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"My glass of wine later is turning into a bottle," said the chair of Your Party's conference in Liverpool at one point during a particularly rowdy part of Saturday's session. It was hard not to feel sorry for her.

"We're going to have to cut the mic [of the speaker]. We have to keep order. We have to keep order!" she exclaimed at one point.

The member concerned wouldn't stop speaking - as he railed against what he described as a 'witchhunt' of members of other socialist parties.

It must have been a particularly painful thing to hear for Jeremy Corbyn, whose supporters so often condemned what they viewed as a witchhunt against his supporters in the early days of Keir Starmer's leadership. Now it was allegedly happening within Your Party, Jeremy Corbyn's upstart socialist party that has been riven with personal divisions and factional fighting even before it formally launched.

Its conference in Liverpoor exposed some real problems for the party. Originally planned to host 13,000 people, in the end, only around 2,500 people turned up, selected by 'sortition' - a bit like a jury. It's a hung one.

In the huge cavernous space of the ACC - also home to Labour's conference earlier this year - at times the delegates resembled ballbearings rattling around in a tin can.

Of course Your Party doesn't pretend to be a party on the scale of the Labour Party. But it does share some things in common: in particular the factionalism that so often tears left-wing movements asunder.

Internal Tumult

At one of many points of disruption in the hall, the Chair told members: "Please, please remember that we have a very important battle outside of this room, and it is called the very right wing media."

Your Party's scepticism of Britain's press is understandable and justified. But the project has often done itself few favours: from Zarah Sultana's unauthorised membership launch in September, to the departure of all the directors of MoU, which held the party's funds - including the income from that botched scheme.

And, in the past few weeks alone, they have seen the edeparture of two MPs from Corbyn's Independent Alliance in Parliament, which had been steering the foundation of the new party.

As a result, Your Party organisers were expecting some disruption at conference, and they got it.

Reporters were told - without much prompting - that if safety was put at risk or there was any violence, the conference would likely be shut down.

There was, thankfully, no such violence. But heckling and defiance of the chair over members of the Socialist Worker's Party, Socialist Party and others being rejected from the conference (and in some cases actively removed) made the atmosphere tense.

Rachel Reeves and the Daily Mailification of the BBC

For all the focus on its supposed "left wing bias", the BBC's heavy coverage of Conservative allegations of dishonesty against Rachel Reeves shows how its political coverage is still largely led by the right-wing press

Adam Bienkov

Motley Crew

Britain's 57 varieties of far-left parties have certainly jumped on board Your Party - or attempted to. I counted literature for eight different socialist/communist factions and parties at Your Party conference, plus Zarah Sultana rally leaflets. This was at one event, largely under one chair.

At the rally for Sultana supporters on the eve of Your Party conference, former Labour NEC member Mish Rahman hit out at briefings against her by other YP figures "in the billionaire press". "You don't do the movement any favours by talking to them…You haven't even got the guts to put your name to it."

At that very moment, at least one close ally of Sultana was briefing a journalist from a right-wing newspaper, I later learnt.

The battle for control of the 55,000-or-so strong party - without doubt Britain'...

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For all the recent hand-wringing about its supposed "left wing bias", the fact remains that the BBC's political coverage has long been heavily-led by the agenda of Britain's overwhelmingly right-leaning press.

On its flagship news and politics programmes, the presenters still routinely begin their programmes with discussion of what the "front pages" are saying, despite sales of print newspapers collapsing over recent years.

This editorial decision not only massively benefits the large majority of those publications which are owned by a handful of extremely wealthy Conservative-supporting owners, it also helps to frame the agenda for those shows from that same political perspective.

This could be seen clearly on the corporation's flagship politics programme, The Laura Kuenssberg Show, on Sunday.

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Beginning, as ever, with a look at "the papers", viewers of the show were shown front page after front page accusing the Chancellor Rachel Reeves of being a "liar" for the advance spin she put on her Budget last week. This was then followed by a lengthy panel discussion about Reeves' alleged dishonesty, with Kuenssberg's panel.

