Illustration by Tracy Worrall

11 min read29 min

It is almost midnight on 31 December 2029, deep in the bowels of Whitehall. A room where monitors bedeck every surface is filled with officials scurrying to and fro. A bespectacled man is on the phone, pinching the brow of his nose in frustration.

“…I know, I know, I know. Inertia. Just please turn it off for the next half hour, and spin up a battery instead.”

He puts down the phone with a heavy sigh. “TEN SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT,” yells one of his staff.

All eyes turn to the screen, where a bar labelled “GAS” is starting to shrink.

“FIVE.” The bar is now halfway down.

“FOUR.”

“THREE.”

“TWO.”

“ONE.”

The bar falls to zero. The room erupts. The lights stay on.

The government is building an enormous machine. It could already raise the temperature of the North Sea, albeit by a single degree and in 200 years. But by 2030, it hopes to have upgraded the machine to such an extent that it would take a mere 150 years.

This machine is the electricity system, and it touches every part of our isles. It is, by a substantial margin, our most complex device. It is in every home, every office and every factory, and it connects them together through a web of cabling that is now well over a century old. While the individual wires may have been replaced, the circuit endures.

The original point of building such a vast machine was to manage the reality that our demand for electricity is not a flat line but varies continuously throughout the day. But the more people connected to a circuit, the more their varied times of switching on the kettle even out. This allows fossil fuel generators to run much more efficiently. Constantly switching them on and off takes more fuel, and instead being able to gently ramp them up and down over the course of the day made electricity considerably cheaper.

Labour won the last election in part through a promise to cut bills by £300 by weaning the country off gas. Its plan for doing so is to decarbonise power by 2030 and thus ensure that the energy crisis, prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, can never happen again. The public face of this plan is Ed Miliband, and his political future is tightly tied to its success. As part of this, he has given considerable new powers to the National Energy System Operator, the body responsible for both balancing the minute-to-minute operation of the grid and now planning its upgrade.

This is not an easy task. Power plants that run on sunbeams do not have the same performance characteristics as plants that run on gas. You can’t switch the Sun on and off, and indeed in the UK the weather will frequently switch the Sun on and off for you. This means that renewable power plants can’t respond to demand. So, to replace gas, you must not simply build solar panels and wind turbines but all the infrastructure necessary to ensure that demand can be satisfied. And then you must ensure that you can actually make that infrastructure run smoothly.

Nuclear power helps out in part but suffers from almost the opposite problem to renewables: it is very hard to switch off. You can change its output at the margins, but demanding that it have the same performance characteristics as a gas plant will lead to a nuclear engineer saying terrifying things like, “Well, I suppose we could poison the reactor with xenon.”

Nonetheless, having a nuclear backbone helps. In 2025, always-on demand equated to about 13m kettles all boiling at once. Most of the UK’s nuclear reactors are older gas-cooled designs. The last of these came online in 1988. They are now ageing and will need to come offline for decommissioning.

By 2030, it is likely that only one of those reactors will remain online, alongside the 1990s vintage reactor at Sizewell in Suffolk. The only nuclear power plant currently being constructed in the UK, at Hinkley in Somerset, consists of two very large reactors, one of which has the potential to be online by 2030. Without this last reactor, the 2030 target will be in trouble, and considerable effort is going into making sure it happens.

However, while nuclear can take care of our 13m kettles, at maximum the UK consumes power equivalent to 60m kettles. This means there is a very large volume of variable demand to solve. As above, we can’t do this with wind and solar alone. We need ways to store their power and ensure it can get to where it needs to go. But even with that, we’ll still need a lot more wind and solar. The government’s task here is to make that happen.

To put this into perspective, we currently have 16GW of offshore wind around our coasts. You don’t need to know what a gigawatt is to know that adding at least 28 more is a lot. Luckily there’s enough already in process to mean that the government is likely to only need to buy 16-20 extra gigawatts. In its most recent round of renewables purchases it was able to buy 8.4 of this total, putting it within striking distance of hitting its target.

