Though Burnham and Badenoch may still need the votes of Green and Reform supporters, both leaders have drawn clear lines in the sand

Ask a straight question, get a straight answer. It’s how politics is supposed to work but almost never does, which is why on the rare occasions it happens the result can be faintly chaotic. What did Andy Burnham mean when he said – in response to a question from the Tory MP Harriett Baldwin – that Labour couldn’t partner with the Green party while it remains wedded to the “Zionism is racism” motion its members have just endorsed? Were Green MPs now barred from a future coalition government? If so, what about councils where they are currently sharing power with Labour?

Though Burnham was only confirming what ministers have been arguing privately for days, at first nobody seemed to know: tellingly, it took almost 24 hours for the Labour party chair, Bridget Phillipson, to confirm that unless local Green groups disowned that idea sharpish, “Labour will bring any such local arrangement to an end”. So much for cuddly cross-party Andy, who always seemed so relaxed about rainbow coalitions. Now elected Greens in places such as Sheffield or Lewes must choose between power and members’ wrath, a useful rehearsal for what a hung parliament might feel like.

One good poll has convinced the Tory leader she is invincible. She was back in her happy place with a scattergun PMQs

Little things please little minds. And minds don’t come much smaller than some of those in Westminster. If a researcher had come up with a study that showed one element two points higher in value than countless other experiments, it would almost certainly be marked down either as an outlier or “within the margin of error”. At the very least, no conclusions would be drawn until many other experiments had been conducted which had produced similar results. Serious scientific journals would just laugh at you if you asked them to publish your findings.

And yet. In one – just one out of many – recent opinion poll, the Tories have increased their ratings by a couple of points and are now for the first time in years in second place, ahead of Reform. And all of a sudden, Kemi Badenoch is insisting this is incontrovertible proof that the Tories are back in business. All the sins of its 14 years in government have been wiped clean. All hail to Kemi, the new chief. She is the chosen one. And the Conservatives are a government-in-waiting.

Prime minister tells PMQs that the Green party motion was ‘wrong’ and says no way Labour would make a deal

PMQs is about to start.

Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.

After @genevieve_holl reported this last night, various sources in the Trump administration who are supportive of Farage said Badenoch was needlessly trying to cause a political row (per @katyballs @MrHarryCole) and accused her of undermining the Anglo-American relationship.

It is possible that these people are particularly sensitive about this topic because they are still considering buying the islands, as @connorstringer and I reported earlier in the year. Domestic opposition to the idea of the US running Chagos in the UK would be a problem for the White House.

Calamity Kemi Strikes Again.

Kemi Badenoch has risked causing a diplomatic row with Britain’s allies, all because she cannot control the Tory spin doctors around her that oversaw the disastrous premierships of Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Theresa May, and even David Cameron.

Kemi and the Conservatives cannot be trusted by the Chagos people.

If they really have interest in the Chagos, why would you have started negotiating about things you already own?

We are confused at why @KemiBadenoch is attacking @Nigel_Farage …

We understood Nigel Farage’s comments to mean that we would get perpetual use of the base, which, frankly, we’ve always had.

Don’t be fooled by its bickering leaders. Their calibrated fake fighting will probably end in coalition

Kapow! In a warmly received conference speech, Kemi Badenoch turns her fire on Reform UK, describing it as “weird”, and ruling out an electoral pact. Slap! Not to be outdone, her former colleague Robert Jenrick derides Badenoch as a champion of the wealthy, which is quite rich for a guy who looks like he’s just accidentally ingested a bundle of £50 notes through his sphincter. Bosh! Reform’s Richard Tice and Restore’s Rupert Lowe clash online over the result of a council byelection in Derbyshire, in which the Greens profited from a split rightwing vote. “Vote Restore get Islamists,” Tice chides. “Vote Reform, get some random Bangladeshi bloke,” Lowe responds.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives are back. The Kemibounce is real. The Keminaissance is true. We’ve all got a severe case of the Kemirrhoids. And you may wonder why much of the media are talking about a Badenoch revival in a year where her party lost 563 councillors and 40% of its councils, remains about four points below its apparent nadir of 2024, and in which the leader herself appears incapable of doing a broadcast interview without looking like a restaurant diner who received exactly what she ordered and is inexplicably furious at it. The point is that the Conservatives are a serious party of government again, and the reason is that we all said so.

Terry Peach responds to Kemi Badenoch’s conference speech, while Penelope Turton writes on her promise to cut inheritance tax

Kemi Badenoch’s conference speech rehearsed the argument that Andy Burnham’s economic policies were warped by his “nostalgia” for the 1970s, unlike her own forward-looking programme for “a better tomorrow” (Tories accused of prioritising rich voters as Badenoch lays out inheritance tax cut plan, 7 October).

