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with Alastair Lockhart and Lara Brown |
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Good morning. Andy Burnham’s tears adorn the front pages today, after he told Labour’s conference he would discuss scrapping the pensions triple lock, establish a National Care Service and make Britain’s ties with Europe closer. One of the five men involved in the RAF Fairford ‘bomb plot’ called 999 early on Sunday morning. Today marks the withdrawal deadline for US forces in Iraq, and Spain is considering banning all evictions. Anthropic said again that AI could kill us all, while long-term US borrowing costs are soaring. Welcome to Spectator Daily: here’s everything you need to know today. |
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IT ALL ENDS IN TEARS Is this the best it ever gets for a Labour leader? Andy Burnham is up and at ‘em this morning as he tours the breakfast TV studios to discuss his conference speech yesterday. It’s the last day for Labour in Liverpool today: Yvette Cooper will give a speech this morning (as most head home), before the whole thing concludes, as is tradition, with the Red Flag being sung.
Burnham’s teary face appears on every single front page this morning. The Guardian: ‘“Today we draw a line on a decade of division”’. The Times goes with ‘tearful Burnham stakes future on free care for all’, while the Telegraph leads with ‘triple lock scrapped by 2030’. The Mail refers to Burnham’s announcements as ‘Burnham’s triple shock’ (triple lock/ National Care Service/ closer ties with the EU). The Mirror? ‘I will build a Britain my dad would be proud of’. The Express? ‘It’s a crying shame for our nation’. |
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 | Getty | Was Angela chopping onions in the front row? |
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Burnham told Labour conference yesterday that ‘I accept I may pay a political price, but someone has to go through the pain barrier and rip the plaster off’, as he announced plans to reconsider the pensions triple lock, establish a National Care Service, look at introducing proportional representation and set out a new long-term relationship with the EU.
He also promised to repeal laws brought in by Margaret Thatcher that ban publicly owned water companies, give councils new powers to seize homes from private landlords who rent out poor homes, and announced a state-owned company to compete with the National Grid. There was little on defence and little on welfare, as he gave an hour-long speech during which he paused several times while emotional about his father’s recent death.
Kemi Badenoch said that ‘Andy Burnham wants to take Britain back to the 1970s – a time of more government control, more trade union control and no economic growth.’ Nigel Farage, meanwhile, said ‘by potentially scrapping the triple lock, Andy Burnham will abdicate his responsibility to British pensioners.’
Of course, we’ve got your morning reading covered on our website. Madeline Grant says that Burnham’s brand of patronising tweeslop is reigning supreme: he ‘specialises in mawkishness, mass-produced sentimentality and “be kindism”... he’s clever, because he knows the British like this, just as they like McCartney’s rinky-tinky evocations of suburbia much more than they ever indulged Lennon’s self-centred, narcotic warbling.’ Tim Shipman gives his 14 takeaways from the speech and says it will remain ‘among the half-dozen most memorable’ party leader speeches.
On the National Care Service, Isabel Hardman says his tears won’t be enough to push proper care reform through, but that the crying ‘wasn’t so much a loss of control as it was a sign of fire in his belly’. Michael Simmons is more enthusiastic about the triple lock announcement, saying that ‘not all heroes wear capes. Some wear black T-shirts. Andy Burnham has done what nearly every British politician knows needs to be done but dares never do.’ Ross Clark, meanwhile, is sceptical: ‘Ending the triple lock won’t save a penny in the short term; all it will do is to limit the acceleration of the cost of the state pension in years to come.’
Best of the rest: in the Mail, Quentin Letts didn’t much like it, saying that ‘we may be on the cusp of war and economic collapse but family emotion trumped those imperatives’. The Telegraph’s Tim Stanley chuckles that Burnham finds it bold to try and persuade the Labour party to raise spending: ‘Would they go for it? Would bears enjoy a trip to the woods? Would the Pope care for another cup of Catholicism?’ Robert Shrimsley points out in the FT that there doesn’t seem to be much point in the rest of this parliament. In the Times, Patrick Maguire says ‘the Labour Party will talk about this speech for years and it will be remembered, as so few speeches are, as a formative, watershed moment in the history of this young century, for better or worse.’
