Wales’ first minister has said she does not think the incoming US president Donald Trump is racist.

During a BBC radio phone-in, Labour’s Eluned Morgan said: “There were a hell of a lot of black people and Latinos who voted for him in the election.”

Her words contrast with those of Labour London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who called Trump “racist”, “sexist” and a “homophobe” in an interview in May and urged his party to “call him out”.

Speaking on Radio 5 Live on Thursday, Morgan said the UK had to “keep as good a relationship with the United States as we can”.

UK Labour Labour Foreign Secretary David Lammy previously called Trump a “neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath”, in 2018 when he was a backbench MP, but has dismissed those comments as “old news“, insisting he would be able to find “common ground” with the president-elect.

On Thursday morning’s phone-in Morgan was asked by presenter Nicky Campbell if Trump was a racist.

“I shouldn’t think he is, to be honest,” she said.

“There were a hell of a lot of black people and Latinos who voted for him in the election.”

The first minister added that the American vote had to be respected: “We need a strong relationship with the United States irrespective of who leads the country.

“It’s our biggest area in terms of inward investment,” she said.

She said she was worried about the potential of additional tariffs, however. “It will hit our economy,” she warned.

During his election campaign Trump pledged to impose a 20% tariff on all imports into the United States and a 60% tariff on Chinese imports.

During Thursday’s programme, which marked Morgan’s first 100 days leading the Welsh government, the first minister also called for farmers to “calm down a bit” over changes to inheritance tax.

The man in charge of a review of the prisons crisis says building more jails is not the answer and a more “strategic” approach is needed to free up space.

The former Conservative Justice Secretary David Gauke has been called in by Labour to review sentencing, following the early release of nearly 3,000 offenders in recent weeks.

The sentencing review was a Labour manifesto pledge and the party has also appointed Lord Timpson, former head of the key-cutting chain that hires ex-offenders and chief of the Prison Reform Trust, as its prisons minister.

Gauke, who was justice secretary under Theresa May, has previously suggested that jail terms of less than six months should be scrapped.

The UK prison population has roughly doubled in the last 30 years, with capacity lagging behind, and in September the system came within 100 places of running out of space altogether.

Gauke told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that this autumn’s crisis release of prisoners was unavoidable for the new Labour government because of “the circumstances they inherited”.

Stressing “I do not speak as a Labour person”, he said “any government of any colour would have been forced to make that decision, or something very like that decision, at that particular time”.

He warned projections showed demand for prison cells would continue to “increase very significantly”, but he hoped the sentencing review could help avoid the same crunchpoint in future, by reducing the number of people sent to jail.

“What we want to avoid is a situation where prisoners are being released as a short-term, reduce-the-pressure moment,” he said.

“What we have to be is more strategic – we have to make sure that prison capacity meets demand and that means we have to look at the question of demand on prison places and that’s I think where looking at the sentencing regime is necessary and important.”

The current prisons crisis had built up over 30 years, Gauke said, due to successive government decisions to make average sentences longer, creating a situation where the UK “relies much more heavily on prison than any other western European country”.

Although he said prisons were an important part of the justice system, he questioned whether the UK should keep on building more prisons because “it’s very expensive and…evidence does not suggest that it’s an effective way of reducing crime”.

Instead, he talked about using technology to create tougher non-custodial sentences, following approaches taken by other countries with much lower prison populations.

With more than half the women in jail serving sentences of six months or less, Gauke said reducing the female prison population was also an option to free up space.

He said: “Clearly there are some women prisoners who must go to prison, who commit serious offences and it’s right that prison is where they go, but I think there is a case for looking at short sentences more generally.

“There’s a particular issue with women offender who are very often themselves victims of crime, very often face issues with mental health, substance abuse and so on that could be addressed outside prison.

“So I would certainly want to look at that, and I said this as justice secretary, I think we could reduce the female prison population.”

Latest government figures show more than half of women are sent to jail for less than six months, compared to 3% of the total prison population being behind bars for that length of time.

The sentencing review is now open for submissions from the public about how the prison system can be improved and will submit findings to the Lord Chancellor by Spring 2025.

BBC

‘Tough choices’

A bid by the department for rural affairs to soften changes to inheritance tax for farms – possibly by exempting some older farmers – has been rejected by the Treasury.

