Downing Street has only itself to blame for lack of grip on Whitehall, say experts

Downing Street only has itself to blame for failing to exercise power, Whitehall experts have said, after a former No 10 adviser said that lobbying by a “political perma-class” had distracted the government from voters’ priorities.Paul Ovenden prompted a debate about how Keir Starmer’s administration is governing after criticising what he described as the “sheer weirdness of how Whitehall spends its time”.In particular, the former Downing Street strategist highlighted the effort spent on freeing the British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, who has previously posted on X about killing Zionists, saying colleagues had joked about the campaign as a “totem of the ceaseless sapping of time and energy by people obsessed with fringe issues”.Ovenden hit out at what he called the “supremacy of the stakeholder state”, arguing the government had been hobbled by a “complex coalition of campaign groups, regulators, litigators, trade bodies and well-networked organisations”, although he stressed that many civil servants themselves wanted to change the system.He claimed the stakeholder state was “incubated by a political perma-class that exists within every party and every department – one whose entire focus is on preserving their status within a system that gives them meaning”

Distractions over Abd el-Fattah were running joke, says ex-Starmer adviser

Efforts to free Alaa Abd el-Fattah regularly distracted Keir Starmer’s government from focusing on bread-and-butter domestic political issues, according to one of the prime minister’s closest former advisers.Paul Ovenden, who stood down last year as the prime minister’s director of strategy, said the case of the British political prisoner became a “running joke” among those in government frustrated by the slow pace of change.Abd el-Fattah’s case has dominated headlines since he was freed from an Egyptian prison to return to Britain on Boxing Day, only for a row to erupt over social media posts he wrote a decade ago in which he advocated killing Zionists.Ovenden said the amount of time dedicated to freeing Abd el-Fattah was symptomatic of a government that has struggled to stay focused on voters’ core priorities in the face of pressure from “well-connected” activist groups and arms-length bodies.“We would be having long meetings on the priorities of the government, and often they would be railroaded via any other business into discussions of this gentleman,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme

A new year brings new battles for democracy and for Labour | Letters

“Did 2025 mark the end of British parliamentary democracy as we know it?” asks the headline on Andy Beckett’s article (25 December). Let’s hope not, but the case for moving to a proportional-representation-based system seems clear. The disillusion with Westminster, however, surely stems from the growing gap between House of Commons politics and extra-parliamentary politics in workplaces, communities and the streets. Hundreds of thousands have continued to march on Palestine in 2025. Some nods to this have been made – recognition of a Palestinian state

Nativism and the disintegration of the UK

Stalking your editorial on the new political geography emerging in Britain (25 December) is the fear of disintegration. This is a political outcome that needs to be taken seriously. Despite the “British” rhetoric of the political class, and the profusion of union flags in highways and byways, the continuation of the United Kingdom in its current form cannot be taken for granted.Twentieth-century history shows us that when plurinational polities collapse, they do so fast. Crucial conditions for the collapse of plurinational polities are the weakening of pro-integration parties, and the attitudes of political elites in the majority nation

Labour needs complete ‘reset’ to defeat Reform UK threat, says strategist

Keir Starmer does not have enough of a plan to defeat the “existential threat” that populism poses to UK democracy and should undertake a “fundamental reset”, New Labour’s former advertising strategist Sir Chris Powell has warned.Powell, who is the brother of Jonathan Powell, Starmer’s national security adviser, warned there were just three years to stop the “new and terrifying threat” of populists, suggesting Reform UK could represent a danger to democracy and national institutions.Writing for the Guardian, he said: “Here in the UK, where is the urgently needed counter plan on a huge scale, to thwart and head off such an existential threat? It is simply not in place, nor does it appear to be even at the planning stage.“We are at a very dangerous moment. We simply cannot afford to allow Reform UK to have a free run, and become established and entrenched as a credible potential government in the minds of disenchanted voters

‘They misjudged Caerphilly’: how the Reform juggernaut backfired in Welsh byelection

Yuliia Bond works two jobs, raises two children and is studying at university. In the autumn, she also found time to take on Reform UK when it tried to win the Caerphilly byelection.Bond, a Ukrainian refugee who has settled in south Wales, said she could not remain silent as Reform tried to win the seat in the Senedd (Welsh parliament ).“Members of our Ukrainian community spoke up,” Bond said. “We challenged the disinformation because we didn’t want our neighbours to be misled into resenting us