ALL-A-BORDER
The RAF Fairford story is getting even stranger. Today’s Times reports that one of the five men released on bail called 999 in the early hours of Sunday morning. The police are investigating whether the men were Iranian proxies, and whether the ‘bomb plot’ could have been a dry run, a stunt, or surveillance. They’re also trying to work out if the 999 call was one suspect getting cold feet, or all part of the plot. Complicating things further is that no explosive devices were found in the cars, only petrol.
A Palestinian migrant who arrived in Britain on a small boat and has called for the slaughter of Jews is facing deportation. Mosab Abdulkarim al-Gassas was jailed for immigration offences in May but released in June because of overcrowding. He was recalled again for breaching his licence conditions but was released in December, since then he has lived in asylum accommodation in Corby where he has recorded videos of himself asking residents to shout ‘free Palestine’ for his almost 20,000 TikTok followers. He has previously promoted one of the ‘martyr’s brigades’ associated with the 7 October attacks.
The anti-migrant activist Daniel Thomas has been denied bail after he was accused of slashing a migrant dinghy in the Channel while a member of the rescue service was on board. He has also been charged for failing to disclose the PIN to his mobile phone. A provisional trial date has been set for 1 March and Thomas will be remanded in custody until then. He previously pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Meanwhile, a six-month trial of live facial recognition technology in London railway stations has led to no arrests and one false positive alert despite scanning more than 500,000 faces. The trial cost £320,000 and took up almost 100 hours of police time. The British Transport Police have extended the trial for four months and say that there have been positive alerts since the extension, and that they have made associated arrests with the help of the technology. |
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 | iStock | ‘The facial scanner says we’ve got to look out for a balding bloke heading to the away end’ |
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The body of a baby has washed up on the shoreline of North Wales near Bangor. The body was found just before 5 p.m. on Sunday by a member of the public. Authorities have asked for the mother to come forward, saying she may be ‘extremely vulnerable’. They continued: ‘We appreciate coming forward is difficult, but inaction is not an option’. A post-mortem will take place this afternoon. |
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| Coming up today |  | Emmanuel Macron continues his two-day trip to Spain; he’ll meet Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez today. | | It’s New Year on Mars today, as it begins a new orbit around the sun. One year on Mars is equal to 687 Earth days, don’t you know. | | A documentary about the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie, Knife, is out today. Stuart Jeffries interviewed the author in last week’s magazine. |
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THANKS FOR ALL THE MEMORIES
Today marks the final deadline for US forces to withdraw from Iraqi bases, after an eventful two decades. The withdrawal will be celebrated as a victory by Iran and its allies, who already have substantial influence over the country and who will now have even more. There are also concerns that it could spark an Islamic State comeback, which is why the US returned to Iraq in 2014. The move out was agreed in 2024 under Joe Biden’s presidency.
In Europe, Spanish ministers announced proposals to ban all evictions until 2030 yesterday. The country has been appalled by the case of an 87-year-old woman who was evicted from a flat in central Madrid in which she had lived for seven decades. The woman was unable to pay the rent set by the investment firm that owned her flat. The government lacks a majority in parliament, but will put the plans to a vote on Friday. Opposition politician Míriam Nogueras said the proposals would leave ‘small landlords out in the cold’. |
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 | Getty | Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez |
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Across the northern border, Marine Le Pen is vehemently standing by her number two, Jordan Bardella, over recent anti-Semitism allegations dating back to when Bardella was 17 or 18. Bardella vehemently denies making the comments, but he is alleged to have said in private chats in 2013 that ‘the Jew has to dominate other peoples, crush them, and rob them; a Zionist is necessarily a Jew, and fundamentally so.’ He also allegedly said ‘all the banks are owned by Jews’. Le Pen said the remarks are ‘so weird that they can only be a forgery’. Gavin Mortimer asks if Bardella is in trouble on Coffee House.
Estonia, meanwhile, blamed Russia for an arson attack on a defence company in the capital of Tallinn last month. Prime minister Kristen Michal said the attack on Milrem Robotics (which sends support to Ukraine) was ordered by Russia, but gave no details. Emmanuel Macron said it was yet another example of Russia’s hybrid warfare with Europe, and that it represents a ‘dangerous escalation’.