But the problem government now faces is that the price it paid for offshore wind in this round was higher than it has paid for other recent rounds, and developers now know that it’s willing to pay over the odds to hit its target. This implies that if it wants to buy the same amount in the next round it might be charged even more. At the same time, the US’ current antipathy towards wind projects in its own waters will prompt developers to pivot away towards Europe and Asia, potentially improving competition.

The same challenge applies to onshore wind and solar. Onshore wind needs to double, and solar needs to triple. In February we will find out how much government has paid to bring more of these projects online. But the big problem these projects face is much less getting paid and much more about getting connected.

Where pylons stride across landscape, local opponents could cause delay, whether by judicial reviews or planning inquiries

The wires that run the length of the country, the high voltage highways of the power system, were built when most of our power stations were located in the middle of the country and the task was to get the power from the middle to the edge. But the windiest parts of the UK are in Scotland, and the sunniest parts are in Cornwall, which means we now need to rewire the country to bring power from the edges into the middle. Given that our existing grid was slowly built out over the course of about a century, rewiring everything everywhere all at once is a colossal challenge by itself.

It will involve building about 1,000 kilometres of wire onshore and about 4,500 kilometres of wire offshore. The onshore cables will carried by pylons, aside from a small number of locations where they will be buried in the ground to protect nationally significant landscapes. The offshore cables will take the form of enormous wires stretching through the North Sea from Scotland to the Midlands, ensuring that wind can get out of Scotland efficiently, as well as new offshore connections around East Anglia.

Whether onshore or offshore, these projects will face opposition. Where pylons stride across landscape, local opponents could cause delay, whether by judicial reviews or planning inquiries. Offshore cables are not immune because bringing high-voltage direct current connections onshore means very large converter stations. To the uninitiated, these resemble large coastal warehouses – and those who live near them have already started to organise.

Without sufficient connectivity, adding more wind farms will not actually reduce emissions: even if England buys their power, if the power can’t physically get to England, gas power stations will need to be switched on to meet demand.

But because if you’ve sold your power you still get paid regardless of whether it can get to your customer or not, lots of applications for wind, solar and battery projects have been put in across the country. Not all of those can efficiently connect to the grid. Historically, new grid connections have been managed on the basis of first-come first-serve, but in a context in which literally hundreds of gigawatts’ worth of projects had applied for a connection, something new was required.

The System Operator has, therefore, decided to stop allocating connections based on who happened to have bought an option on farmland in Yorkshire and applied on the never-never six years ago, and instead moved to a much more centrally directed regime. Quite simply, it’s looked at all the regions of the UK, looked at how much connectivity it has to play with, and said, “Alright, we need more solar here, some batteries there, and a few wind turbines over here.” It’s then allocated grid connections on this basis and stripped out all those applications from people who hadn’t even bothered to get planning permission.

Batteries and solar – and projects with solar and batteries on the same site – have been the big winners from this process, even if a lot of more speculative applications for these technologies have fallen by the wayside. Lithium-ion batteries, typically made in China but controlled by British-designed software, are expected to come into their own for the purposes of 2030. They will be increasing fivefold from their current capacity of 5GW to closer to 25GW. This moves them from an interesting technology project into the daily mainstay of the grid, storing the midday sun and pumping it out at teatime.

But this new approach to grid connections relies on the wires that provide that connectivity actually being built on time, and here the picture is not quite as positive. The Norwich to Tilbury line, essential for conveying as much offshore wind to the South East as possible, has been delayed to 2031. Without it, the volume of low carbon power that can reach demand will be lower.

Delays are a function of both engineering challenges and financial engineering challenges. In building all of this new grid infrastructure, the transmission companies can only spend up to the amount that Ofgem has allowed them to, before it starts cutting into their bottom line. Ofgem has not allowed the network companies to spend everything they might need for 2030 yet. They have taken the not-unreasonable view that all the generation needed might not materialise, and if it doesn’t materialise then the wires aren’t needed. The spending is therefore locked up inside Uncertainty Mechanisms, a term of regulatory art that doesn’t refer to a mechanical magic 8-ball but rather to a set of conditions under which the money will be unlocked. Which includes progress on delivering all the renewables projects laid out above.