I'm not going to dwell too long on the merits of this allegation about Reeves, other than to say that it rests on a rather convoluted debate about the relative extent of the Chancellor's fiscal headroom and whether the Government's welfare plans should or shouldn't have been included in that figure.

And while Reeves clearly did break her pre-election pledges not to raise taxes "on working people" the specific allegations about her pre-Budget spin over her "headroom" are far less clear cut.

In any case, it has been fascinating to watch the sudden conversion to concern about lying in public life from some of those politicians and publications who have spent most of the past 15 years repeatedly giving cover to it.

Chief among these is the Conservative party, whose last election-winning Prime Minister was a man forced out of office for repeatedly lying, and a newspaper, in the Daily Mail, which now pays the same man £1 million a year to continue those lies on their pages.

Another figure loudly accusing Reeves of deception is Nigel Farage, who has spent the past two weeks denying ever hurling racist abuse at his school, despite at least 20 people who were there at the time clearly recalling that he did.

On the weekend Farage demanded an investigation into the Chancellor's "lies", despite also spending recent weeks refusing any such investigation into his own racist comments, or his own party's connections to Russia - none of which received anything like the level of coverage currently being devoted to Reeves' comments.

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Now of course it is nothing new for opposition politicians to accuse their opponents of lying, or for partisan newspapers who support those politicians to loudly repeat those claims.

But what has been particularly striking over the past week is the willingness of the supposedly impartial BBC to go along with this agenda hook, line and sinker.

On Sunday's show, Kuenssberg devoted almost all of her post-Budget interview with the Chancellor to repeating the "liar" allegations against her, with barely any real discussion of any of the actual measures in the Budget, beyond showing a text from a viewer accusin...

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The UK is being sued by a Russian oligarch under controversial Investor State Dispute Settlement rules, the UK Government has confirmed.

The same oligarch is also suing the Government of Luxembourg with the help of former Prime Minister Tony Blair's wife, Cherie Blair. She is not part of the action against the UK Government.

On Tuesday November 18, Chris Bryant, Secretary of State for Business and Trade told Parliament that Mikhail Fridman, a Russian oligarch and ally of Putin is suing the British Government under an ISDS provision, following a question from Martin Rhodes, the Labour MP for Glasgow North.

The rumour that an oligarch was suing the British Government under ISDS was reported in several outlets including Byline Times earlier this year, though Bryant's answer in Parliament was the first time that the rumour, and the identity of the oligarch in question was confirmed publicly.

ISDS mechanisms contained in trade treaties are controversial because, according to critics, they allow corporations to override the decisions of sovereign governments by dragging states into very expensive, long running cases when multinationals or ultra-high net worth individuals feel they have lost out on potential profit.

Fridman is understood to be using it to oppose sanctions placed on him following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

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Fridman, a Russian-Israeli dual national with interests across Europe, is also suing the Government of Luxembourg over its decision to sanction him following the outbreak of the Ukraine war. He is being represented in the €13.8 billion claim against Luxembourg, which is at an early stage in the proceedings, by several firms including Cherie Blair and Omnia Strategy, the law firm she co-founded.

In May Douglas Alexander, who was then Minister of State for Business and Trade, met with the Tony Blair Institute to discuss trade strategy.

The lawsuit in the UK is likely to bring more attention to the Blair's activities at a time when Tony Blair is under fire for his proposed role in Trump's Gaza plan, and his lobbying of the British Government through the Tony Blair Institute.

This is the second ISDS case that the UK Government is having to contend with.

West Cumbria Mining is currently suing the UK Government after the proposal for a new coal mine was quashed by the high court.

A major investor in West Cumbria Mining, Woodhouse Investment Pte Ltd is a Singaporean firm and is also suing the Government through a bilateral investment treaty with Singapore signed in 1975.

Fridman previously attempted to appeal the sanctions placed against him by the British Government in the High Court, but the claim was dismissed in 2023.

He was initially sanctioned in March 2022 under the designation that he was a "pro-Kremlin oligarch".

