Tories to step up attacks on Reform economic policy after Jenrick acrimony
The Conservatives plan to intensify their attacks on Reform’s economic policy as they gear up for a fight to the death between the two big parties of the right, a battle brought to new levels of acrimony by Robert Jenrick’s defection.While Jenrick, the former shadow justice secretary, insisted he was “uniting the right” in signing up to Reform, Kemi Badenoch portrayed her former colleague as dishonest and no loss to the Conservatives, saying: “Nigel Farage is doing my spring cleaning for me.”In a blistering TV interview of his own, Jenrick castigated Badenoch’s Conservatives, saying the “arsonists” who had tanked its reputation were still in charge.While it remains to be seen whether any other sitting Tory MPs will follow Jenrick, the open rancour makes it extremely unlikely that a Badenoch-led Conservatives would do a deal with Reform, pitting the parties against each other in a fight for votes that will start with May’s elections in Scotland and Wales and for English councils.The Conservatives remain well behind Reform in national polling but Badenoch and her team hope a gradual shift in voter attention from migration to the economy will help her party, with a recent internal Tory strategy meeting focused on the party’s economic message.
Internal Conservative polling suggests economic policy is a key weakness for Reform, along with the sense that the party is a one-man band,After a dramatic day on Thursday in which Jenrick was forced to hastily seal his move to Reform after Badenoch’s team learned of his plans and removed his shadow ministerial job and the party whip, he went on the offensive on Friday with a BBC interview castigating his old party,He said: “I came to the conclusion over the course of the last year or so that … the party hadn’t changed, that the people who’d made those mistakes were still sat around the shadow cabinet table, the arsonists were still in control of the party, and that this was not a party that was capable of even understanding what it had got wrong, let alone fixing it,”Asked if he risked splitting the UK’s political right with the move, he replied: “This is uniting the right,My message to millions of people in the country who stuck with the Conservative party, often with gritted teeth … if you want to get rid of this Labour government and have a strong reforming government to fix the country, there’s frankly only one way to do that.
”In her own interviews during a visit to Scotland, Badenoch was equally blunt about her former shadow cabinet colleague and his new party.Asked if she could commit to the Conservatives going into the next election as a solo force, she said: “Yes.How do you do a deal with liars?”On Jenrick, Badenoch said: “You can’t believe a word that comes out of his mouth.This is a man who was asked yesterday morning: ‘Are you going to defect?’ And he said ‘never’ to the chief whip.”She added: “People from Reform and other Conservative party members have been bringing stuff to me about the actions he had been doing to undermine the party, and I kept giving him a chance.
So I’m just glad that Nigel Farage is doing my spring cleaning for me.He’s taking away my problems.”Badenoch urged any Tory MPs considering a similar move to act quickly: “If they’re people who do not belong in our party, who think that it’s all a game and that people’s lives are a game, they just want all this psychodrama, then yes, they should go.We don’t want people like that in the Conservative party.”Jenrick has urged other rightwingers to follow his example, writing in the Telegraph on Friday: “If you’re not already onboard, join the movement.
The future of the country is on the line,”He told the BBC, however, that he did not know of any other imminent high-profile defections,Some Conservative MPs said Jenrick’s brutal defenestration by Badenoch was likely to have made others more wary, and that the party was determined to unite,“It was all about Robert and his ambition, and he needed to grow up,” one said,“Everyone is sick of this crap.
”Speaking to Sky News, Nick Timothy, who has been given Jenrick’s job as shadow justice secretary, said voters would not welcome his former colleague’s move.“The country is absolutely sick of the backbiting, the backstabbing and, frankly, the lack of seriousness with which lots of politicians have taken the very serious and significant challenges that the country faces,” he said.