She appears not to see that her preference for a lesser-regulated capitalist market economy, with lower public expenditure, taxes and national debt, coupled with “tough love” welfare policies, is itself harking back to arguments that have circulated for centuries.

Farage was its champion, now it’s Badenoch – and the aim is the PM’s defeat at all costs

While the merits of a so-called Britannia shield to protect Britain from missiles and drones are debatable, the Conservatives’ proposal did achieve one thing last week: the very idea of the shield was used to anoint a political leader.

In a significant development, little observed amid the hullaballoo of news events, Kemi Badenoch’s uncosted, pie-in-the-sky plans to build a £10bn anti-missile system were enthusiastically heralded by the rightwing press. It was not just a matter of the plans themselves being lauded, even by outlets that must know them to be ridiculous. More significant is what it said about the champion chosen by these media organisations in their offensive against the Labour government and Andy Burnham.

Jane Martinson is an academic and Guardian columnist. She is a board member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group, and writes in a personal capacity

The prime minister tells MPs the next summit with the EU will be held on 20 November

Burnham to urge MPs to embrace closer ties with EU

Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s home affairs spokesperson, is speaking now. He started his speech with an account of a 73-year-old woman dying in North Wales after having to wait 23 hours for an ambulance, and he sought to link this to immigration.

He said:

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine estimates that 15,000 people across Britain died last year due to excess wait times for emergency treatment. That’s 300 people a week, 300 lives destroyed, 300 families devastated.

And that number has increased tenfold over the last decade. This is a moral outrage, and it is a direct result of decisions made by Tory and Labour governments.

I don’t think that’s because he wants to have a fight over the European Union. I think that’s because he knows what we’re talking about today impacts hard in what is known as the red wall.

Tories plan to scrap low-carbon housebuilding, Greens back new nuclear reactors, and Labour put oil-drilling decisions on hold

New homes could be built without solar panels, heat pumps and high-grade insulation, leading to higher household bills if the Conservative party wins the next general election.

Kemi Badenoch made scrapping the future homes standard (FHS) one of the central planks of her bid to become the next prime minister at the Tory party conference this week.

The world may be going to hell in a handcart, but at least now I get to say I know a Nobel prize winner

“Anyone worried about pneumonic plague?” This is a friend – a medic – texting me after reading reports at the weekend of the 28-year-old Russian woman who died while working at a “plague research lab” in Siberia. Relying on details from the famously open Russian state guaranteed the presence of a certain dark subtext to the tantalisingly short news item. Namely: lab-grown disease cultivated for reasons unknown and with a 100% mortality rate escapes Russian facility into general population, eight hours’ flying time from London. In other words, we’re all going to die.

While the Labour and Conservative leaders will be delighted with their showing, Nigel Farage, Ed Davey and Zack Polanski have less reason for cheer

Andy Burnham

Exclusive: Badenoch’s flagship conference policy document cites £957bn estimate, twice the total in climate advisers’ data

Kemi Badenoch’s flagship party conference policy document overestimated the cost of net zero by nearly £500bn, seemingly after someone accidentally double-counted figures on a spreadsheet.

The apparent error appears in a chapter on net zero in The Right Way, a 100-page policy document produced for the Conservative conference in Birmingham. Badenoch repeatedly used the phrase in her main speech.

Kemi Badenoch’s personal brand is not strong enough to revive a party that so thoroughly lost the trust of the British people

For a party that keeps losing elections, the Conservatives have enjoyed a remarkably upbeat conference in Birmingham this week. A party with a strong regicidal impulse is united behind Kemi Badenoch. Opinion polls show the leader’s personal ratings, while not spectacular, outperforming the wider Tory brand. Mrs Badenoch exuded confidence in her keynote speech on Wednesday, setting out what she believes is a path back to power.

The strategic focus is the economy. The Conservative leader expects Andy Burnham’s honeymoon to come to an end when his chancellor delivers a painful budget later this month. A spending review will then compound the pain, forcing grim trade-offs on a prime minister who has a reputation for deferring hard choices.

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Party hopes to win over affluent middle-class voters as leader rejects calls to ‘unite the right’ in conference speech

Kemi Badenoch has announced that the Conservatives would abolish inheritance tax on family homes if elected, prompting criticism that she is prioritising cutting taxes for the rich.

The Tory leader also said couples would be able to leave an additional tax-free sum of £1m to their families, as the party attempts to shore up its traditional base in southern England.

