in England and Wales was “teetering on disaster” when Labour came to power, James Timpson, the prisons minister said today.

Speaking at his first Prison Governors’ Association conference in Nottingham since he took on the role, Timpson said:

It has not been easy to rehabilitate offenders in a system teetering on disaster.

We have to take the tough decisions bringing changes to release to ease the pressure on our prisons. It was quite frankly a rescue effort. If we had not acted our justice system would have grinded to a halt – we would have faced a total breakdown of law and order.

We only have to look at the recent disorder on our streets to see how close to catastrophe we came. We brought the violence to an end, but in the process we came dangerously close to running out of prisons entirely.

The last government allowed prisons to run so hot for so long, it was nothing short of a disgrace. We had no choice but to introduce emergency measures. To attempt to delay any further would have allowed our justice system to collapse.

The government will rebuild and reform the system. We will accelerate the prison building programme to make sure we have the cells we need.

Timpson was a surprise appoinment when Keir Starmer formed his government after the election. He used to run the eponymous family shoe repair business that has a good reputation for employing ex-offenders, and having him in charge of prisons has led to speculation that Labour’s policy in this area will end up being more progressive than the Conservatives’.

UK may approve bee-killing pesticide despite election promise to ban it

Helena Horton

UK ministers are considering allowing the use of a bee-killing pesticide next year despite promising during the election to ban it, Helena Horton reports.

Conservative members were more likely to be turned off by what they saw of Robert Jenrick at the party conference than impressed, a survey suggests.

Jenrick arrived at the conference as the clear bookmakers’ favourite. But, according to a ConservativeHome survey of Tory members, only 23% of them said that what happened at conference made them more likely to support him – and 43% said they were less likely to support him afterwards.

Tom Tugendhat experienced a similar loss of support – but he is expected to be out of the contest by the end of today anyway as the candidate most likely to be eliminated in today’s ballot of MPs.

Conservative members favour Kemi Badenoch for next leader, according to numerous ConHome surveys, and proper polling, but 35% of respondents said conference made them less likely to support her, while 30% said the opposite.

The survey suggests the big winner was James Cleverly. Some 55% of Tories said conference made him a more attractive candidate, while only 14% said it didn’t.

The survey also suggests that, by a large margin, he was seen as delivering the best speech on the final day. Badenoch came second.

As a result of what happened at conference, Cleverly has now become the clear bookmakers’ favourite. This chart from the PoliticalBetting.com website, showing the implied chances of winning, illustrates how that has happened.

ConservativeHome has a panel of Tory members and it regularly surveys them on leadership preferences. In the past it has been a reliable guide to Tory leadership elections – always pointing to the right winner, if not by the correct margin.

Jenrick came first in the last two ballots of Tory MPs. Some rightwingers are supporting him because they thought Badenoch would not make the final two (because she is a lot more popular with members than with MPs) and because they thought Jenrick would beat any of the likely “left” candidates in the final two. But a survey at the weekend suggests that is no longer true, which could provide an opening for Badenoch.

In Tory terms, Badenoch and Jenrick are the two “right” candidates, while Cleverly and Tugendhat are the two “left” ones. In non-Tory terms, they are all quite rightwing.

Keir Starmer’s decision to accept clothing freebies “looks greedy”, Boris Johnson, the former Tory PM has claimed. As Jamie Grierson reports, Johnson, who is doing interviews to promote his much-ridiculed memoir, seems to have forgotten his own record of freebie-harvesting on a lavish scale.

Here is John Crace’s digested read of the Johnson book, which is well worth a read (John’s article – not the book, I’m told).

During her morning interview round Louise Haigh, the transport secretary, also all but confirmed that HS2 will be extended to Euston station in London.

When Rishi Sunak announced that the last government was cancelling the Birmingham to Manchester leg of HS2, he said that it would definitely run to Old Oak Common, a station in west London.

He also indicated that the final stretch, a 4.5 mile tunnel from Old Oak Common to Euston, would go ahead too. But he said this was dependent on the project attracting private sector funding, which meant the government could not 100% confim it would be completed.

