Career civil servant will replace Simon Case as PM says government must be changed to deliver long-term reform

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has said that he does not believe a story saying Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire Trump ally and owner of X, might give his party $100m.

The suggestion was contained in a story published by the Sunday Times yesterday. It did not feature an on-the-record source for the claim, but it said “leading businessmen and Conservative Party officials believe there is a credible prospect that Musk is preparing to give $100 million (GBP78 million) to Farage as a “f*** you Starmer payment” with a view to transforming British politics”.

I suspect this is not true. Legally, companies operating in the UK can give money to UK political parties, but I think we’re a very long way away from that.

Look, if it did happen, well, that’d be great, but I think it’s one of those really very good gossipy Sunday newspaper things. Let’s see. But I rather doubt it.

The craziest thing about this story is that it is all perfectly legal.

Musk is a South African-born billionaire who lives in the US. Our election laws are explicitly supposed to prevent foreign donations like this - but anyone, from anywhere, can get around the rules if they donate through a UK registered company. (A wheeze Robert Jenrick knows well.)

New targets on living standards will be unveiled by Keir Starmer on Thursday

Is being seen as a sidelining of his big economic pledge - getting the highest growth in the G7

The problem with the ‘highest sustained growth in G7’ target is Starmer of course doesn’t control the economies of US, Aus, Canada, Germany, France, Japan

US growing way faster now: 2.8% estimate for 2024 vs 1.1% for UK

For the new living standards target real household disposable income and GDP per capita have been considered.

The new promise will likely have the benefit of not being a pledge to beat other countries.

Note the nuance. The G7 target remains. It will likely be mentioned in the ‘Plan For Change’ document unveiled on Thurs and Starmer’s speech

But a new major economic pledge will now be unveiled which in the coming years is likely to be talked about much more than the G7 ambition

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PM expected to set target to carry out 92% of routine operations and appointments within 18 weeks

• UK politics live – latest updates

NHS bosses are said to be privately concerned about Keir Starmer’s ambitious targets to cut waiting lists for routine operations, set to be announced later this week, which will also include specific targets on living standards and housebuilding.

The prime minister is expected on Thursday to set a target for 92% of routine operations and appointments in England to be carried out within 18 weeks by March 2029 – a goal that has not been achieved in almost a decade – the Times has reported.

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The Guardian’s Pippa Crerar and Kiran Stacey look at why the government is laying out their ‘plan for change’ five months in. Also, after being voted through the Commons, what next for the historic assisted dying bill?

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Wormald will take over from Simon Case on 16 December as the most senior official in the country

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer has appointed Chris Wormald, a career civil servant who heads the health department, to become the new cabinet secretary.

In what will be seen by some as a surprise choice, Wormald, who has spent eight years as permanent secretary at the Department of Health and Social Care, will take over from Simon Case on 16 December as the most senior official in the country, an official announcement said.

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Written complaints about DWP double, while prisons, the NHS and higher education experience big increase

Complaints about public services have soared by more than a third since 2016 with substantial jumps in relation to benefits, prisons, the NHS and higher education, according to a leading thinktank.

Demos, a cross-party organisation, found that between 2015-16 and 2023-24 complaints across key public services increased steadily by evermore than 100,000 from 309,758 to 425,624 – aside from a sharp drop during the pandemic.

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Palliative care commission set up to provide high-quality, holistic support following assisted dying vote

• Assisted dying bill brings critical state of palliative care into government’s focus

MPs, doctors and charities have drawn up a blueprint to deliver an “unprecedented transformation” of care for 100,000 people a year in the final stages of their lives.

After parliament’s historic vote last week to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales, a commission on palliative care has been set up to help improve end-of-life care.

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Turmoil in the populist party founded by comedian Beppe Grillo could herald a crucial progressive realignment

Political scientists have long argued that a defining characteristic of populism is the distinction between a “pure people” and a “corrupt elite”. In the turbulent politics of the early 21st century, few public figures have promoted that worldview with as much vigour and impact as the Italian comedian Beppe Grillo.

During the 2010s, Mr Grillo’s Five Star Movement (M5S) became at one point the most successful and quixotic populist party in Europe, coming first in the Italian election of 2018 by a comfortable margin. Its signature principles were a belief in the power of direct democracy, and a conviction that traditional left-right politics should be superseded by a popular revolt against la casta – the privileged elite whose power persisted whichever government was in charge. People power was mobilised through the party’s Rousseau platform, designed as a forum for online democracy by M5S’s co-founder and internet evangelist Gianroberto Casaleggio.

