One of Liz Truss’s favourite rightwing thinktanks has criticised the government for considering ditching a much-vaunted new funding structure for farmers, calling the existing subsidy system “a massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to landowners”. Truss has announced plans to review the environmental land management scheme (Elms), where farmers would be paid for environmental protection, in...
The decision to pay Liz Truss’s new chief of staff, Mark Fullbrook, through a private company has been dropped after criticism from within the Conservatives as well as from opposition parties. The government admitted over the weekend that Fullbrook would be paid through his lobbying firm, a move that could have helped him avoid paying tax. He had previously claimed the firm had stopped all...
Keir Starmer has said Labour will launch Great British Energy, a publicly owned energy company run on clean UK power, in its first year of government, saying the party will “fight the Tories on economic growth”. In his speech at the Labour conference in Liverpool, Starmer said the largest onshore wind farm in Wales was owned by Sweden, China had a stake in the UK nuclear industry, and millions of...
Boris Johnson has been criticised by senior business leaders and Conservative MPs for a “rambling” speech to top industry figures that saw him extensively praise Peppa Pig World, compare himself to Moses and imitate the noise of an accelerating car. The prime minister’s sprawling address to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) was accused of lacking seriousness and professionalism. Johnson...
French fishers are set to take action within days, including blocking road and sea freight bound for the UK through Calais and other Channel ports, as a months-long dispute over licences to operate in British waters intensifies. French media reported on Tuesday that with talks between the two governments and the European Commission over post-Brexit fishing rights seemingly deadlocked, angry...
In recent speeches, Boris Johnson has cited Kermit the frog and James Bond, and drawn up on all manner of football analogies. Yet none of them were as widely panned as the one he gave to business leaders earlier this week, when he went on a long – and seemingly unscripted – riff about Peppa Pig. According to political scientists, the furore is a sign that cracks are beginning to show in his...
The portrait painter passed away “suddenly and peacefully” at a London hospital on Monday, the family said in a statement shared with the Daily Telegraph. The prime minister has previously described his mother as the “supreme authority” in the family. At his first Conservative party conference as leader in 2019, Johnson said his mother had taught him “the equal importance, the equal dignity, the...
Just months after Akshata Murty was born in April 1980, she was sent to live with her paternal grandparents after her parents moved hundreds of miles away to Mumbai for work. “Your mother and I were young then and struggling to find our feet in our careers,” her father wrote in a letter to Akshata, which was published in Legacy; Letters from eminent parents to their daughter. “Two months after...
What is non-domicile status?A person who is registered as non-domiciled with HM Revenue and Customs is tax resident in the UK but does not have to pay UK tax on income and capital gains earned overseas – including on company stocks or cash made from selling a second home – unless they bring their money into the UK or deposit it into a UK bank account. However, non-doms do still have to pay tax on...
Disgraced Tory MP Neil Parish, who resigned his seat on Saturday after admitting he had twice watched pornography in the House of Commons chamber, appeared to have committed a criminal offence which carried a maximum two-year prison sentence, Labour said. Parish, who had represented the safe west country seat of Tiverton and Honiton since 2010, said that on the first occasion he watched porn on...