As PA Media reports, the Commons’ public accounts committee issued a report in February stating it was “highly sceptical” that the Department for Transport would be able to attract private investment on “the scale and speed required” to make extending HS2 to Euston “a success”.

Labour has inherited the last government’s plans and has not yet said the Euston stretch will definitely go ahead.

But, in an interview on Times Radio this morning, asked if the Euston leg was affordable, Haigh replied:

We will be making an announcement on that soon. But it certainly would never have made sense to leave it between Old Oak Common and Birmingham.

Asked if the announcement may come in the budget, she said: “It may be made around those decisions.”

Keir Starmer does not have a problem with women, the transport secretary, Louise Haigh, has said, adding that the prime minister had promoted a number of women – but she admitted the government had made “missteps”. Jessica Elgot has the story.

Good morning. Labour has already been in office for almost 100 days, but in some respects it still feels like we’re at the start of a new political season. This morning Keir Starmer is chairing his first cabinet since Morgan McSweeeney replaced Sue Gray as the key aide in No 10 (a move which could have radical implications, as Pippa Crerar reports here), this afternoon Tory MPs are holding another ballot to elect their next leader, and, with the conference recess over, MPs are getting down to a busy three months of parliamentary business, with the budget only three weeks away tomorrow.

Labour won a big majority at the election, but the big story of politics in recent years is the fragementation of the electorate, and this morning the thinktank UK in a Changing Europe has published a major report on the attitudes and voting behaviours of ethnic minority Britons. For anyone interested in this topic, it has lots of very good data, but two findings in particular stand out.

• Labour will not be able to rely on ethnic minority voters as a ‘bloc’ of support in the future, the report says. In his introduction James Kanagasooriam, the pollster from Focaldata who produced the data used in the report, says that it is still the case that, overall, ethnic minority Britons are much more likely to vote left than right than white Britons. He says:

At the 2024 election, the combined vote share of Labour, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats was 66% among ethnic minorities, while that for the Conservatives and Reform UK was 26%. Among white voters, the equivalent figures were 53% and 41%. Any discussion over Labour’s problems with minority voters and Conservative gains needs to be tempered by these facts.

But he goes on:

At future elections, Labour cannot rely on ethnic minority voters as a ‘bloc’ of support. It is true that the Labour Party still convinces a far greater proportion of minorities with ‘warm’ views of the party to vote for it than the Conservative Party does. But among many ethnic groups, there is a fundamental disjunction between opinion on the salient issues of the day and voting patterns. Our polling suggests that Labour support among ethnic minorities is an ossified cultural and historical legacy that could disappear very quickly.

This chart shows how ethnic minority voting behaviour changed between 2019 and 2024.

• Having a degree makes white voters more leftwing, but ethnic minority voters more rightwing, the report says. In his introduction Kanagasooriam describes this as the Lee Anderson-Rishi Sunak factor in Tory support. He explains:

The demography of right and left is vastly different between white and non-white voters. White voters differ hugely on their educational profile, with non-graduates drifting right over the last 20 years, and graduates to the left. Amongst non-white Britons, graduate level education makes you proportionately more likely to be Conservative. Class cleavages and patterns that have disappeared from the voting patterns of white Britons exist and are indeed getting stronger amongst non-white voters. The Conservative Party will continue to have its esoteric coalition of affluent minorities and nongraduate whites and Labour the opposite. In other words, the Lee Anderson - Rishi Sunak spectrum is a feature, not a bug, of right-wing politics.

And this chart illustrates the point.

There is a summary of the report here, the main 77-page document is here, and the technical appendix is here.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet.

9.30am: The Office for National Statistics publishes its latest population estimates.

11am: The four Tory leadership candidates – James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat – are due to take part in a private hustings for Tory MPs, before the third ballot for MPs opens.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

After 12.30pm: MPs begin a debate on a Tory opposition day motion, criticising the plan to impose VAT on private school fees.

3pm: Economists from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Institute for Government give evidence to the Lords economic affairs committee about the government’s debt target.

3.30pm: Bob Blackman, chair of the 1922 Committee, is due to announce the result of the third ballot of Tory MPs for the Tory leader.

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