It’s just possible that the Labour voices who urged Khan to ditch Ulez expansion after the Uxbridge by-election were not, after all, strategic geniuses.

I’m at the deputy leadership hustings at Labour conference - officially, after it has finished, meaning lots of delegates have already left so Bridget Phillipson and Lucy Powell are making their cases to a hall maybe 1/3 full.

Personally I can think of quite a few other fairly recent days in British politics with a better claim to this title.

Away from Labour, Ed Davey has (slightly) reshuffled his from bench. The well thought-of Lisa Smart goes from home affairs to a cross-policy Cabinet Office role; another rising star, Max Wilkinson, replaces her; Jess Brown-Fuller (yet another rising star) takes over at justice.

I’m in the conference hall for Keir Starmer’s speech and many people in the crowd are holding small union flags and Welsh flags being handed out as they come in. There might be a theme emerging here.

Speaking at an event at the Labour conference, Sadiq Khan says: “I think it is a badge of pride that bad people hate London.”

Interesting to see that Jack Anderton, who set Farage up on TikTok and is now an adviser to Hull mayor Luke Campbell, and who (as we reported) suggested Britain would be better off had it stayed neutral in the second world war, is now doing articles for the Mail. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Wes Streeting at a fringe event at Labour conference: “I did not think in my lifetime we would see 100,000 of our fellow countrymen and women marching behind Tommy Robinson on the streets of London.” He says this is “terrifying”.

Having looked through the entire Labour fringe listings there are basically 3 types of event: - We need to talk about widgets! How the widget industry and AI can bring growth (minister for widgets: invited) [90% of total] - How to take on the populists and Reform. - Andy Burnham event*.

This leaflet was enclosed inside my Labour conference pass envelope. Coincidence? I think not #globalconspiracy

The substack setting out the conspiracy is even more amusing. The final sentence in this mini-extract is one of the more curious shifts in tone I’ve ever read.

With full respect to YouGov's expertise, not only are MRP polls three years from an election almost entirely meaningless, but I'm increasingly convinced the scale and complexity of tactical voting in a 'stop Reform' election makes the result even harder to forecast with such models.

Blimey. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

NEW: Menzies "Ming" Campbell, the former Lib Dems leader, an MP for 28 years (and a former Olympic sprinter) has died aged 84, the party has said. I met him at a few LD conferences and he was really very lovely.

Also: Labour MPs are pressuring ministers to take urgent action to help often deprived coastal communities. There are 66 Labour “Sea Wall” - see what they did? - seats, they say, at least as numerous as the Red Wall. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

I’m at a slightly curious political event in Westminster, a kind of Glastonbury for progressive politicians. Apart from Keir Starmer, also appearing are Mark Carney, Anthony Albanese, Pedro Sanchez, Jacinda Ardern, Rachel Reeves, David Lammy, Pete Buttigieg - this list goes on.

This from Lucy Powell is the strongest articulation I've seen yet of the way Labour can take on Farage www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Exclusive: another big departure for Keir Starmer from his No 10 team, someone who is very close to the PM and hugely trusted. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Sadiq Khan to ITV London on Donald Trump’s comments about him to the UN: “I think I’ve got squatters right for the amount of time I’ve spent in Donald Trump’s head. I’m just hoping he doesn’t send me an invoice for all the time I’ve spent there.”

It’s increasingly beginning to look like the Lib Dems’ resident genie who guarantees endless Tory self-sabotage also grants occasional requests about Reform.

As we await Ed Davey’s big conference speech, here’s my analysis of a Lib Dem conference that was simultaneously quite boring in news terms, hugely fascinating in what it showed about the party’s sheer focus and ambition, and potentially quite consequential. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

A story from Lib Dem conference today. Various views are available. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

With more MPs you need more mugs. I can’t say whether all 72 are on offer at the Lib Dem shop here at their conference, but they have got a lot.

If you're at Lib Dem conference today, then this feels like the most interesting fringe of the whole weekend – and that's very much not because I'm chairing it.

Some more culture war pushback from the Lib Dems - people who use the union jack or St George’s cross as a form of aggressive nationalism do not love their country, Tim Farron tells their conference. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

NEW: Ed Davey has called for an emergency programme to clear the asylum backlog and treat refugees with compassion, before a Liberal Democrat conference where the party aims to target disillusioned Conservative and Labour voters. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

One apparently direct result of the Your Party ructions: the Greens’ membership rose by about 1,400 people in a day. They’re now above 75,000. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Now this is a curious tale from @rowenamason.bsky.social, not least the idea of a "leading" interior design company whose website only uses stock internet photos and listed no contact details until they were approached by the Guardian via their accountants. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Some initial thoughts from me about what the seeming implosion of Your Party (or whatever name emerged) means for its leaders, would-be supporters and the left more generally. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

It's Reform's stated ambition to copy the Lib Dems' election strategies, both locally and nationally. But if you look at the candidate training listed for the upcoming Lib Dem conference, you realise *just how seriously and in detail* the Lib Dems take all of this. Doesn't happen overnight.