The government’s problems don’t end there. While gas will only provide about five per cent of the electricity needed to run the system, actual gas plants will need to run 20-30 per cent of the time. But much like the nuclear fleet, our gas fleet is ageing and it’s not clear whether many of the existing plants will stagger over the finish line.

The government currently plans to carve out a special market for new build and refurbished gas plant – but, much like with offshore wind, the market knows that these plants are needed and will extract as much value as it can.

These are strong headwinds, but there is an unexpected chink of light. The government may be on course to achieve its 2030 target, albeit not in the way it expected. Many of the large numbers set out above presume significant increases in demand. If demand doesn’t increase dramatically – driven by heat pumps, electric cars and data centres – then a smaller generation build-out might be sufficient to decarbonise the power system. Given that demand for electricity has been declining for the last 20 years, this would be in keeping with the existing trend.

This may be excellent for the target, but this chink of light would in fact be the lights of an oncoming train of failure for the government’s other objectives. Progress on decarbonising heat and transport – not to mention progress on rolling out the data centres necessary for AI – will have gone seriously off-track.

The government’s Warm Homes Plan calls for 200,000 fewer heat pumps than the Climate Change Committee’s target. The Treasury has decided to levy a similar tax on electric vehicles that, when imposed in New Zealand, saw deployment fall by half. The newspapers are full of claims that AI is a bubble.

The triumphant crossing of the finishing line at the end of the decade may yet be realised – but the way we got there may mean it doesn’t feel that great. 

Starmer fends off coup his aides accuse Streeting of being behind, as Badenoch insists his position is still untenable

“Sir Keir Starmer on Monday insisted he was “not prepared to walk away” after he survived the most serious challenge yet to his leadership, even as fresh tensions emerged between the embattled UK prime minister and one of his leading rivals. Starmer’s authority was badly damaged after Anas Sarwar, Labour’s leader in Scotland, called on him to resign less than two years after winning power, saying there had been “too many mistakes”. The prime minister’s allies claimed that Sarwar’s move was co-ordinated with health secretary Wes Streeting, who is seen as a contender for the Labour leadership if and when Starmer leaves office. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to wonder whether Wes knew about and encouraged him to make a move,” said one MP close to Starmer. Streeting’s team hit back, criticising Starmer’s Downing Street operation for trying to implicate the health secretary even after he had voiced some support for the prime minister. “We did not ask Anas to do this, he did not co-ordinate with Anas on this, Anas is the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, he is his own man, and Wes has the highest respect for him,” said a spokesperson for Streeting.” – FT

• ‘Too many mistakes’ Scottish Labour leader tells Starmer to quit now and blasts ‘it’s not good enough’ – as PM desperately clings on to career – The Sun
• Cabinet bounced into giving PM ‘a stay of execution’: Ministers back Starmer after 24 hours of silence as markets wobble in wake of Scottish Labour chief telling Sir Keir ‘go now’… amid war with Wes – Daily Mail
• Starmer still standing after the coup that never was – The Times
• Cabinet forced to back Starmer to save his skin – Daily Telegraph
• ‘This is my fight’ Starmer vows to fight on & beat rebels in Labour showdown as he pleads with MPs to battle Reform after Mandelson scandal – The Sun
• Keir Starmer tells MPs: I’ve won every fight I’ve been in — as it happened – The Times
• Keir Starmer says he is ‘not prepared to walk away’ after call for resignation – Guardian
• Starmer stumbles on as rivals balk at killer blow – FT

Editorial

• While Sir Keir clings on to his leadership, next to nothing is being done to fix UK’s broken borders or flailing economy – The Sun

Comment

• Starmer should go for the good of the country – Kemi Badenoch, Daily Telegraph
• Blimey, what a Monday! But the nasal knight will live to honk another day – Quentin Letts, Daily Mail
• Neither good nor serious – Ben Sixsmith, The Critic
• Labour’s toxic cult of masculinity has been Starmer’s undoing – Suzanne Moore, Daily Telegraph
• McSweeney’s exit sounds Starmer’s death knell – William Atkinson, CapX