This designation was removed in 2023, however he remained sanctioned for deriving benefit from or supporting the Government of Russia through his position as director of Alfa Group.

Much of the criticism of the ISDS system relates to Western corporations overturning decisions made by poorer countries in the global South in attempts to control their own resources, though campaigners hope that Fridman's use of ISDS legislation as a way to overturn sanctions can prompt the Government into changing tack.

Tom Wills, Director of the Trade Justice Movement, described the revelation of Fridman's lawsuit as "staggering" and said: "ISDS gives wealthy investors a private legal backdoor to challenge democratic decisions. Now we discover that this backdoor is being used by someone sanctioned for their links to the Russian regime".

The UK is party to 79 trade a...

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When veteran Labour peer Alf Dubs first heard the Government's hardline proposals to transform the asylum system, he was shocked.

Lord Dubs, who arrived in Britain as a child refugee from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939 on the Kindertransport and has since spent his life campaigning on behalf of displaced children, told Byline Times that he was "taken aback" to hear some of the proposals announced last week.

"There are some very harsh and unnecessary things, which are bitterly disappointing coming from a Labour Government," he said.

"They are very different to the sorts of things the party supported when we were in opposition. We cannot defeat Reform by trying to outdo them."

Dubs has good reason to feel shocked. In 2020, he signed a joint letter with Keir Starmer urging the then Conservative Government to restore its commitment to family reunion for child refugees.

In the letter the then Shadow Brexit Secretary said there was a "moral argument" to protect "some of the most vulnerable people in the world." Five years on and Starmer's own Government is now ripping up some of those same protections.

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Dubs says the Government's new plans, which include making refugee status temporary and making it harder for refugee families to reunite, represent a "historic low for the Labour party" that he has been a member of for the past five decades.

Of particular concern for Dubs is the suggestion that families could be forced to return to their home country once ministers deem it "safe" to return. That would involve imprisoning children, including those born in this country, something the Home Secretary has declined to rule out.

Lord Dubs met last week with Home Office minister Alex Norris to raise his concerns. However, he hasn't yet met the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood.

"She [Mahmood] is doing things that I think are letting this country down," he said. "I don't think [former Labour Home Secretary] David Blunkett did that. These proposals undermine basic human rights principles. We're better as a country than that."

Last week Mahmood justified her plans for the asylum system by telling MPs that she and her family had been subjected to racist abuse over many years, including being called a "fucking paki".

Given her experiences, Dubs finds it surprising that she has taken such a hardline stance on refugees. "I'm hoping that her feelings will hold sway over the harsher line she's putting forward. She knows what it's like" he says.

Lord Dubs, who has spent his life helping lone child refugees to settle in Britain, was particularly disheartened by some of the language the Home Secretary used.

In her statement on the plans, Mahmood suggested that asylum seekers were "exploiting the fact that they have children" to "thwart attempts" to remove them. The Home Secretary added that the system currently "incentivises" families to put their children on unseaworthy dinghies to cross the Channel. Responding to the comments, Lord Dubs told BBC that the Government was "using children as a weapon".

His alarm was only heightened by the response from Nigel Farage's Reform UK to Mahmood's proposals. Reform UK MP Danny Kruger welcomed the rhetoric used by the Home Secretary, suggesting that Labour sounded like Reform, and invited Mahmood to defect to their party. Reform's official Twitter account later posted a meme of Mahmood in her bedroom with their flags behind her. This was, Lord Dubs says, "cheap politics" with the refugee issue being exploited for "cynical electoral ends." He believes Nigel Farage is riding th...

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It is often the case that events of expected high political drama fail to live up to billing. For weeks, we have been told that today's Budget was a make-or-break moment for the chancellor, the Government and the economy. The speculation over what might be in it has been leading the news for months, fuelled by ridiculous - indeed disgraceful - amounts of Treasury kite-flying. Labour MPs feared manifesto-busting tax rises, the Conservatives salivated at the prospect of a Liz Truss-style market meltdown, while the City watched in horror as share and bond prices swung wildly in response to every rumour. Indeed one outraged City grandee told me that he thought Treasury ministers and officials should be charged with market abuse.

