Robert Jenrick, the Reform UK Treasury spokesperson, has claimed Labour is acting like a “banana republic” in banning political parties from receiving donations in cryptocurrency.

Speaking about the annoucement at a media event this morning, Jenrick accepted that this was aimed at Reform UK, the only main party encouraging people to donate in crypto, and he accused Labour of wanting to “stop its opponents from succeeding”.

He said:

Look, the government is failing. It’s losing the argument. So what’s it doing? It’s like a banana republic - resorting to attacking how political parties raise money – perfectly legitimate ways for British citizens to donate, as they’ve always done, to political parties.

He went on:

This isn’t serious politics. It’s just the mark of a government that is failing and is having to use every lever at its disposal to try and stop its opponents from succeeding. It’s not going to work.

We’re going to see in May that people across the country come out to vote, to send a signal, a very clear message, to Keir Starmer that he is one of the worst prime ministers we’ve ever had, and we want to get him out of office as quickly as possible and have real change, which is what Reform offer.

Jenrick was speaking at a petrol station where he was to promoting Reform UK’s call for the government to halve VAT on petrol for three months in the face of rising oil prices caused by the Iran war.

Yesterday the Conservative party said that it wanted to ban political parties from distributing campaign literature in a foreign language. Announcing a plan to propose an amendement to the representation of the people bill to make this law, the shadow communities minister Paul Holmes said:

Campaigning in a foreign language as the Greens did in Gorton and Denton only fosters greater division. A coherent national culture relies on shared values, and an inclusive electoral process relies on a common tongue.

Steve Reed, the local government secretary, has rejected this proposal. In an interview with GB News, he said:

I think it’s for political parties to choose how they campaign and communicate with British voters. If they’re using British money that is funding their campaigns and they’re speaking to people who have the right to vote, then why would you not show those voters the respect of communication?

What fuels division is Nick Timothy standing up and singling out Muslim forms of worship for a ban when he’s not applying that to forms of worship that other religions are talking about.

The Conservatives are continuing to suggest that Morgan McSweeney has been engaged in some sort of conspiracy to dispose of his mobile phone, and stop parliament getting hold of his messages with Peter Mandelson. Yesterday Kemi Badenoch said “it is only right that Morgan McSweeney testifies in Parliament and explains exactly what happened”. And this morning Andrew Griffith, the shadow business secretary, told Sky New that “the whole thing is as smelly as a fish market on a hot summer’s afternoon”.

Referring to claims that McSweeney’s account of how he had his phone stolen (meaning the messages potentially cannot be recovered) and that the police did not investigate it propertly, Griffith went on:

It just doesn’t compute, does it? I worked in Number 10. Briefly, I had a Number 10 phone. There was a paranoia about devices like that falling into other people’s hands.

And so whether it was the Met Police, whether it was Morgan McSweeney, and what sounds like pretty evasive set of reporting, even when you look at that transcript, or whether it was the Number 10 security team following up something that at the time they could not have been sure had not been taken by a state actor, a phone with all sorts of government secrets potentially in it, that’s precisely why people in government have two separate phones.

Griffith worked in No 10 for Boris Johnson, who reportedly told the Covid inquiry that it could not read messages on one of his phones because he had forgotten his password. Perhaps this explains why Griffith is sceptical about explanations from No 10 figures about why phone messages cannot be obtained.

Keir Starmer has said that the idea that McSweeney was engaged in a plot to dispose of the phone is “far-fetched”. Others are more dismissive, suggesting the Tories have gone into full conspiracy theory mode. There is precedent for this; last year Badenoch and her team spent several weeks pushing the theory that Jonathan Powell, the PM’s national security adviser, has intervened to get the CPS to drop the China spy case, before they eventually gave up after an inquiry by a parliamentary inquiry found no evidence at all to support the claim.

But it is not just the Tories who think there is something fishy going on.

Last night the Labour MP Karl Turner posted these on social media, accusing McSweeney of lying when he told the police his phone had been stolen.

I don’t believe McSwindle had his iPhone stolen

Honest believe, Matt. It’s smacks of the liar Johnson defence of ‘lost all my WhatsApp messages’. We mustn’t take the public for fools. And I am afraid this smacks of too convenient by far. I won’t do it. I will say what I actually think. And I don’t believe it. End of!

I believe the report was made. McSwindle didn’t mention that he was the chief of staff to the PM. A significant omission of he’d wanted the police to prioritise the offence.

Turner is an outspoken MP who is willing to go much further than his colleagues in saying things that are provocative. But this morning he has received partial backing from Richard Burgon. He has tabled some parliamentary written questions about McSweeney’s phone which suggest he does not think the full truth is being told.

Burgon is a leading figure in the Socialist Campaign group in parliament, which represents leftwingers, and he was a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour left hate McSweeney because he masterminded the Labour Together operation to destroy Corbynism, and some respects Burgon’s intervention might be best understood as a new instalment of Labour internal feuding.

Keir Starmer has been speaking at the JEF leaders’ summit in Helsinki. He said that the war in Iran should not distract attention from the threat from Russia, which he said “has grown”.

He said:

A couple of months ago all eyes of the world were on the High North, and now they’re on the Gulf. And, of course, we will continue to defend our interests, there.

But the threat from Russia in the north and the east has not gone away. And therefore it’s important that we’re here today.

In fact, in my view, that threat has grown, and we all know very well the impact of that threat for our security, for our economies and the cost of living for families in each of our countries.

So it’s right that we’re focussed, as ever, on Euro-Atlantic security and on Ukraine, and bringing those two together the Joint Expeditionary Force has a vital role to play here.

Jakub Krupa has more coverage on his Europe live blog.