Today

Wes Streeting blamed by Starmer loyalists for ‘coup’ attempt that failed

“A fresh row broke out between Wes Streeting and Downing Street on Monday night after the Health Secretary accused No 10 of briefing against him while he was out defending the Prime Minister. Downing Street accused Streeting of co-ordinating with Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar to call for Keir Starmer to quit over the Peter Mandelson scandal, the Health Secretary’s spokesman said. The hostile briefing against him took place while Streeting was doing an interview with Sky News in which he expressed support for the PM, they added. Despite that support, the Health Secretary seemed to be clearing the path for a potential leadership bid as he published his private WhatsApp messages with Peter Mandelson. As dark clouds gathered around the PM last week, Streeting’s name was once again thrown into the mix to replace him, leading to a vicious briefing war with other rivals, who made much of his friendship with the disgraced peer.” – Daily Mail

• Streeting accused of No 10 coup – Daily Telegraph
• I’m not prepared to walk away’: Starmer tells Labour MPs in showdown meeting as he fights for his future – but his woes deepen as Streeting reveals how he moaned about PM’s ‘no growth strategy’ in Mandelson WhatsApps – Daily Mail
• Starmer just one Cabinet resignation from being forced out, insiders say – The i
• Streeting told Mandelson Labour had no growth strategy in private texts – Daily Telegraph
• Wes Streeting’s Mandelson texts: ‘No growth strategy at No 10’ – The Times
• Streeting accused of coup against Starmer as plot to oust him exposed – Express
• Streeting wrote off his re-election chances in WhatsApp exchanges with Mandelson – Guardian
• Keir Starmer to force out cabinet secretary over Mandelson vetting – The Times

Comment

• Wes Streeting is disloyal, untrustworthy – and right on many things – Stephen Pollard, Daily Telegraph
• The Cabinet’s belated – and frankly unconvincing – show of loyalty has brought Starmer a stay of execution only. All it would take is a puff of wind to blow him over now – Jason Groves, Daily Mail
• What could a Starmer government possibly achieve now? – Isabel Hardman, Spectator
• Cabinet delighted to save Sir Keir… now they own him – Tim Stanley, Daily Telegraph

Angela Rayner for leader website went live briefly last month…

“An unfinished website claiming to launch Angela Rayner’s Labour leadership campaign was published temporarily in January, prompting further speculation that the former deputy prime minister could be gearing up for a contest to replace Keir Starmer. The Guardian was alerted to the website, which appeared to be under construction, by a source in the IT industry – before the US Department of Justice’s latest release of documents on Jeffrey Epstein threw the UK government into disarray. It was published, seemingly by accident, on a “staging site”, before being removed from the internet. The domain name angelaforleader.co.uk was registered within minutes of the apparent publishing error, at 9.48am on 27 January, with the same company – Webfusion – as her official parliamentary site. Rayner has denied any links to the website, with her team dismissing it as a “fake” that had neither been commissioned by her, nor with her knowledge, while one ally described it as a “false flag” operation.” – Guardian

• Angela Rayner ‘leadership website’ revealed as she claims it’s ‘nothing to do with her’ and steps back from killing off Starmer – after Scots Labour leader said he must go on day of drama – Daily Mail
• Rayner for leader’ site proves race to succeed Starmer is well under way – Guardian

Comment

• Why Angela Rayner would be the most abysmal PM of my lifetime – Stephen Glover, Daily Mail

Yesterday

Jimmy Lai sentenced to 20 years in jail by China just days after PM asked for his release

“Jimmy Lai will die in prison, his daughter warned, after the Hong Kong newspaper owner was sentenced on Monday to 20 years in prison under the territory’s national security law. Despite Sir Keir Starmer’s personal lobbying of President Xi of China in Beijing last month, Lai, 78, received the longest sentence given so far under the law after being convicted in December of sedition and collusion with foreign powers. Eight other defendants, including journalists at Lai’s former Apple Daily newspaper, were sentenced to terms ranging from six years and three months to ten years, at the end of a trial that has been condemned by western governments and human rights organisations.” – The Times

• Keir Starmer accused of ‘monumental diplomatic failure’ as China jails British citizen Jimmy Lai for 20 years just weeks after Prime Minister raised his plight during talks in Beijing – Daily Mail
• Jimmy Lai: will Hong Kong media tycoon die in jail? – Guardian

