Some people are arguing that now is the time for the opposition to table a no-confidence motion. The Leader of The Opposition has made it clear she will facilitate one if Labour MPs now want to get rid of the PM. The Opposition is of course free to do this but will only do so if it seems likely there are enough Labour MPs to make it a worthwhile thing to do. Often the Opposition tabling a motion simply unites the governing party to fight off the threat to the future of the government. This defers the infighting which the crisis has generated. MPs in a governing party are usually reluctant to vote to destabilise their own patronage machine or to hasten an election.

Of course if enough Labour MPs see a No Confidence motion as a means to rid themselves of an unpopular leader then the Opposition can help the rebels by tabling and voting for such a motion. When a party has such a large majority as Labour there is no chance of passing a No confidence vote without large numbers of Labour MPs voting for it. If that did happen the King would ask whoever emerges as the new Labour leader to form the next government. It would not bring on an early General Election.

The Labour Party at the moment is very divided with a large number of Labour MPs extremely unhappy about their leader and about the events surrounding Lord Mandelson. So far the rebels have not all agreed to get behind a single candidate as an alternative to the Prime Minister. Instead the leading contenders or their supporters are busy attacking the Prime Minister in their briefings and doubtless seeing how many other MPs would be willing to get behind a leadership bid by them. It takes 81 Labour MP s to all declare in public they want the same named replacement as Leader to trigger a contest.

I have deleted more than usual as people are ignoring guidance. You should not accuse people of criminal acts or claim people are corrupt when you have not supplied evidence and helped persuade the authorities to bring charges.

Yesterday the PM was unable to put the fires out. Deadly Opposition from the Conservatives confronted Starmer with a motion he needed to vote down, demanding full publication of all the documents around Mandleson, his appointment and his tenure as Ambassador.

The PM realised his huge majority was not with him and he could not perform the usual routine business of voting down an Opposition motion. He decided to compromise by offering to publish much, but keeping under his officials the right to withold important documents they deemed to be important to national security and or international relations.

His rebellious party would not accept that. Livid with how their top people had landed them in a huge crisis, many demanded full disclosure. The Conservatives proposed letting the senior, confidential Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee read the relevant papers and decide which if any should not be published. By the time Angela Rayner agreed with this the PM had no option. The hapless Minister defending him in the Chamber tried the line it was too late to amend the motion, but the Speaker made clear he would take a late manuscript change to accommodate the obvious mood of the House.

This feels like a seismic explosion, a large fire engulfing this Administration. By appointing Mandleson the PM came to part own the Blair government, the great banking crash of 2008-9 and worse still for him the worrying emails,payments and deals surrounding Mandleson.

The police enquiry may take time and may dampen some speculation. The governing party looks gutted by what has happened and is in no mood to cover up or support. There will be plenty of stories about what did go on in the dying days of the Brown government and in the Oval Office under Starmer. It is deeply embarrassing for our country, and it has upset the crucial relationship with the US President. The last thing Donald Trump wanted was more discussion of Epstein.

The government has said that by 2040 the reset will bring benefits of £9 bn to our economy. That is just 0.3% of Gdp spread over 14 years, or 0.02% a year. Why bother?
In practice it will be a loss to the UK as this assessment of benefits leaves out the costs. There will be a financial contribution to the EU to pay for it. There is the surrender of our fish for another 12 years leaving us short of fishing revenue. There is the very expensive Erasmus scheme to help more EU students than UK students replacing the much better and much cheaper Turing scheme for UK students we currently enjoy .
Worst of all is the wish to sign us up to the very costly EU carbon trading scheme. This will put up the UK carbon tax which will speed the closure of more UK businesses relying on gas and on petrochemicals. Adopting a version of the carbon border tax will make our imports from non EU dearer, as it is an expensive tariff. What happened to the government’s focus on the cost of living?
Integrating our electricity industry more with the energy short continent will make us more dependent on expensive imports.
The SPS changes on food exports and imports are unlikely to simplify or reduce costs by much as we will be forced to adopt the EU schemes which requires extensive use of vets and certification in a very bureaucratic package. We also need good food safety rules.
The EU is anti innovation. Accepting their rules on farming and business could cut us off again from important new ideas and science being pioneered in the US.

I with others argued that appointing Lord Mandelson as Ambassador was a bad idea. We had a good career diplomat Ambassador in Washington, liked by President trump, who got appropriate access and set out the UK case.

The PM knew Mandelson had connections with Epstein though he may well have not known what has come out. He would have known that President Trump had no wish to have friends of Epstein in the Oval Office given Epstein’s criminal convictions. He should have worked out that some of Mandelson’s past views and certainly some of his past statements about Trump were far from helpful in winning over President Trump. By any measure this was a bad appointment before we learned of more of the detail of the Epstein relationship.

One of my biggest annoyances is the damage this has done to UK/US relationships and the impact it has had on UK policy. When he was first appointed I urged Mandelson to see the damage the Chagos give away would do. Instead he helped Starmer reassure the President this was a good policy. Now the President has found out more of the truth about the deal he has concluded it is a very bad idea.