Yet the reality is that the budget itself was something of a damp squib - and not just because the Office for Budget Responsibility managed to publish the entire contents half an hour before the chancellor delivered it. It turned out that the OBR really did come to Reeves's rescue with a much better fiscal forecast than anyone had expected, enabling the chancellor to duck hard choices.

Higher tax revenues as a result of higher wages offset much of the impact of a downgrade to productivity forecasts to take account of the damage from Brexit and the global financial crisis. This is what enabled her to suddenly abandon a planned 2p rise in income tax just days after she had held a breakfast press conference to roll the pitch for it. In fact, the OBR reckoned that, even after previous U-turns on welfare spending cuts since last year's budget, she was still on track to meet her fiscal rules with £4 billion to spare.

The Good News in Rachel Reeves' Budget

From lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty, to taking on the media-backed gambling lobby, there was much to praise and far less to criticise in the Chancellor's annual statement, argues Adam Bienkov

Adam Bienkov

That result was that Reeves was able to scrap the two-child benefit cap at a cost of £3 billion a year - as demanded by Labour MPs - while raising taxes by much less than expected tax - and still increase her headrooom under her fiscal rules to £22 billion. That is more than twice the safety margin that she left herself with after last year's budget.

True, the £26 billion of tax rises that she announced are still the third highest of any budget since 2010 and will raise the tax burden to 38% of GDP, an all-time high. But the bulk of those tax rises will come in the form of freezes in personal allowance for three years after 2028. Other measures that will not kick in for several years include a new road pricing charge for electric vehicle drivers, a reduction in the tax perks for some pension savers, and higher taxes on rents and dividends to bring them in line with other forms of income.

Nonetheless, backdating tax rises to pay for higher welfare today is not without risks. According to Deutsche Bank, 47% of the tax rises will not come until the last year of the current parliament. Reeves will be hoping that an expected 0.4 percentage point reduction in inflation as a result of budget measures to reduce the cost of living will enable the Bank of England to cut interest rates faster than expected, while the increased headroom will convince the bond markets to reduce the one percentage point risk premium that they currently add to gilt yields. And of course, she will be hoping that something will turn up between now and 2028 that will enable her to avoid going into the next election with one in four people paying higher rate tax. As the OBR notes, an AI-driven productivity boom could give her more than £50 billion of headroom by the election, giving her plenty of scope for pre-election giveaways.

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"This pudding has no theme" was a Churchillism that could be applied to budgets as well as desserts. Because while Rachel Reeves' Budget on Wednesday was in many ways progressive it tells us little about why the Chancellor, or the Government, want to be progressive, where they are taking us, why or how.

Mrs Thatcher once remarked that "It is only on the basis of truth that power should be won or indeed can be worth winning". It's a quote that comes to mind as we look at how this Government has descended, despite its huge majority, into survival mode.

Running the state in the 21st century is hard, the poly-crisis of economy, environment, technology and geopolitics create untold pressures and challenges. No one should just stand on the sidelines and claim it's easy.

But given the complexity and scale of these challenges and more, how on earth could it happen that a Government can come in with so little scrutiny and having done none of the deep thinking and preparation to manage these issues and more?

Again, let's be considered. It is not as if everything can be solved overnight. It's not that progress on the economy or public services we're going to be easy or quick. Meaningful change takes time. We need a politics that is pragmatic in the best sense of the word - a clear sense of direction, and an openness and patience in terms of making progress.

But this Government came in with nothing except an overblown sense of their own ability to make decisions on the hoof. All the country needed, they seemed to argue, was the return of 'the grown-ups' and all would be well. They would make the right sound judgements on a case-by-case basis. They would know how to tweak the system to optimise outputs. If ever governments did work like this they they don't anymore. There isn't a lever or a dial in Downing Street or the Treasury that you can simply pull or turn and make the world a better place. It's all densely complicated. And to deal with that complexity you need people on your side willing to help and to shape and enact the decisions you make.