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Farage and Trump are winning because they understand the politics of emotion, while Labour is lost in numbers and statistics

Keir Starmer’s people don’t like the word “relaunch”, but that’s what it is. On Thursday, the prime minister will give a set-piece speech about a “Plan for Change” that really should have materialised back in July. It will seemingly be based on “tangible outcomes” and the insistence that the government machine is newly focused on issues such as early years education and NHS waiting lists, briefed to the media in a blizzard of official statistics. What has triggered all this is not exactly mysterious: amid dire approval ratings and a general sense of malaise and mishap – the latest hiccup is the somewhat farcical departure of the transport secretary, Louise Haigh – his administration is palpably unpopular.

The truth, of course, is that the prime minister and his colleagues hardly attracted much acclaim and affection in the first place. In July, only one in five of the electorate voted Labour. Our electoral system might maintain the appearance of politics-as-usual, but a lot of us know what is really afoot: the UK’s increasing resemblance to any number of European countries, with two supposedly main parties competing for a declining share of the vote, while everything fragments and hard-right populists seize on people’s continuing resentments. As evidenced by Starmer’s recent acknowledgment that “very many people didn’t vote Labour at the last election”, the tension between his government’s parliamentary majority and its dearth of support in the real world remains its defining feature.

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Improving oversight and addressing slippery slope concerns are among the priorities of the bill’s critics

The House of Commons’ backing of the assisted dying bill for England and Wales was a historic moment but just the first step in a long process.

One thing that was clear is that many MPs hope to see significant amendments to the bill that they voted on. That includes some MPs who voted in favour of Kim Leadbeater’s bill but only because they anticipate that lingering concerns they have will be dealt with before it becomes law.

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Feminist solidarity has weakened, but women around the world tell me their fight continues

What happens in America does not stay in America. The prospect of Trump’s second administration is devastating for many American women, but its reverberations are also echoing for women across the globe, and bringing much more fear and uncertainty than last time around.

Eight years ago, while Trump’s success shocked women in Britain, it also brought rays of hope – in the shape of a resurgence of solidarity. On the day after the election in 2016, I remember going into my workplace, a charity for refugee women, feeling pretty bleak, and looking at other women’s downcast faces. Then, at the end of the day, one of our colleagues had the most unexpected news. The charity’s online donations had rocketed.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk

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MP says what terminally ill people ‘really’ need is access to hospice care and proper end-of-life care

Diane Abbott has warned it could soon be cheaper for GPs to encourage seriously unwell patients to “sign on the dotted line for assisted suicide” than to find them a place in a hospice.

The senior Labour MP voted against changing the law because she fears vulnerable people will get swept up in the assisted dying route when “actually what they really need is access to hospice care and proper end-of-life care”.

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Pat McFadden defends government handling of transport secretary’s departure, saying it did not ‘drag on for weeks’

Decisions over Louise Haigh’s future were “dealt with very quickly” and marked a “big contrast” to how issues were handled under Conservative governments, a cabinet minister has said.

Pat McFadden, the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, refused to accept suggestions that Haigh’s resignation as transport secretary and controversy over freebies made the Labour government look “chaotic” because he said it was not “something that dragged on for weeks”.

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Recent polling puts party above 10%, which could result in up to 12 MSPs at next Scottish parliament elections

Reform UK is celebrating “an extraordinary sense of momentum” north of the border, as Scotland’s top polling expert predicts the populist right party could end up deciding the next Holyrood government.

The deputy leader, Richard Tice, said his party’s mood was “bullish and optimistic” as it held its first Scottish conference in Perth on Saturday.

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Peter Wanless of the NSPCC calls for more preventive action on child poverty, a ban on ‘morally repugnant’ smacking and favours guardrails online rather than bans

The boss of the UK’s leading children’s charity has attacked the Conservatives for their failure to improve outcomes for children, saying that, while they were in power, “pretty much every indicator” went in the wrong direction.

In a frank interview days before he steps down, NSPCC chief executive Peter Wanless said ministers had “good intentions”, citing a review of children’s social care and online safety reforms – but that in the end, “you’ve got to be judged by the actions”.

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Yes Labour have been taxier and spendier than their manifesto implied, but actors signing an Elon Musk-supported petition is a sinister step

This week I was all geared up to slag off Rachel Reeves and now, thanks to Michael Caine, I can’t. I hope you’re happy, Michael. Is that what you wanted? To close down any centrist criticism of the government? Because that’s what you’ve done.

Let me explain. Michael Caine, a great film star and an astute, relatable and popular public figure, has expressed his support for that petition for another general election. You know, the one that was set up a week or so ago by a pub owner from the Midlands and then got bigged up by Elon Musk. It accuses the government of having gone back on promises it made during the election campaign and, at the time of writing, it’s got 2.8m signatures, one of them, presumably, Michael Caine’s.

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Investing more in revenue services pays dividends in returns to government coffers, new US research shows

What do we want? More tax inspectors. When do we want them? Ideally a few years back, but now will do. Maybe not the most exciting protest song, but it does it for me.