The Treasury said there would be no change or mitigations to the policy, which will see an end to inheritance tax exemption for some farms.

From April 2026, farms worth more than £1m will face an effective inheritance tax rate of 20% – half the usual rate of 40%.

BBC Newsnight understands that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which represents the interests of farmers in government, believes it was not properly consulted over the change.

The department was informed about the policy the night before it was announced in the Budget.

The move has been branded “disastrous” by the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), with some farmers warning it would decimate the countryside.

Defra suggested softening the policy to exempt some older people, possibly those over the age of 80.

The April 2026 start for the policy means they may not have time to make use of existing rules to skip inheritance tax by passing on an asset seven years before death.

But this suggestion has been dismissed by the Treasury, which said it had taken “a fair and balanced approach”.

Since its introduction in 1984, agricultural property relief (APR) has allowed small family farms – including land used for crops or rearing animals, as well as farm buildings, cottages and houses – to be exempt from inheritance tax.

The Treasury said 40% of APR had been going to “the 7% wealthiest claimants”, and that it had “made a difficult decision to ensure the relief is fiscally sustainable”.

It put this against a backdrop of “public services crumbling [and] a £22bn fiscal hole inherited from the previous government”.

“Around 500 claims each year will be impacted and farm-owning couples can pass on up to £3m without paying any inheritance tax – this is a fair and balanced approach,” a spokesperson added.

There are divisions in government over the change.

Some ministers believe it will only have an impact on relatively wealthy farmers – a couple using all their inheritance tax benefits will be able to pass on a £3m farm tax free. Any inheritance tax charge on farms can be paid over 10 years.

But other ministers believe the chancellor is in danger of undermining Labour’s relations with rural Britain while raising a relatively small amount of money.

The change could raise around £560m.

Some sources in government have expressed concerns that the chancellor is creating unnecessary grief over a change that is not, in relative terms, a huge money spinner.

There are concerns that the change – which has proved controversial among farmers since its announcement – could become “totemic” in rural Britain.

The NFU warned it would “snatch away the next generation’s ability to carry on producing British food” and see farmers forced to sell land to pay the tax.

A rally to protest against the plan will be held in Whitehall next Tuesday.

There is also a dispute around the figures used to calculate the changes.

Farmers leaders have been told by Defra that the figures come from the Treasury and not their department.

Tom Bradshaw, the president of the NFU, said that Defra figures showed the changes would have an impact on 66% of estates.

The Treasury said the figure was 28%.

Clive Bailey, founder of the Farming Forum which is also organising a protest in central London next week, said on Thursday that any change to the new rules “would be a step forward”.

Mr Bailey, who farms in Staffordshire, said the suggested exemption should cover people much younger than 80.

Compared with the wider population, farming sees “a lot of people who should have retired already still working”, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

He called the inheritance rules “so poorly thought out”.

The cost of running a viable farm exceeded £1m, he said, arguing that the government needed to sit down “with real family farmers or agricultural economists”.

“We’re not special, but the economic circumstances of farming are very different to other industries.”

A Defra spokesperson said:

“With public services crumbling and a £22bn fiscal hole inherited from the previous government, we have made the difficult decision to reform Agricultural Property Relief in a balanced and fair way.

“All ministers support the policy and it will not change.”

Sue Gray’s departure matters. But not in the way some may assume. Gray became famous because of three things: her Partygate investigation under Boris Johnson, her recruitment to Keir Starmer’s team in opposition and for having once run a pub in Northern Ireland. It all turned her into just about the only British civil servant whom people beyond Whitehall might recognise on the news.

It was therefore predictable that her fall from power would also be depicted in personality terms. Sure enough, Gray’s original ousting in October was attributed to a turf war with Morgan McSweeney, now her successor as Downing Street chief of staff. Or to the fact that Labour special advisers were disgruntled over their pay differentials. Gray’s final exit this week was also reportedly triggered by Starmer’s frustration that she had not started work on the job to which he demoted her five weeks ago.

There is likely some truth in all of this. There was too much internal hurt, anger and mistrust around Gray. But this misses the larger, less personalised reason why her leaving is important. More than 18 months ago, a senior Labour official put it succinctly. Starmer had recruited Gray “for one sole purpose, preparing Labour for government”. Unlike Starmer himself, and unlike most of those in line to be his ministers, Gray knew not just how Whitehall worked, but how it ought to work better. Her job was to ensure that the new government hit the ground running.