The Good News in Rachel Reeves' Budget

From lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty, to taking on the media-backed gambling lobby, there was much to praise and far less to criticise in the Chancellor's annual statement, argues Adam Bienkov

Adam Bienkov

The Institute for Government recently reported that Keir Starmer is failing to make major improvements to public services partly because he did not plan properly while in opposition. Wes Streeting in particular is singled out for his "chaotic and incoherent approach" to NHS reform. This picture is mirrored on the economy where a fund manager looked at the impact of the new Government on the bond market and concluded "There is no plan, there is no vision, and they are not going to succeed because they do not have the talent".

You can't be competent, if you don't know to what purpose. A Government that has no direction and no method was always bound to fail. The Prime Minister is of course a barrister, but what works in the courts was never going to work in the country. You can't just read the brief provided by a civil servant as he might have done in his chambers - and make technical decisions accordingly. It doesn't matter how much he promises to try harder if he has no idea what good looks like and doesn't know how change happens in the 21st Century.

The decision, at least for now, not to raise the overall level of income tax in the Budget is an example of this shambolic approach. First, they should never have ruled out tax rises before the last election and put such naive promises in a manifesto. The Conservatives had already won Labour the election, so they were just ensuring that either the economy would suffer if they didn't put up t...

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There was much to welcome in Rachel Reeves annual Budget on Wednesday.

Her decision to scrap the two child benefit will lift an estimated 350,000 children out of poverty and finally bring an end to the cruel George Osborne era policy that punished children for the crime of simply having been born.

The policy will be partly paid for by raising taxes on Britain's harmful gambling sector - something long called for by campaigners, including the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

The tax on gambling will come despite heavy lobbying by the industry as well as from some of those British news organisations which have themselves heavily benefited from the misery the sector causes.

Meanwhile a new mansion tax on homes worth worth over £2 million will raise an estimated £400 million for new housing and local services, while a new pay-per-mile tax on electric vehicles will ease the transition away from polluting petrol and diesel cars.

Continued increases in NHS spending will help repair some of the damage caused by 14 years of neglect under the Conservatives, while an increase to the minimum wage should raise living standards for millions of young people.

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None of this is likely to be well received by the UK's largely Conservative and increasingly Reform-supporting press.

A series of botched briefings and Treasury U-turns, followed by the accidental early release of her plans by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, will no doubt give Fleet Street cover to label the entire package as a new "Omnishambles" Budget.

Even prior to her statement the Daily Mail, which celebrated Liz Truss' disastrous budget that nearly crashed the entire UK economy as a "True Tory Budget" was lambasting what it described as Reeves' "bonkers" plans to make young people slightly better off.

Plans to tax multi-million pound houses and target landlords are likely to be similarly coldly received by the hugely wealthy owners of most of Britain's newspapers.

Putting Off Long Term Repairs

Of course this is not to say that there are not reasonable criticisms to make of Reeves' Budget.

The Chancellors' deeply unwise election pledges not to raise income tax, VAT or National Insurance has instead forced her to institute a bewildering range of new tax raising measures to make up the difference. Included in these are plans to continue Conservative freezes on income tax bands, which will raise taxes for millions of Brits. The fact the Chancellor is continuing to insist that she is keeping her pledge not to raise taxes on "working people" when she has now implemented stealth raises to both income taxes and National Insurance is difficult for anyone to credibly defend.

Other measures appear to be entirely conflicting with each other. Despite spending many years urging the public to invest money in their own pensions, the new tax on pension salary sacrifice schemes will push millions to do the complete opposite. The pledge to raise wages for young people will also run headlong into the accompanying stealth measure to freeze thresholds for tuition fee repayments.

The broader problem with this budget is that despite the Chancellor claiming to take the long term decisions required to turn the economy and country around, most of the difficult tax raising measures announced today are being put off until after the next general election.

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Anyone who has ever sat on a jury or taken part in a Crown Court trial as an advocate, witness, expert or Judge, knows that to dismiss them as no more than an exercise in administering the criminal law and determining guilt or innocence is a massive over-simplification.