My first job in the Treasury was for a very sexy team called Revenue Service Delivery, clamping down on tax evasion and avoidance by hunting those stashing money in Swiss bank accounts or pretending to be self-employed.

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The view in Number 10 is that work on the government’s missions has been too sluggish and now needs to be driven harder and faster

Whatever you say about it, don’t call it a relaunch. Sir Keir Starmer will fanfare a new “Plan for Change” this Thursday and it is being bigged up by Downing Street as a momentous event, no less than “the most ambitious delivery plan in a generation”. His aides are wary of the dreaded r-word because many observers are going to interpret this, fairly or not, as a desperate attempt to turn the page on recent troubles.

It is a truth now pretty much universally acknowledged within the government that it has got off to a much stickier start than it expected. In too many areas, it has hit the ground not running, but stumbling. More definition of Labour’s goals was provided by the budget, but at the price of rousing a lot of extremely vocal opposition, especially from those being asked to pay more tax. The latest squall to buffet Number 10 has been the enforced resignation of Lou Haigh. She could never be described as a soulmate of the prime minister, which helps explain the clinically unsentimental way in which the transport secretary was taken out of service. Losing a relatively junior member of the cabinet will have next to no impact on Labour’s eventual fate. Her fall nevertheless adds to the impression that the Starmer government is being serially surprised by embarrassing revelations and knocked about by events.

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The resignation of transport secretary Louise Haigh over a mobile phone offence is a bump in road for Keir Starmer

• You can order your own copy of this cartoon

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The government has its five missions. But the deeper cause of Britain’s malaise is the unhealthy and unhappy nature of the modern economy

We often hear how ministers should be more honest about the state of the economy. How they should signal their intentions and, before announcing a policy shift, have the guts and intellectual heft to debate the expected impact in public, such that when a section of the public dislikes the plan, at least they understand why it has been set in motion.

It was a message Rachel Reeves absorbed and used as a defence for her first budget in October, only to come unstuck when she shocked businesses with a previously undiscussed change to the terms of employer national insurance contributions and an ill-considered last-minute grab at farmers’ incomes via a rise in inheritance tax.

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Villagers hit by extreme weather accuse Labour of neglecting flood defences as Reform UK reaps political rewards – while denying impact of climate crisis

Thick, dark slurry flecked with stones and twigs covers the entire ground floor of Ralph Connor and Tina Honeyfield’s terraced house in the former coal mining village of Cwmtillery in south Wales. They use the lights on their phone to show what happened when a long-abandoned coal tip collapsed during last weekend’s torrential rainfall and surged through their front and back doors.

“Our house bore the brunt of the landslide… I spent an hour holding the door to prevent the slurry from getting in [last Sunday night],” says Connor, 49, as he stands in the cold gloom of their powerless living room. “It was frightening but when you are in it, you just react. It’s fight or flight.”

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The granular detail of Kim Leadbeater’s bill for England and Wales is yet to be agreed, and some MPs want reassurances before finally backing it

As a few low murmurs broke out in a respectfully reflective House of Commons chamber after its historic vote on assisted dying in England and Wales, one figure in the public gallery had a special interest in the result.

Back in 2015, Rob Marris, the former Labour MP for Wolverhampton South West, had tabled the previous attempt to pass a bill changing the law. It was comprehensively defeated.

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From the the Barnett formula to the humiliation of having an English ‘Prince of Wales’, you’d never catch Scotland allowing this treatment

When you come to Wales, one of your first impressions is of how delighted people here are to be Welsh. Even those who have left feel a strong pride in their Welsh identity, according to a study of the Welsh diaspora published last week. It is a source of immense pride to them that they are from Wales. It should be. It is a miracle of history that Wales and Welshness even still exists.

In the floods that devastated much of south Wales last weekend, we saw the very best of our nation. Tight communities, coming together in the face of obstacles that would shatter the morale of all but the most resilient. But after more than 16 years of calling Wales home and covering it as a journalist, I am struck by a great paradox. Though the people of Wales will go 12 rounds with anyone who scorns their country, there is deep down a seeming acceptance among many that it is Wales’s lot to be perpetually treated as less of a nation than Scotland.

Will Hayward is a Guardian columnist. He publishes a regular newsletter on Welsh politics

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Employment minister wants to create new ‘public employment service’ to transform the UK job market

“This is why I love jobcentres: because they’re intensely hopeful places.” The employment minister, Alison McGovern, has just spent half an hour perched on the edge of a desk in a drab office block in Hoxton, east London, hearing from a group of job coaches.

“Intensely hopeful” is not the stereotypical view of jobcentres, whose staff have the role of checking up on benefits claims, as well as pointing the way to jobs. Jobcentres have faced repeated criticism, not least by McGovern’s boss, Liz Kendall, who says they are not fit for purpose.

