Key events
Steve Reed says it is ‘perfectly normal’ for political activists to volunteer in other countries’ election campaigns
Good morning. Steve Reed, the environment secretary, has been doing the morning interview round, and he expected to be talking about the appointment of an independent commission, led by the former Treasury official and former deputy governor of the Bank of England Sir Jon Cunliffe, to consider the future of the water industry. Details were briefed out last night, here is the news release, and here is Helena Horton’s story.
But instead Reed has spent the morning fending off a rather bizarre story about the Trump campaign filing a complaint with election regulators in the US alleging that the Labour party is interfering in the US presidential election. Eleni Courea has the details here.
In an interview with the Today programme, Reed said that it was “perfectly normal” for political activists to volunteer in election campaigns in other countries. In an interview with the Today programme, he said:
It’s up to private individuals what they do with their free time, and it’s actually perfectly normal for people who are interested in politics to go from one country to campaign for a sister party in another country. I‘ve seen Americans in the UK doing that in our elections.
He also said the pro-Democrat volunteering effort had not been official organised or funded by the Labour party.
None of this has been organised or paid for by the Labour party. This is just individuals using their own time and their own money.
Asked about a post on LinkedIn from Sofia Patel, head of operations at the Labour party, inviting more people to volunteer and saying their housing would be sorted out, Reed said Today programme would have to be speak to her, but “the Labour party has nothing to do with organising this”.
When it was put to him that the fact that the post has been taken down was an admission that it was badly worded, Reed just said he had not seen it.
Reed is right, of course. Volunteering like this is routine (Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, helped out with the Bill Clinton campaign at one stage in 1992), and the Trump campaign don’t seem too bothered about British inteference when the person doing the interfering is Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader. In one respect, the most interesting feature of the story is the fact that Donald Trump and his campaign team appear to be the only people on the planet who think that Keir Starmer’s Labour party is “far left”.
But Trump may well win the US presidential election in two weeks’ time and, although Starmer has been scrupulous about being respectful towards him as PM, and describes their relationship as “good”, Trump is unpredictable and vindictive, and so this could be a story with repercussions.
Starmer is spending all day travelling to the Commonwealth summit in Samoa, so we are not going to hear much more from him on this. But we’ve got PMQs, and so the topic may come up there.
Here is the agenda for the day.
11.30am: John Healey, the defence secretary, holds a press conference with his German counterpart, Boris Pistorius, after they signed a UK-Germany defence pact.
Noon: Angela Rayner, the deputy PM, faces Oliver Dowden, the shadow deputy PM, at PMQs.
After 12.30pm: MPs debate regulations relating to the infected blood compensation scheme.
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