A Crown Court trial is first and foremost about people. Individuals who, because of poor luck, bad decision making, a particular predilection towards a criminality that sits in their characters or a combination of all three, have ended up accused of a crime, or as the victims of a crime.

Their narratives and background often go way beyond the strict confines of the law and the legal process, and so, we as lawyers try to fit their behaviour and their characters into the process as best we can. Together with judges we strive for fairness, for objectivity and to ensure that the criminal justice system achieves the goal of protecting society from those individuals who commit crime and ensuring that the criminals in turn receive the correct sentence.

As I leave Court every day, I do a roll-call, when I ask myself if the people I've dealt with that day, as either a prosecution or defence advocate are in the right place: is the kid who dealt drugs at school been given a chance to rehabilitate himself via a suspended sentence; are the men who fought in the street with bottles and sticks properly behind bars; is the young women who was raped content that the man who subjected her to her ordeal has been properly punished. Overwhelmingly, the answer will be yes - not because of any particular skill by me, but because of the collective efforts of the police, the court staff, the probation service, the CPS, defence lawyers and the Judiciary.

And Juries play a pivotal role in that process.

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Gareth Roberts

Twelve ordinary people, given the extraordinary role of judging the evidence and casting a verdict on strangers that will almost always be life-changing for them.

They sit in the theatre of Court, twelve pairs of eyes, watching and listening, taking in every nuance of the evidence, recording in their minds every time a witness flinches or procrastinates and every tearful denial or assertion, and then at the end, they are given a law lecture by the Judge and go off to the sanctity of their room to consider what they've seen and to apportion guilt, if they can. I have never been in a jury room, or sat on a jury, but I can only imagine, that once they are discussing the evidence, and asking the questions they are directed to consider, the fact that you have 12 different people, with different experiences of life and different perspectives is invaluable as they take up the challenge of reaching a true verdict.

I say that with confidence, because, in my 26 years as a barrister, during which I have watched many hundreds of juries go through this process, I can think of only a handful of occasions where I thought that they've reached the wrong verdict.

Labour's announcement that they are considering replacing juries with judges for all but the most 'serious offences' is an attempt to mend a system by smashing it into tiny bits.

The principle of being tried by your peers is an important one. The criminal law is not something that can be imposed upon us without our consent, it must be something that we all feel part of, that we all buy into and trust. The jury system is a vital part of that process, because it brings ordinary people into the system and gives them a role that brings it alive...

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The BBC has issued an apology after one of its presenters failed to challenge a climate-sceptic lobbyist who runs a group that has received funding from fossil-fuel interests.

It is the first apology to be issued by the BBC since the row over a Panorama documentary on Donald Trump blew up last week, leading to the resignation of the corporation's Director General, Tim Davie, and CEO of News Deborah Turness. It has thrown the public broadcaster into chaos with threats of a $1-5billion lawsuit from President Trump.

The latest apology follows a 17th July interview by Annabel Amos on BBC Radio Northampton, where the Scottish campaigner Andrew Montford was introduced as the 'Director of the campaign group Net Zero Watch'.

Net Zero Watch is the campaign arm of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a registered charity which does not disclose its funders and which publishes reports criticising the push to reduce carbon emissions. No explanation of its funding or allegations of denying climate science was presented by the interviewer.

The GWPF has lobbied against Government plans to reach Net Zero by 2050 and has played down the link between man made climate change and extreme weather events, stating last year that it is a "mistaken belief that weather extremes - such as heatwaves, flooding, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires - are more common and more intense today because of climate change".

The GWPF was founded by Margaret Thatcher's former Chancellor, the late Nigel Lawson, in 2009 to fight what it describes as "extremely damaging and harmful policies" designed to mitigate climate change, as climate outlet DeSmog has reported.

As Byline Times has previously reported, funders of the group have also donated significant sums to the Conservative Party, including its current leader Kemi Badenoch, who has since abandoned her party's support for Net Zero.