Trump tariff threats are bad, but the uncertainty they instil is much worse
Donald Trump’s latest tariff threat, in pursuit of his goal of seizing Greenland, is a political nightmare for European leaders, but it could create a severe economic headache too.As the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has repeatedly pointed out since Trump’s trade war began in earnest last year, whatever the ultimate level of tariffs, uncertainty takes its own toll.And as the IMF managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, put it in October, in the Trump era “uncertainty is the new normal”.Businesses tend to hold back from new investment when they are unsure what the policy landscape will eventually look like – as the UK learned to its cost during several years of Brexit wrangling after the 2016 referendum.And this latest threat comes just as businesses in the UK and the EU believed they could plan with certainty, after much-vaunted trade deals with the US were struck and signed with ceremony last summer
Why Rachel Reeves should give bankers more of the cold shoulder at Davos 2026 | Heather Stewart
Back-slapping bankers will be thick on the ground in the Swiss ski resort of Davos this week as Rachel Reeves flies in to mix with the global elite. But she might be wise to treat the finance bros with a certain froideur.That has not been Labour’s approach thus far: Reeves spared the banks from a windfall tax in her 26 November budget, and the UK’s regulators have just loosened capital rules for the first time since the financial crisis.Back in the summer, bank share prices ticked down after the Labour-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) recommended an £8bn levy on the windfall profits made as a result of quantitative easing (QE).Insiders at other thinktanks said at the time that it was made clear to them by the Treasury that publishing such forthright policy proposals was not a welcome contribution to the debate
‘We could hit a wall’: why trillions of dollars of risk is no guarantee of AI reward
Will the race to artificial general intelligence (AGI) lead us to a land of financial plenty – or will it end in a 2008-style bust? Trillions of dollars rest on the answer.The figures are staggering: an estimated $2.9tn (£2.2tn) being spent on datacentres, the central nervous systems of AI tools; the more than $4tn stock market capitalisation of Nvidia, the company that makes the chips powering cutting-edge AI systems; and the $100m signing-on bonuses offered by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta to top engineers at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.These sky-high numbers are all propped up by investors who expect a return on their trillions
He called himself an ‘untouchable hacker god’. But who was behind the biggest crime Finland has ever known?
Tiina Parikka was half-naked when she read the email. It was a Saturday in late October 2020, and Parikka had spent the morning sorting out plans for distance learning after a Covid outbreak at the school where she was headteacher. She had taken a sauna at her flat in Vantaa, just outside Finland’s capital, Helsinki, and when she came into her bedroom to get dressed, she idly checked her phone. There was a message that began with Parikka’s name and her social security number – the unique code used to identify Finnish people when they access healthcare, education and banking. “I knew then that this is not a game,” she says
Bielle-Biarrey hat-trick fires holders Bordeaux to Champions Cup victory at Bristol
The odds on Bordeaux Bègles successfully defending their Champions Cup crown shortened considerably on a damp, grey Sunday lunchtime in Bristol. Good sides can adapt their game to suit awkward conditions and, for the second weekend in a row, French class outflanked English energy and optimism with a hat-trick of tries from the spectacularly prolific French winger Louis Bielle-Biarrey.The Bears, seeking to play billionaire rugby on a day crying out for more prudent housekeeping, made far too many unforced errors and duly paid the price against opponents who are now perfectly placed in this year’s tournament. They will have the luxury of playing all their subsequent knockout games either on French soil or, if they reach the final, just across the Spanish border in Bilbao, and at this rate it will require something special to prevent them claiming back-to-back titles.Even when their side are not quite at their best the sparkling Bielle‑Biarrey, along with the artful Matthieu Jalibert, give Bordeaux crucial extra stardust
Australian Open 2026: Sabalenka, Alcaraz and Raducanu in action on day one – as it happened
Righto, that’s us done for today. Thanks for your company and we’ll see you again tomorrow – but in the meantime, we’ve plenty else for you, in the shape of Wolves v Newcastle and Villa v Everton in the Prem, followed by Senegal v Morocco in the Afcon final, then Patriots v Texans in the NFL playoffs. Not bad, eh?But otherwise, peace out and see you tomorrow.So what’s going on tomorrow? In the day sesh, Arnaldi v Rublev looks decent, likewise Medvedev v De Jong, while Gauff faces Rakhimova and Anisimova meets Waltert, while Jacob Fearnley gets under way against Kamil Majchrzak.We’ll be with you for evening dig, featuring Yuan v Swiatek, Martinez v Djokovic, Vekic v Andreeva and Bellucci v Ruud
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