The Tory leader is now too big for the party to allow her to fail, so everything she does is acclaimed a work of genius

Where’s AI slop when you need it? It could all have been so much simpler. Just ask ChatGPT to write me a leader’s speech in the style of Kemi Badenoch. Make it an hour and 10 minutes long, so plenty of room for padding. Go heavy on the slogans, cliches and the obligatory crap politician jokes. Ones we’ve all heard many times before. Not least at this conference.

Make the usual digs at Labour and put the boot in to Reform. The main aim of the speech is to try to reposition a party that is tanking in third place on 20% in the polls as the main opposition to the government.

Conference announcements on inheritance tax and childcare boosted the party’s mood, but the task is still holding off Reform, rather than any realistic bid for power

On paper, the traditional role of the journalist at a British party conference boils down to some simple questions: what was the mood of the assembled activists? Did the leader give a good speech? In practice, the changing nature of conferences and the media makes this superficially simple task more complicated than it may initially appear.

Any journalist covering the leader’s speech, for instance, will have watched it in full. But it will reach the vast majority of its intended audience in fragmentary form, through clips – and speeches are increasingly written with that reality in mind. The conference hall is not really the audience, or the full speech really the product. This adds a layer of complexity to the reviewer’s task.

At Conservative conference, some worry about becoming a one-woman party, while others say party should thank their lucky stars they have her

Kemi Badenoch has long said that the Conservatives were “under new management”, but in a TV interview to mark the end of a party conference at which she has been front and centre of more or less everything, she took the analogy further.

“Your viewers will know that sometimes you have a football team that’s disappointing,” the Tory leader told GB News. “There’s a new captain, there’s a new coach, there’s a new owner, effectively – which is all me.”

Conservative leader will deliver her keynote speech to Tory conference later

Kevin Hollinrake, the Conservative chair, raised a pint of beer and was joined by his black female Labrador, Zuzu, on stage at the party’s conference in Birmingham, the Press Association reports.

Hollinrake made light of comments by Labour MP Jenny Riddell-Carpenter who said country pubs with “warm beer” and a black Labrador was a “far-right nostalgic vision of Britain”, PA reports.

Everywhere I go, people tell me how much they love Kemi, including in my local pub, that place where I go to drink my far-right fantasy pint. With my far-right fantasy black lab.

As I campaigned to expose the reality of what happened, more and more emerged about life in many of our towns and cities, about police leaders so compromised, so corrupted by the ideology of multiculturalism.

They surrendered their operational independence to those they should have faced down, including many they should have locked up. That is something we should never, ever tolerate.

Reminders of banished Reform UK defector were all around the Conservative party conference in Birmingham

As Kemi Badenoch basked in the applause of the Tory faithful at the close of her pivotal speech at Conservative party conference last year, one member of her shadow cabinet looked less than enthused.

Robert Jenrick, bested by Badenoch in the leadership contest a year earlier, looked on, and – as one shadow cabinet member now recalls – had to be prodded by Lord Ashcroft to applaud. “If you’re plotting against someone, then you at least pretend to like them,” they say. “The thing about Robert is he’s not even a good machiavellian.”

Farage’s scandals have allowed Badenoch to get her party back in the race. But her programme would be no less ruinous for our country

The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, will march on to the conference stage in Birmingham feeling buoyed. “Kemi’s soaring,” coos the Sun, and that sums up the prevailing wisdom. More than four in 10 Britons think she is doing well as Tory leader, compared with a third who think otherwise. As Nigel Farage’s stock has plummeted thanks to scandals over a £5m personal gift and donations from crypto billionaires, the polling suggests that the Conservatives could regain the mantle of Britain’s main rightwing force.

Yet Badenoch has been the beneficiary of circumstance. Her tenure as opposition leader has been defined by Keir Starmer’s project imploding almost as soon as it gained power. When Reform UK enjoyed its seismic polling lead, the Tory plight was double-edged: they were starved of attention, but that inevitably resulted in a lack of scrutiny, too. It has been easy for Badenoch to appear formidable while her opponents have disintegrated.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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‘It’s a Britannia Shield’ announcement proves no one does farcical improv better than the Conservative leader

Just another day in Crapland. It’s amazing what you can get used to. You can’t say the Tories haven’t put a lot of thought into their party conference. It takes some programming skill to make every day even more dismal than the last. You come expecting very little and get even less.

Schopenhauer would be in dreamland. The very act of being has never felt so inconsequential. Yet there’s something very comforting about this. You leave the Birmingham theme park attraction feeling better about yourself than when you arrived. Who knew abject failure could be so much fun? You find yourself congratulating some members on being able to dress themselves. A curious hybrid of an endangered species and care in the community?