Conservative Baron and hedge fund billionaire Michael Hintze, who founded the asset management firm CQS (now Manulife Investment Asset Management), has given money to GWPF, alongside fellow Conservative peer Lord Moynihan.

While the GWPF says it "does not accept donations either from energy companies or from anyone with a significant interest in an energy company," the Guardian revealed in 2022 that a major donor to its US arm had $30m (£24m) of shares in 22 companies working in coal, oil and gas. Most of the cash from its US arm, American Friends of the GWPF, goes to fund its UK work. The group has said it follows all transparency laws.

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GWPF's current director Benny Peiser has previously claimed it is "extraordinary that anyone should think there is a climate crisis". The group was recently subject to a Charity Commission probe, which led to Net Zero Watch being distanced from its charity 'owner'.

However, Net Zero Watch still links to its 'friends' GWFP across its website, while its Privacy Policy suggests data is shared when people "become a member of the GWPF." The two organisations maintain the same 55 Tufton Street address.

Montford has previously said of global warming: "We don't know and I haven't seen anything credible to persuade me there's a problem" - dismissing the scientific consensus that humans are significantly contributing to the world's changing climate through burning fossil fuels.

A BBC complaint from an environmental group,...

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The former Conservative Levelling Up Secretary and now editor of the Spectator, Michael Gove, has been selected as a judge for the 2026 Orwell Prize awards, despite his record of dodging media scrutiny and allegations of 'stifling' critical journalists.

During his time in Government Gove was accused of deliberately obstructing Freedom of Information requests by journalists, while his aides were also accused of setting up an anonymous Twitter account in order to target members of the media.

The prestigious media awards have now appointed him as the chair of their panel judging reporting on homelessness - despite what critics describe as a questionable track record on the issue.

During Gove's time in office, the age of first time buyers rose, housebuilding targets were repeatedly missed, and homelessness more than doubled, an increase which has been partly blamed on multiple poor policy decisions made under Gove's party.

That includes the party's freeze on local housing allowance (LHA) rates for four (2020-2024) years while costs skyrocketed (though Gove is said to have advocated for an increase to then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in 2023), stalling on putting a stop to no-fault evictions, soon to be outlawed by Labour as part of the Renters' Rights Act, and overseeing a collapse in social house-building.

The Conservatives' time in power also saw a massive increase in people forced to live in temporary accommodation. In May 2010, there were 50,400 households in temporary accommodation, a figure up by 144% by June 2024, with the number of children up 120%.

Gove has previously admitted "regret" over the situation, telling the BBC's Today Programme after it was revealed in 2024 that that nearly 112,000 households were living in temporary accommodation at that time, 63% of which included families with dependent children, that: "The biggest issue overall is that whether it's in the private rental sector, the socially rented sector, or homes to buy, we still need to increase the supply of homes."

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One Orwell Prize judge, who chose to remain anonymous, spoke to Byline Times about Gove's inclusion among Orwell judges focusing on homelessness "seems a strange choice considering Gove was at the heart of Government during a period when the number of people sleeping roughly doubled."

Also drawn into question has been Gove's role while in Government of attacking journalists and operating a culture of transparency in departments under his remit.

In 2022, openDemocracy reported on the Cabinet Office's 'Clearing House' unit, an entity itself deemed 'Orwellian' by critics. The Clearing House was accused of vetting and blacklisting Freedom of Information (FOI) requests from journalists.

It was Gove, then a sitting cabinet minister, who attacked the publication in an official Government statement, calling reporting into Clearing House "ridiculous and tenuous", though the department spent nearly £40,000 in taxpayer funds in trying to block the release of information pertaining to it.

In court, a judge sharply criticised the Cabinet Office for presenting "misleading" documents, while noting a "profound lack of transparency" about the unit's operation, which might "extend to ministers".

A later release published on Clearing House by the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC), prompted by the reporting, found that there "was evidence of poor FOI administration in the Cabinet Office and across Government". The Clearing House was shuttered in 2022.

Peter Geoghegan, former editor-in-chi...