It looks as if Lord Mandelson failed to explain to the President the US/UK Treaty promising the UK would keep the freehold of Chagos, failed to explain the consequences of Mauritius being signed up to a No nuclear Treaty, and failed to consider the defence impact of the islands being owned by a friend of China.

An Ambassador being close to our most important ally let us down badly by not explaining all this to the President,leaving the President no choice but to change his view when someone else put the full truth to him about this bad deal.

When responding to this remember Mandelson has not been accused of any criminal offence and is innocent until proved guilty. Of course the revelations of his lifestyle and the involvement with Epstein has been quite enough for the PM to say he has behaved badly, should not be a peer and should be subject to an enquiry. All this from the man who thought he was the best person to be our most important Ambassador and who said he had full confidence in him when the Opposition pressed him in Parliament.

Why did he ever force Mandelson onto the diplomatic service given his troubled past when in government? This was well known to all of us given his loss of office twice over conduct issues.

Do you remember the one about how the government was going to preside over building far more homes, boosting growth and jobs? The last government promised 1 m over five years or 200,000 annually whch it delivered after covid. The incoming government promised 1.5 million or 300,000 a year. So far instead of putting up the rate of completions, they are down.

The Chancellor was arm wrestling the so called independent OBR to give her credit for more growth ahead from more homes which were going to come from easier planning rules. The OBR need to review that decision as numbers of homes have gone down, not up.

The collapse has been biggest in London, the part of the country with the dearest homes and the biggest shortages. A Labour Mayor and a Labour government have added more expensive regulations and allowed lower targets, against their own national policy. The new rules on two staircases in mid rise blocs, on net zero standards and more outdoor space requiring balconies, have undermined the viability of new flats projects.

The big tax attack and the government inspired or regulated price surges in water, energy, rail fares, Council taxes has also meant fewer people have enough money to think about buying their first home or about trading up. The housing market is sluggish or in decline as a result.

The Housing Secretary says they are sticking with his 1.5 m target. Few commentators and builders think there is any chance of hitting it. Labour would be doing well to get back up to the last government’s build rates. No more growth here than in China.

Much of the public deeply resents the spending priority afforded to migration. We read that the government is being asked to pay yet more money for its hasty and botched cancellation of the Rwanda plan, rubbing salt into wounds when we do not have the deterrent effect of somewhere to send illegal migrants which the government clearly needs. The government pays large sums to the French to stop the boats without conditions and accepts the French have broken their promise to tackle some of the boats in shallow water before they depart when their intentions are clear.The government is paying large sums for hotel accommodation they promised to close down, and paying more to convert older buildings for use as migrant hostels in an attempt to avoid more hotels as illegals continue to arrive. The government is paying top up benefits to migrants, and a full range of benefits to dependents that come to join them. Migrants taking up lower wage employment qualify for subsidised housing, free NHS, free school places and the full range of public services. The press have recently highlighted the costs of providing free English language tuition for recent arrivals. The arrival of a large number of people speaking a wide range of languages has raised language costs in a number of relevant public services.

In 2025-16 the EU was trying to respond to the large numbers of migrants arriving across its borders.They made a proposal that countries that would not take their fair share of these EU arrivals should have to make payments to the countries that did take them. Their calculation suggested that the set up and early year costs of a new low or no pay migrant were 250,000 Euros.
I tried to work out what a similar cost would be for the UK leaving the EU. I saw that the EU figure had plausibility. If many people come then the state does need to build new flats or houses to accommodate them, and these will need to be heavily subsidised with the public sector picking up the initial capital cost. There needs to be more school places and surgery and hospital capacity, with capital costs to increase the capacity of schools and health centres, and with more staff being recruited to man them. Adding more people on a big scale also means putting in more road and rail capacity. Meanwhile the private sector has to spend on more broadband, water, electricity and gas supply.

The case for controlled immigration has been clear and popular with the majority of voters for a long time. The Treasury idea that high levels of migration were fine because they added to GDP was always disbelieved by many of the voters. It is difficult to understand why clever Treasury officials never wanted to highlight the public spending consequences of unrestricted migration when it was bound to have a very visible impact on capital and revenue budgets for key state services and for benefits.

This anti growth government that has done so much to kill growth in our domestic market now goes in search of growth from EU trade. It has banned our businesses getting out more oil and gas, put strict limits on how many petrol and diesel cars our motor industry can sell prior to a complete ban on their best selling lines in 2030, taxed people out of jobs and increased closures of pubs, shops, entertainment businesses and the rest. It has followed a strong de industrialisation policy,is trying to close down as much industrial capacity as possible that dares to use fossil fuels by imposing high carbon and windfall taxes and bans. It refuses to offer grants to farmers to farm but will offer them money to stop growing food and rearing animals.