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Making dying easier is not the solution when NHS, social and palliative care are simply not there for patients

The succession of former prime ministers who lined up in recent days to assert their compassion for the dying was quite something. David Cameron, Theresa May, Liz Truss, Boris Johnson – all of them wanting us to know just how much they cared. Imagine if this roll call of political powerhouses – each of whom was better placed than anyone to improve the fate of those with terminal diagnoses – had used that power, while in office, to do something concrete, tangible, to alleviate the terminal suffering that allegedly touched them so deeply. Imagine, in other words, if their actions then had matched their fine words now.

I don’t doubt the strength of feeling behind this vote in favour of legalising assisted dying in England and Wales, but as someone who has cared for thousands of people with terminal illnesses, I have to wonder at its sincerity. Because every prime minister over the last 20 years – and every MP for that matter – knows full well that much (though not all) of the pain and misery of dying can be alleviated with good palliative care. They also know how much suffering at the end of life is caused by basic NHS, social and palliative care simply not being there for patients. Wes Streeting went one step further. The health secretary cited the threadbare realities of our underfunded, patchy, palliative care services as his primary reason for voting against the bill, stating (correctly) that the postcode lottery in care denies many patients a genuine choice at the end of life.

Rachel Clarke is a palliative care doctor and the author of Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic

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Anne Puckridge is among half a million pensioners living abroad missing out on state pension increases

This weekend, a few weeks before her 100th birthday, a former wartime intelligence officer will set off on a new mission: to meet with the UK pensions minister and persuade her to end an “injustice”.

Anne Puckridge is travelling 4,400 miles from her home in Canada to ask the UK government to change rules that campaigners say penalise almost half a million pensioners living overseas and leave many struggling financially.

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MPs advanced the proposed bill. With ethical dilemmas and practical safeguards under scrutiny, challenges still remain unresolved

On Friday, MPs voted to advance legislation on assisted dying in England and Wales, reflecting polling that shows widespread public support. However, a slim majority, of less than one-tenth of the House, should temper the confidence of its proponents. This is a profound, historic decision that demands careful consideration. Parliament was at its best in putting through the proposals to the next stage of deliberation. The debate was marked by sobriety and the welcome absence of partisan bickering. MPs approached the issue with humility, showing respect for every contribution, regardless of stance.

The central tension between individual autonomy and societal responsibility was clearly highlighted by the discussion. MPs were right to allow for further detailed scrutiny, debate and potential amendments to ensure the terminally ill adults (end of life) bill addresses both ethical concerns and practical safeguards effectively. The desire to alleviate suffering is deeply compelling. The legislation proposes allowing mentally competent adults with a terminal diagnosis and less than six months to live to seek medical assistance to end their lives. Safeguards include independent assessments by two doctors, high court approval and a 14-day reflection period. Once the criteria have been met, a doctor may prescribe a self-administered life-ending medication.

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The emotion on display during five hours of heated discussion speaks to the complexity and importance of the bill itself

Who would have guessed? All too often debates in the Commons are partisan affairs, punctuated by jeers and braying. Where reason is superseded by dogma and ill-temper. This was a very different occasion. Parliament on its very best behaviour. Where necessary, people – mostly politely – agreeing to disagree. MPs heard in silence. Some in tears. Even more remarkable was the feeling there was intelligent life on view. The quality of argument was a cut above the average.

There again, this was no ordinary debate. Most Fridays, Westminster is a ghost town with MPs back home minding their constituencies. But this was an exception. The day when a private member’s bill to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill people took its first step to becoming law. When some men and women of faith tried to imagine making laws for those of no faith.

Taking the Lead by John Crace is published by Little, Brown (GBP18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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From defence to trade, the incoming US president is upending the old order – and standing apart from our neighbours leaves us dangerously exposed

It’s one damned thing after another. As Keir Starmer is discovering, government, like life, can feel like a fusillade of events, each coming faster than the one before. If it’s not a cabinet minister resigning over a past fraud conviction, it’s MPs voting for assisted dying – and that’s just in one day. Through that blizzard of news, it can be hard to make out the lasting changes in the landscape – even those that have profound implications for our place in the world.

The November 2024 event that will have the most enduring global impact is the election of Donald Trump. There are some in the higher reaches of the UK government who are surprisingly relaxed about that fact, reassuring themselves that, in effect, we got through it once, we’ll get through it again. Yes, they admit, Trump has nominated some crazy people to lead in areas crucial to the UK-US relationship, such as defence and intelligence, but don’t worry, officials in London will do what they did last time: work with like-minded counterparts in the Washington bureaucracy to bypass the Trump loyalists at the top.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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