Today

Palace will cooperate with police over Andrew’s connections to Epstein

“Buckingham Palace has said it will support police in their investigation into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and his links with the late paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein. The King emphasised his “profound concern” about his brother’s alleged conduct and said the Palace would provide help to police if it was requested. Thames Valley Police has expanded its inquiry into Andrew, who was already under investigation over allegations that he was introduced to a second victim of Epstein — someone other than Virginia Giuffre — at Royal Lodge in 2010. Andrew denies wrongdoing. The force confirmed that it would also assess allegations that Andrew leaked confidential information as a trade envoy.” – The Times

• King Charles says he will help UK police investigate brother’s links to Jeffrey Epstein – FT
• King Charles expresses his ‘profound concern’ at allegations of Andrew’s conduct after Epstein file release, as Buckingham Palace says it ‘stands ready to support’ the police – Daily Mail
• King Charles ‘ready to support’ police over claims about Andrew – Guardian
• King Charles’s U-turn in response to Andrew scandal proves one important thing – Express
• King ‘stands ready’ to support police probe into Andrew amid claims ‘he leaked confidential docs to paedo pal Epstein’ – The Sun

Reform-led Worcestershire set to issue England’s largest council tax rise

“Reform-led Worcestershire county council is likely to issue England’s largest council tax rise this April after it was given special permission by the government to increase it by up to 9%. Worcestershire is one of a handful of authorities whose requests to be allowed to increase local rates above the standard 5% cap from April have been accepted by ministers. Its cap-busting tax hike will be embarrassing to Reform UK nationally, which has made low council tax a political priority; while it has already led to one local Reform councillor quitting the party in protest. Ministers have also announced the government will clear about £5bn of historical debts accumulated by English councils who have overspent on special educational needs and disability (Send) services in recent years.” – Guardian

• Eric Pickles: ‘Cancelling local elections is unconstitutional’ – Daily Telegraph

Yesterday

For successful economic reform, the sums need to add up and Reform’s economics don’t – Mel Stride

News in Brief

• Our armed forces are hollow – and our enemies know it – Nick Carter, Spectator
• Who has the courage to fix Britain’s debt crisis? – Anne Strickland, CapX
• The conservative case for Keir Starmer – Mary Harrington, Unherd
• Call for the King – Nicholas Boys Smith, The Critic

Credit: Fergus Burnett

The chemical industry plays a vital role in all our lives. Chemicals and their derivatives are used in more than 90 per cent of manufactured products and materials – everything from construction and automotive products to everyday items like cleaning products and medical devices.

But with the advent of AI and new technologies, innovation is crucial to support the success of the industry.

With that in mind, world-leading chemical company BASF and Imperial College London are working in partnership to share their expertise and develop innovative solutions to real-world challenges. These include meeting sustainability commitments by developing sustainable products and technologies, improving resilience to supply chain shocks caused by geo-political events, and potentially being ready to manufacture pandemic pharmaceuticals at speed.

Our partnership with BASF is unusually close, interactive and genuine

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Since 2019, the partners have been pioneering ways to produce chemicals with less energy and fewer materials, implement continuous production techniques at smaller scales, and use AI to optimise manufacturing, thereby ensuring that the industry continues to be as competitive as possible. Innovations like these could improve the performance of BASF’s production sites and support economic growth across the UK.

Working together, the partners are creating advanced technology and know-how to support the green transformation of the chemical industry by accelerating a shift to non-fossil feedstocks and less energy-intensive methods.

At the same time, they are nurturing a new generation of industrial chemists able to boost the industry’s success, resilience and sustainability.

“We are always looking to work with the best and brightest students and the top people in their fields,” says Darren Budd, Managing Director of BASF plc.

“We have around 10,000 researchers globally, and 40 or 50 years ago maybe we could do it all in-house. But research requires a multi-disciplinary approach today and we can’t do everything ourselves. We need to find the best partners – partners who fit with our ethos, allow us to progress our research and bring products to market much faster.