Instead, the government hit the ground stumbling. The July election meant parliament was slow to get into its stride, resulting in a stop-start summer and a lack of political direction. Universal winter fuel payments to the over-65s were then clumsily abolished, an amateurish error. There were easily avoidable pratfalls over gifts and freebies, which ministers foolishly tried to defend. All this bore little relationship to the change that Labour had promised and for which the public had voted.

It was very damaging. But it could all have been foreseen. It certainly should have been far better handled. But not even this was what brought Gray down. The cause of her fall was that Gray’s idea of how government ought to work was felt to have wilted under the realities of office. In particular, it did not satisfy Starmer himself, as he gradually became accustomed to having his feet under the Downing Street desk.

Gray’s failure, according to insider critics this week, was that she prepared Labour for government in exactly the wrong way. She did not accept the reality that, in modern politics and government, the centre will always want to shape what is done at departmental level. She instead encouraged ministers to trust the Whitehall machine, and to run their departments with their own goals and their own departmental narratives. It was this fundamental difference of approach that led to her being forced out.

By October, Starmer had had enough. There seem to have been two main reasons. First, Gray did not prioritise the government’s so-called missions – the yardsticks by which Starmer wishes Labour to be judged when the next election comes round. All of these – clean energy, highest G7 growth, NHS reform, educational opportunities and safer streets – are cross-departmental projects. So is the unofficial sixth mission: control of borders. Only the centre of government, Starmer told a meeting of the cabinet last week, can ensure that departments work together to deliver them.

Starmer’s second reason is that, in reality, it is he, more than any minister, who has to answer to the public for the success or failure of the government’s priorities. His desk is where the buck stops. There is simply no other way. Like it or not, it is the prime minister – in press interviews, in parliament and when the next election comes – who has to make the case for the government’s departmental priorities.

This is why, in part, it was Starmer himself who went to the Cop29 summit in Baku this week to announce new commitments to cleaner energy goals. No 10 believes that the government’s big themes, on which its re-election hopes will depend, need to be led from Downing Street and by the prime minister himself. The decision to go to Baku directly reflects what has changed with Gray’s departure.

It will now be followed by others. Starmer has spent a lot of time abroad in the government’s early months, largely because the diary required his attendance at a succession of international gatherings, of which next week’s G20 summit in Brazil will be the next in a long line that started with the European political community summit at Blenheim Palace in July.

Expect, though, before Christmas, to see Starmer starting to play a much more central role on domestic policy, too. There are at least two such events in the imminent Downing Street grid now. At least one of them is likely to involve making a case for NHS reforms of the kind that the health secretary, Wes Streeting, announced this week.

This is the context in which stories suggesting the “return of the Blairites” to Downing Street must be seen. For once, such tales are not exaggerations or scare stories. This time, they are simply true. The Blairites – or some of them – are indeed back. Their return does not embody a change of political direction for the Starmer government. More, it consolidates Starmer’s willingness to grasp that Labour’s project will not get far in the Trumpian 2020s unless it draws on experienced and politically savvy people who are willing to challenge shibboleths.

The appointment of Tony Blair’s former chief of staff Jonathan Powell as national security adviser from the start of December is the most eye-catching example of this. With Starmer refocusing on domestic policy, Powell is likely to carry a lot of the international heavy-lifting. But the return as director of policy delivery and innovation of Liz Lloyd, possessor of one of the driest senses of humour within the old Blair inner circle, is, if anything, more crucial. Most of the mission agenda will rest on her shoulders.

None of this is to claim that Starmer’s in-flight rebuilding of his governmental engine is without problems, still less that it will succeed. But it should be seen for what it is: as a very large change moment that makes coherent sense of Gray’s departure. Back in the summer, Starmer was still engaged in the “phoney war” early stages of his attempt to refit Labour as a plausible government for the transformed 2020s political landscape. Now he has set his course. Even now, it may all have happened too late to undo the damage that the government inflicted on itself in the early months. Gray’s departure, though, marks the moment when the pilot was dropped and the project decided to get serious.