Keir Starmer likes to point out that, under Labour, real household incomes have been going up – which did not happen when the last Conservative government first took office. This morning the Department of Work and Pensions has published its annual poverty figures and it backs this up. It says:

-median household income increased in real terms between FYE [financial year end] 2024 and FYE 2025, rising by 5% before housing costs (BHC) and 5% after housing costs (AHC) to £719 and £623 per week respectively. The increases for both these measures were statistically significant

-household incomes increased across almost the entire BHC distribution, with the largest increases in the central deciles. Smaller increases were recorded at the top and bottom ends of the distribution. For AHC, increases were also seen across most percentiles, except at the very lowest end, which experienced a slight fall

-for the more central deciles, income increases were statistically significant, though changes at the extremes of the distribution are more uncertain due to wider confidence intervals

The report also says poverty rates were relatively stable.

-relative low‑income rates increased slightly, rising from 15% to 16% (BHC) and 19% to 20% (AHC). These changes were less than 1 percentage point (the AHC change was less than 0.5 percentage points) and not statistically significant

The DWP has changed the way it collects poverty data and that means exact comparisons with the historic data are not possible. The DWP explains this in its report.

The conflict in the Middle East will damage the UK’s economy more than any other industrialised nation, according to analysis by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which warned over rising inflation. Phillip Inman has the story.

Inman says:

Noting a weakening of the UK jobs market and a contraction in business investment towards the end of 2025, the OECD attributed the downgrade to a lack of momentum going into 2026 as well as the shock from rising oil and gas prices as a result of the US-Israel attacks on Iran.

Illustrating the UK’s dependence on international trade and imports of fuel, the OECD said it had downgraded the UK’s growth in 2026 because it was likely to suffer higher inflation than previously expected.

The forecast 0.5 percentage point cut in UK growth compares with expectations of a much more limited reduction in growth for France, Germany and Italy, which were more insulated from spiralling energy prices and are all expected to suffer a more modest hit to growth of 0.2 percentage points.

Yesterday Steve Reed, the local government secretary, announced that 15 new councils will be created in the south and east of England as part of the government’s local government reorganisation. Patrick Butler has the story here.

James Cleverly, the shadow local government secretary, responded with a statement saying:

This is outright gerrymandering from a Labour government desperate to shore up its collapsing support.

Reorganisation should be bottom-up, informed by and reflecting local priorities and voices. Instead, Labour are imposing top-down decisions on communities while claiming to be empowering them.

To justify the “gerrymandering” claim, the Tories say the plans will “expand the Labour-run local authorities’ boundaries of Portsmouth and Southampton, as well as Brighton and Hove”.

Doctors who have been prevented from working in the NHS while they wait for asylum decisions are celebrating after the Home Office agreed to lift the ban, Diane Taylor reports.

Keir Starmer has said it is “far-fetched” to suggest that the theft of his former chief of staff’s mobile phone is somehow connected to a subsequent push for the release of documents relating to Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador, Ben Quinn reports.

Good morning. It is going to be a busy political news day, but potentially quite a mixed and messy one. Keir Starmer is in Helsinki for a meeting of the Joint Expeditionary Force (the northern European military pact – the Nordics, the Baltics, the Dutch and the UK), and he has already been speaking to the media. In the Commons it is the last day before the Easter recess, which means it is “take out the trash day” – the trash, in this case, being government announcements that have to be reported to parliament (so they can’t be announced during the recesss), but which have been held back because they’re moderately embarrassing (or sometimes just too dull). There are 24 written ministerial statements (full list here). Few, if any, of these are likely to produce big headline stories, but there should be a lot here for people interested in the workings of government.

And, with the parliamentary session also about to end soon (the new king’s speech is expected to take place on Wednesday 13 May), the government is also trying to get all its bills onto the statute book. And it faced a new problem last night after peers voted for a second time to insert a clause into the bill committing the government to an Australian-style social media ban for under-16s.

The government has already launched a consultation on the case for a ban, and it is including provisions in the children’s wellbeing and schools bill that would allow it to implement a ban very quickly, and so the gap between what the Lords are demanding and what the government is already offering is quite narrow. But Starmer does not want to commit to a full social media ban for under-16s, because he thinks other options might be more effective.

Speaking to reporters in Helsinki, Starmer said he was determined to do more to tackle “addictive features in social media” and that he would announce more on this tomorrow. Asked about the Los Angeles court case where Meta and YouTube were found liable for deliberately designing addictive products, he said he thought it should that the public wanted to see social media companies regulated more aggressively. He went on:

Obviously we’ll study that ruling very carefully, but I’m absolutely clear that we need to go further.

The status quo isn’t good enough. We need to do more to protect children.

That’s why we’re consulting about issues such as banning social media for under-16s.

I’m very keen that we do more on addictive features within social media.

We’ve already taken the powers so that when we get to the end of the consultation, we don’t have to wait years to implement this.

But I want to be really clear, it’s not if things are going to change, things are going to change. The question is, how much and what are we going to do?

And that’s what we’re working on. I’ll be saying some more about this tomorrow.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: The Department for Work and Pensions publishes annual poverty figures. And the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero publishes fuel poverty figures.

10am: Robert Jenrick, the Reform UK Treasury spokesperson, holds a media event at a Dover petrol station to promote the party’s call for VAT on petrol to be halved for three months.

10am: John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, launches the SNP’s 2026 election campaign. At 10.30am Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, launches his party’s Holryood election campaign, and at 1.30pm Russell Findlay, the Scottish Tory leader, launches his campaign.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

After 11.30am: Torsten Bell, the pensions minister, is expected to make a Commons statement about the failure of National Savings and Investments to pay money owed to the families of people who have died.

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