While I understand the BBC’s imperative to provide balance in stories, at times it can feel completely ludicrous. Data vs one person’s entirely anecdotal opinion isn’t balance.

Exclusive: Sadiq Khan has accused Donald Trump of doing more than anyone else to encourage the intolerant far right across the globe as the US president arrives in the UK. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

There is a long and quite self-righteous debate in the Commons about when No 10 knew what about Peter Mandelson & Jeffrey Epstein. The brief if depressing answer is: *everyone* knew Mandelson was a mate of Epstein, including post-conviction. But the media made nothing of it, so it was overlooked.

That’s quite a coup for Reform and terrible for the Conservatives - not just a sitting MP but also a shadow minister (he was a shadow work pensions minister). Kruger is quite culture war-ey but still a surprise.

Foreign billionaires don’t get to incite violence against Britain. We cannot stay silent. 1/5 www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

NEW: Keir Starmer has been warned that time is running out to repair his faltering leadership, with Labour MPs beginning to ask whether he could be challenged as prime minister. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

EXCLUSIVE: Lucy Powell, the former Commons leader who is now vying to be Labour deputy leader, has called for a “change of culture” inside Keir Starmer’s Downing Street to make it more inclusive and better connected to MPs. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

After this diary item was read out at today's No 10 briefing, another reporter asked the perfectly fair question: why is it "working people" who will be safer? Won't better security tech also protect pensioners, kids, the unemployed etc? It's all very strange.

The semi-detached UK arm of Turning Point are likely to be in the news after the awful murder of Charlie Kirk. Worth remembering they're notably more extreme than when originally formed – their head, Nick Tenconi, has called for "millions" of deportations and has been praised by Tommy Robinson.

Day four of the tube strike, and my patience finally snapped with one of the wobbly, light-jumping young men new to Lime biking - he almost wobbled into me jumping a light from the other direction as I turned right. That said, "Gilet-wearing fuckwit" might have been a bit harsh in retrospect.

I’m at an event on leaving the ECHR with Richard Tice, Suella Braverman and David Frost - but, we are assured, there are no defections about to happen.

I’ve read through the tranche of emails by Jeffrey Epstein and his banking friend Jes Staley to, from and about “Petie” aka Peter Mandelson, so you don’t have to. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Kemi Badenoch begins PMQs by asking Keir Starmer whether he has confidence in Peter Mandelson, and if No 10 knew the full facts about his links to Jeffrey Epstein. Has she got a new PMQs adviser? Questions are pertinent and to the point. There are even follow-ups!

Such is the atmosphere stoked by politicians and media, that if you’re a coachload of young men from varied ethnic backgrounds arriving in an English town, it’s currently about 50-50 whether you’ll face abuse, threats or potentially worse.

Later today, Valérie Plante, the mayor of Montreal, will re-name a section of the city's main REV bike route in honour of Robert "Bicycle Bob" Silverman, who in the 1970s pushed for bike lanes as part of Le Monde à Bicyclette. Amazingly, I've been told, I'm slightly responsible for this.... 1/2

Timetable for the Labour deputy leader election confirmed. 80 MPs in place by 5pm Thursday? Easy.

I joined Zack Polanski for a walkabout around Clacton, where he talked to Nigel Farage supporters and said other parties must do more to battle the prospect of a “far right-adjacent” Reform government. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

My hunch is that if Zack Polanski's Greens or the Corbyn Party were platforming quite this level of crank madness about cancer in the Royal Family, they would get quite a lot of heat for doing so

Possibly unwise instant opinion: if you *have* to lose a popular and emblematic deputy PM, then doing so at high speed; in such a way her allies cannot claim conspiracy; but where also the official verdict is she was, at worse, rushed and naive... well, it could be worse.

Hello from the Reform UK conference at the NEC in Birmingham which is, as you’ll hear all day, quite glitzy and more conference-like than last year’s rally. But it’s still a mixed bag. The fringe event I’m at starts in 1 min and is maybe 1/5 full. And there are not many fringes.