And Benjamin Netayahu spent yesterday playing down and simultaneously condemning an overnight attack by Israeli extremists in the West Bank. More than 100 people took part in an attack on the West Bank village of Jalud, as they tried to stop Israeli forces from helping a displaced Palestinian family returning to their home. Netanyahu said the perpetrators would face ‘the fullest extent of the law’, but that it was only a ‘small number’ of people. |
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 | ‘We better let our shareholders know we’ve accidentally created the Terminator.’ |
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| Watch and listen | | Michael, Tim and Noa reacted to Burnham’s speech on Coffee House Shots. | | Bill Gates and the New York Times’s Ezra Klein had a feisty exchange about AI on the latest episode of the Ezra Klein Show. | | Jeffrey Archer joined the BBC to discuss prison, prostate cancer and what he says is his final novel. |
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IT’S THE END (AGAIN)
Anthropic are saying the same in private as they are in public: AI can kill us all. Their IPO prospectus, leaked to Reuters and the FT yesterday, says that artificial intelligence could, in their view, pose ‘catastrophic or existential risks to humanity’. The Claude maker is preparing for a potential £1.5 trillion valuation, but the whole prospectus hasn’t been made public yet (companies usually have to report on risks when they file these). OpenAI yesterday cancelled the release of its model GPT-6.1 Astra, since it showed high levels of deception and scored poorly on alignment tests. Fantastic. |
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 | Getty | Trump sits with Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai and others at a ‘superintelligence meeting’ at the White House yesterday |
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| More concerning in the immediate term are the still-soaring US Treasury yields. It was longer-term borrowing costs that were most notable yesterday, as the 30-year Treasury yield rose 0.05 percentage points to 5.612 per cent (the ten-year yield rose to 5.28 per cent). Investors seem to be taking a long-term view on the US’s fiscal stability, as well as more acute concerns such as oil supply and rising interest rates. Scott Bessent’s intervention in the market a few weeks ago has clearly not worked. Meanwhile, Barclays’ investment bank branch has been soft and given its staff more time to comply with its return-to-office demands. It was planning to enforce attendance to at least three days a week, although they’ve now said there will be a transition period until the start of 2027. Thousands of its employees backed a Unite call that those with larger commutes should be exempt. The current policy is that staff should be in the office a minimum of… two days a week. And US law firms are currently pinching talented grads off Magic Circle law firms: is it time for the consultancy cartel to get upset too? The British firm Grant Thornton is seeking to lure grads away from the Big Four firms (Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC) by offering a £5,000 ‘golden hello’ joining bonus. It also said it would offer a ‘market-leading’ £40,000 starter salary to London grads, beating the £30,000-£36,000 typically offered by the Big Four. To depress young aspiring consultants here, the starter salary at McKinsey in New York is about £83-93,000. |
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It’s official: the Premier League confirmed yesterday that Manchester City was guilty of all charges related to serious breaches of financial rules. The charges cover the seasons 2009/10 to 2017/18, and they say that City arranged ‘sham’ contracts with its commercial partners, filed misstated accounts, and was in serious breach of spending limits. City said they were ‘disappointed and surprised’: they’ve got til Friday to lodge an appeal. |
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 | Getty | Aguer…no? |
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The reviews for Tom Cruise’s new film Digger are in, and… they’re not great. Digger is the latest from Alejandro González Iñárritu, and is described by Robbie Collin as a ‘Dr Strangelove for the climate crisis’ (eek). Collin is quite generous, and gives it four stars: ‘Risky art is often called a high-wire act, but Tom Cruise’s latest film really earns the label.’ Another generous critic, the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, is more scathing, saying that it’s ‘the most disappointing film of the year: an exasperatingly shallow, laborious, self-congratulatory satire with a trick up its sleeve, featuring very good actors giving not very good performances.’ The Times’s Kevin Maher says that when Cruise fails ‘he does it in spectacular fashion’.
Good news! Drifting off and letting your mind wander is good for your brain. A new report from the University of California looked at 13 years of research on mind wandering, and found that drifting away is important for storing and consolidating memories. Fairly obvious perhaps, but good to know! |
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