“Imperial has like-minded individuals with whom we can work, collaborate and share best practice. Working with them allows us to pick up new techniques and new ideas to support the way in which the world is changing, whether that’s the labs of the future in terms of digitalisation or getting the best students and training them in new techniques and new technologies.”

“Our partnership with BASF is unusually close, interactive and genuine,” agrees Dr Philip Miller, Associate Professor in Applied Synthesis at Imperial’s Department of Chemistry.

“Having a steer and direction from industry as to what some of the challenges are is really important to us. We get to work hand-in-hand with an industrial partner, so from the ground up we co-create projects together. It means that we can take the fundamental research that we do in our labs and apply it to real-world problems.

“Having early-stage input from industrial chemists, engineers or other scientists within companies is important. When you have support from industries like BASF, it puts the rocket boosters on what you can do over the short and medium term – and hopefully sustain that investment, research and translation into the longer term.”

Advancing the chemical industry, a report on the Imperial-BASF partnership published last autumn (2025), showed how the partners are translating their research findings into technologies that are ready for adoption and roll-out. Turning a lab-scale reaction into a commercial manufacturing process can take anything up to 12 years, but the partners believe that their respective expertise can help bring projects to market more quickly.

To date, the partnership has supported 35 PhD students, many of whom are working on improving the economic and environmental performance of the chemical industry – for instance, by improving the yield and selectivity of chemical reactions and by using digital techniques to reduce the time-to-market for new continuous manufacturing processes. Their research has led to numerous papers in leading academic journals, patents and new technologies.

As the partnership evolves, the partners are increasing their focus on bringing new techniques and technologies to industrial adoption.

Routes include their direct transfer to BASF, joint development with consortium partners, and the launch of start-up companies to commercialise their joint research. The formation of SOLVE Chemistry, for instance, is the first time BASF has jointly launched a spin-out with a university. SOLVE Chemistry is now working independently to provide the whole industry with access to its AI-based solutions to find the best way to manufacture chemicals more rapidly.

BASF and Imperial believe that their partnership is a model for the way industry and academia can work together and benefit from each other.

“The pragmatic, impact-driven mindset is what you find at Imperial,” says Dr Christian Holtze, Open Innovation Manager at BASF and BASF’s lead in the partnership. “Imperial is very advanced in how they’re deploying digital science into every aspect of research. They are very strong in areas such as scientific modelling and optimisation – and the way the students are educated is always integrating a digital component. This is fairly unique when compared to research and education at other universities.”

Meanwhile, Professor Mary Ryan, Vice-Provost (Research and Enterprise) at Imperial, sees the partnership as one of the university’s most significant strategic partnerships. “Using Imperial’s advanced expertise in chemicals and digital technologies, the technical advances we now have in the pipeline with BASF are both highly realistic and deliverable and potentially transformational, opening up opportunities for dramatic increases in efficiency and even new value chains,” she says.

Today’s chemists are a world away from the days when they worked at benches cluttered with beakers, burners and rising smoke; they now work in highly controlled environments that blend AI, advanced instrumentation to generate high-quality data and data-driven design.

“If you have sufficient data, you can feed that into a machine learning algorithm that enables decisions to be taken out of humans’ hands and direct the temperature, pressure or flow rate to maximise yield or minimise factors such as cost,” says Imperial’s Dr Miller.  

Some of the partnership’s other projects include the introduction of flow chemistry, a form of chemical production that allows the fine control of parameters such as temperature, flow rate and real-time monitoring via sensors. Imperial and BASF are also combining new computational approaches with experimental data to improve crystalline products and make production processes more scalable. A third project is looking at a new technique that uses light instead of heat to set off the chemical reactions needed to produce products such as crop protection chemicals.

BASF and Imperial are confident that with the necessary investment, the innovations under development have the potential to create new economic opportunities in the UK, including new manufacturing facilities and high-skilled employment. To date, their work has been supported by the government through the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and other organisations in the Innovative Continuous Manufacturing for Industrial Chemicals programme, a £17.8 million research scheme in continuous chemical production.