It is true our exporters do create jobs, pay people good wages and boost our GDP. If its more exports the government wants to replace its dwindling home output of manufactures, energy and food, then it should go to the places that buy lots of our exports, are buying more year by year and want to do business with us. Both in and now out of the EU our trade with non EU countries has been growing faster than with the EU. Both in and out our trade in services have expanded rapidly, especially with non EU countries. The quickest wins for more exports are trade deals and government backing for more exports of our services to the rest of the world beyond the EU to countries that speak English and like what we do.

Our trade in goods with the EU sees us in massive deficit. In 2024 we imported £313bn of EU goods but exported little more than half that at £174 bn. We import lots of refined oil products as we close down more of our own refineries in the name of net zero. We are importing plenty of crude oil as we refuse to get more of our own out of the ground. We are importing large numbers of cars as the government squeezes our own industry to closure brought on by high taxes on petrol and diesel cars made at home. We import plenty of vegetables and fruit we could grow for ourselves as government policy seeks to dissuade farmers from growing things. We also import a lot of European medicines and electrical products.

Our balance of trade in goods is bound to get worse with the EU on current policies. Our past top exports to them of oil, refined oil products, vehicles, chemicals and miscellaneous manufactures are all being hammered by the government’s high energy anti industry policies. Our services exports to the EU are growing but at a slower pace than with the rest of the world.
The government is wrong to think making sacrifices to try to get more trade with the EU will help us grow faster. Loosening rules on trade will help them more than us given the huge imbalance in trade in goods and the impact of their restrictive rules on farming and making things.

What would make a big difference is import substitution. That would boost growth. If only the government would follow policies that encouraged us to get out more of our own oil and gas, keep open our refineries, run chemical works with sensibly priced feedstock, and boost domestic entertainment, hospitality and tourism we would cut the big EU balance of trade deficit, create more jobs at home and enjoy faster growth. Imports subtract from GDP.

The PM will search in vain for growth from more trade with China. Our exports to China were a lowly £30bn in 2024 so a 10% boost would only be 0.1% of our GDP. Meanwhile our imports were a much larger £72.5bn, more than double our exports. A 10% increase in those would cut our GDP by 0.2%. In practice the PM claims a derisory boost of just £50 m a year to our exports in a £3 trillion economy! He doesn’t forecast the increase in our imports which are likely to exceed that tiny total, meaning less overall GDP for UK. Our trade in goos saw our exports down to £19 bn and their goods exports at £67 bn, three times as much.

The truth is there is not much we produce that China needs. Meanwhile the government’s deindustrialisation policies of dear energy, bans and high taxes in the name of net zero create plenty of scope for China to export to us. China dominates the supply of solar panels. It is big in wind towers and turbines, and is coming to dominate in batteries and battery cars. These are the products that lead our lists of imports, assisted by miscellaneous manufactures as UK industry is driven to closure by high taxes and costs.

China does want to copy our success in creating great universities, in generating plenty of innovations, in financial services, in culture and entertainment and the other service exports we are good at. It will pick up much useful insight by sending some of its brightest and best students to the UK and by getting them onto important research projects for further degrees. It will encourage some UK firms to collaborate, including supplying their best intellectual property. Some Chinese business people simply copy western brands and technologies without paying royalties or buying the rights.

China is following a China first policy. It intends to control the intellectual property, own the raw materials and set up the manufacturing facilities at home. The UK government is misguided if it thinks the UK can win large amounts of goods orders from China and sustain their role as a long term supplier, given the domestic focus of Chinese policy.

The much travelled PM thinks UK growth has to come from more trade with the EU and China. I am not sure he knows our big trade with these two is heavily weighted to imports, not exports.I worry he doesn’t realise importing more from them lowers GDP growth.

He is right that if we could export more to them without importing more that helps growth. So why does he follow anti industry anti farming policies that mean we will make and grow fewer things they might want to buy? We used to sell lots of oil, gas, refined oil products and petrol cars to the EU. All these are on the ban and tax more heavily list. We watched as EU grants tore out our orchards, as EU quotas limited our dairy and meat production. Since leaving the EU the farms tax, higher National Insurance, grants for not growing food mean less agricultural output not more exports to a loving continent.

The net zero extremism means high energy costs. There has been a rush of closures in steel, ceramics, cement, plastics, other building materials as demented accounting means we have to import energy intensive products rather than make them for ourselves. The decision to keep our own oil and gas in the ground so we import LNG which creates so much more CO 2 instead is particularly damaging.

This is bad economics and worse politics. The UK trade more with non EU so the PM concentrates on the EU trade in long term decline. We trade more in services than goods, so the PM concentrates on goods. We run huge deficits with the EU and China and a good surplus with the rest of the world. By concentrating on the two big deficits and giving in to them the PM makes more imports and less growth the more likely outcome. China has no intention of helping us rebuild our industries and every intention of making us depend on their batteries, cars, turbines and solar panels. The EU has every plan to use the reset to impose many rules to ensure they sell us more and buy less.