Economic challenges in the chemical sector and in the European societies mean we need support to secure the continuity that is required to deploy our transformative innovations

The partnership’s current priority is to intensify the focus on translation, thereby turning technology innovation into commercially viable businesses – with support from senior stakeholders at BASF, Imperial and UK public funding bodies.

The chemical industry is one of the UK’s foundation industries, producing the core materials on which much of the manufacturing economy depends. As Darren Budd of BASF puts it, it is “the building block of everything”, underscoring its vital role in the UK economy.

It is therefore essential for universities like Imperial to attract the best students from around the world so they can work on new technologies that can then be deployed at scale. The industry also needs the government to enable the regulatory environment and to offer financial support and backing to drive the chemical industry forward.

“But we are at a tipping point,” writes BASF’s Dr Christian Holtze in the partnership’s Advancing the chemical industry report.

“Economic challenges in the chemical sector and in the European societies mean we need support to secure the continuity that is required to deploy our transformative innovations and we need to work hard on removing hurdles to technology translation. This will take a concerted effort by the key stakeholders in our partnership – BASF, Imperial and the public funding institutions.”

Read the full report here: Advancing the chemical industry: A report on the Imperial College London – BASF partnership

“We don’t do betting in the Tory Party anymore,” quipped one shadow cabinet minister to me yesterday when asked about the odds of Sir Keir Starmer resigning as Prime Minister – an aside to bad memories of the gambling scandal at the last election.

Others were less restrained. One member of LOTO told me plainly: “He’s a dead man walking. He will be there for PMQs this week – but he may not be there for the next one.”

But there is a line for Kemi Badenoch to follow as Starmer’s leadership seems to unravel. “Kemi has to balance doing the constitutional role as Leader of the Opposition with not seeming to enjoy the Prime Minister’s discomfort too much,” they added, “it is delicate”.

But as one CCHQ source told me: “It is quite nice seeing it from the other side for a change.”

Some in the shadow cabinet had thought the Prime Minister might depart alongside his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney. Politically amputated, with the vultures circling, Starmer might have been tempted to recognise where he had lost and call it quits.

Not quite yet. I would say he is fighting on, but that feels overly generous. From McSweeney’s resignation at 2pm on Sunday, Starmer went more than 24 hours without a single cabinet colleague offering public support. Even at the height of Boris Johnson’s collapse, half the Cabinet could still be relied upon to appear on air in his defence.

With cabinet silence still lingering throughout the morning, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar made his move with a public defenestration of Starmer, calling for his resignation. But it left him conspicuously alone. He jumped, but no one followed.

As yesterday wore on, the leadership contest that had seemed genuinely plausible at the start of the day began to fizzle. It had the feel of a Burnham moment: the senior figure safely outside Westminster making a bid for personal advantage – in Sarwar’s case, some distance from the poor Scottish Labour results expected in May – only to trigger a reflexive show of loyalty to the wounded leader from those at the centre of government.

“Honestly, how has Sarwar ended the day in a worse position than Starmer?” one Tory MP asked.

Eventually, David Lammy became the first cabinet member to break cover, tweeting: “Keir Starmer won a massive mandate 18 months ago, for five years to deliver on Labour’s manifesto that we all stood on. We should let nothing distract us from our mission to change Britain and we support the Prime Minister in doing that.”

A slow trickle followed. One by one, cabinet ministers – alongside the likes of Angela Rayner – posted strikingly similar messages on X about Starmer’s “huge mandate” and their “fullest support”. They had apparently been instructed to tweet them, if the curiously identical phrasing and forced language wasn’t already obvious.

Perhaps they had remembered that forcing Starmer out would resurrect an awkward archive. Over the past few years, nearly all of them – from Rayner to Cooper to Lammy – repeatedly insisted that a change of leader or Prime Minister must be put back to the voters via a general election.

“It would be a shame if someone had all those clips saved,” one CCHQ source tells me.

Just take a look at their Twitter. Rayner, for instance: “The Tories have crowned Rishi Sunak without him saying a word about what he would do as PM. He has no mandate… The public deserve their say on Britain’s future through a General Election.” Lammy, meanwhile, declared it “unacceptable” for Tory MPs to choose another Prime Minister, demanding a general election “NOW”.

Swallowing one’s own words, however, is not difficult if shame is in short supply. Starmer himself said in 2020: “When they made mistakes, I carried the can. I never turn on my staff.” One wonders what happened to that principle.

All eyes automatically look to May. The shadow cabinet minister who declined to bet on Starmer’s departure made the case that no prospective successor would want to inherit the leadership just ahead of an almost inevitable local election meltdown. And while it may feel far away, it is only seven weeks of parliamentary sitting time – but that is seven weeks of survival, certainly not the same as governing, still less the “change” Starmer once promised.

Nor is there an obvious heir. Streeting does not appeal to the membership; Rayner has tax affairs to settle; Burnham lacks a Commons seat. Meanwhile, Streeting has chosen to publish his own messages with Mandelson (can one leak oneself?), admitting the absence of a growth agenda, criticising the government, and recommending Matthew Doyle – another Labour figure dogged by awkward questions over a friendship with a convicted sex offender – do the US ambassador’s comms. And there is more to come: the Conservatives’ humble address last week all means further uncomfortable disclosures over the next couple of months.

“It was definitely comms that was the problem — not appointing a friend of a paedo,” one LOTO figure joked, after the resignation of Tim Allan yesterday made him Starmer’s fourth director of communications to depart.

Yes, there may just be seven weeks until May, but they may be punctuated by a slow drip of increasingly awkward revelations. Without his usual political svengalis around him, it may begin to feel as though the vultures are drawing ever closer – and the Tories will make the most of it.

Cllr Steve Adams is the Leader of the Conservative Group on Camden Council.

The greatest challenge for a minority party within a hugely one-sided council will always be that, while opposition to unpopular policy and decisions is easy to garner, what is much harder is to convert that opposition into effective political change.

For the last two years in Camden, the Conservative Group has concentrated solely on local issues, their mismanagement by the Labour-led council administration with the collusion of the official opposition by the Lib Dems. The two parties spend more time at council meetings in posturing on national matters than on pressing local problems.

We have made sure that we have not entertained their game of political ping pong.

Camden has a particularly politically aware population and is literally on the edge of the Westminster bubble. With the Prime Minister as a local MP and much of the Labour hierarchy resident nearby, the most effective and credible course has been for us to aim at reclaiming the high ground of competence.

After each Full Council meeting, we have published a report on our position, which goes out to almost 7,000 members and others. The intention of this initiative is to make use of the work we put into the preparation for meetings and prevent that disappearing like yesterday’s papers into the budgie cage. This continued communication with our supporters is popular and respectful of their belief in us. We are also confident that at the ballot box this will reap benefits.

Another Camden challenge is the burning question

“How can the democratic voice of opposition wards within a larger Council be delivered?”  

When the few primarily Conservative wards clamour against the imposed diktat of the council and 85 per cent local opposition to LTNs is voiced, how can their opinions be considered fairly? This is not a PR quiz, but rather a fundamental question on the essence of representation.

The Cabinet system of local government has delivered Camden a hugely whipped council where even gentle questioning by majority members is effectively stymied. It is not popular with voters and provides us with an opening upon which to benefit. We are making this flaw in local democracy known to the electorate and will increase this message as May 7th draws near.

Kemi Badenoch has accepted many times that in the years leading up to the last election, our party lost the trust of the electorate including our own supporters, and she has committed to rebuilding that vital missing link between the country and the Conservatives. This shows her distinct move away from the bluster and fumble that preceded her.

I have always considered local politics to be just that; local and issue based. However, I appreciate that they reflect on national allegiance and visa versa. In view of that evident fact, I have communicated to all our local council candidates and activists that it is their duty to leave everyone they meet with or write to, with the impression that Conservatives are capable, competent, responsible and committed. By doing this, even in small ways we will rid ourselves of the mistrust that has soured our brand and will eventually swing the tide of public opinion and return the party to the role it should have, the serious duty of government.

We are in the game of marginal gains in both senses of the phrase.

Our local aim is that of redressing the deficit in the balance of power by delivering more, highly capable and effective Tory councillors to the seats in Camden Town Hall and by doing so return to the borough, the principles of decent Conservative values.