Charlotte Cadden is a former police officer, women’s rights campaigner and was Conservative candidate in the recent Gorton and Denton by-election.

“I’ve been a Police Officer for 30yrs, I know how to solve crime and anti-social behaviour” on repeat!

This was my mantra for three and a half weeks in February, after I was selected to be the Conservative candidate, for one of the most talked about by-elections, in the recently formed constituency of Gorton and Denton, in Greater Manchester.

The election was triggered by the resignation of Andrew Gwynne, who had been suspended by Labour for sending offensive Whatsapp messages – hoping an elderly resident concerned about bin collections would soon be dead. There were alleged sexist and racist messages within the legendary “Trigger Me Timbers” group. Several Labour Councillors were also suspended.

So, was the time ripe for voters to consider a representative from a different party, as their Member of Parliament? As it turned out, yes.

I had been a Conservative party member for several years. My own ward Councillor had been David Greenhalgh, who sadly passed away in office in 2021. David had fought hard to be elected in 2019 and became the first Conservative leader of Bolton Council in over 40yrs. He was an inspirational, warm and engaging politician and whenever I met him, he would ask me when I was retiring, so I could stand as a local Councillor and support the team locally.

As a Police Officer in Greater Manchester Police, I was a DCI and the Deputy Director of Intelligence. I also held the role of Force Operation Bridger lead. Bridger covers how the Police keep MPs safe when they are away from Parliament. After the horrific murder of Sir David Amess MP in 2021, the Metropolitan Police Service advertised for a national Bridger lead, to design and implement the changes that Parliament required, to further improve the safety and security of MPs.

I got the job, and it was the most challenging and rewarding role I performed as a Police Officer.

As soon as I retired, I hit the ground running, politically speaking, as I had promised David I would. Police Officers can be members of political parties, but they are not allowed to be politically active. I therefore tracked down my local Councillor Les Webb, and offered him my support. I volunteered to take on a couple of new roles within the party, Deputy Chair Political at a ward level and Deputy Chair Membership & Fundraising, at the Constituency level. Soon after, I started the application process to be considered as a candidate for MP, in advance of the next General Election.

The opportunity to stand as a candidate, however, came a lot sooner than expected. At the end of January 2026, I received an email asking if I wanted to apply to be a candidate in the Gorton & Denton by-election. After a challenging application process, I was selected by the members at Denton Conservative Club, to represent them. I met some incredible people that day, many of whom gave me great advice and practical support during the campaign.

The following day, I received an invite to attend CCHQ to discuss campaign messaging and to meet Kemi Badenoch and Chairman Kevin Hollinrake. This was an incredibly special day. Worth getting the 5am train from Piccadilly to Euston!

When I started on the campaign trail, it felt like getting on a speeding train. I was offered daily opportunities to do interviews on the ground with the BBC, ITV, Channel 4,Tameside Reporter, UnHerd, Jeremy Kyle, Rod Little, Matthew Syed the list was endless! And then there were the hustings!

It’s fair to say that the hustings were pretty stressful and I knew I needed some advice from a professional! My incredible Campaign Manager Matthew Littler, put me in touch with Laura Evans who, in the space of an afternoon, transformed my communication style and gave me some practical tips to manage challenging interviews, and get my key points across. A grilling by Laura and husband Nathan, is all the preparation you need for the most hostile of hustings!

There was a warm reception waiting for Conservative Party canvassers on most of the doorsteps of G&D. This diverse area of Greater Manchester featured in daily national news bulletins, as residents were subjected to near constant door-knocking by teams supporting the 11 candidates in the by-election.

Many residents said they had never met a Conservative candidate in the wild before, but they were willing to listen and happy to tell us what mattered to them most.

Many expressed respect for Kemi and looked forward to PMQs each week, to watch her force the deeply unpopular Labour Government into yet another u-turn. There was no love lost for Labour on those streets. This had been a safe Labour seat for generations but all that was about to change.

Suspended Labour Councillors, a sacked Labour MP, an area laid waste by the Labour Mayor (streets plagued by crime & anti-social behaviour, one train a week from Denton station) and an incompetent Labour Government, mired in scandal after scandal. It seemed likely that Labour was going to lose one of its safest ever seats. The battle was seen to be, therefore, by commentators and constituents alike, between the London TV presenter for Reform, and the ‘working class’ plumber from Hale, for the Greens.

So how did the Conservatives fare on the campaign trail?

I was humbled and will be eternally grateful for all the practical support I received from party members, supporters, Councillors and MPs from across the UK, who came to help knock on doors and campaign with me. The dedication of these people, corralled by Dan and Matthew on a daily basis, twice a day, come rain (lots of) or shine (infrequent) was incredible!

Members of the Shadow Cabinet came up to support the campaign.

Stuart Andrew and Matt Vickers were a real boost to morale and great on the doorstep! The highlight for me personally was when Claire Countinho came to meet me at the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst, just outside the constituency. Kemi and Claire have always understood how important sex-based rights are to women, children and many LGB people. The fact that we met to talk about womens’ rights before we went to campaign in G&D was a big deal. Claire is always in the detail. “You do know which party Emmeline stood for as a candidate in 1927?” she asked. “I do,” I replied!

I would like to thank everyone who supported me before, during and after the campaign, with particular thanks to the following incredible people and groups; Tess White MSP, CWO, CfW, Dawn Cobb, LGBT Cons, Andrea Bartlett, Rosie Duffield (Ind) & Baroness Anne Jenkin.

Would I do it all again, knowing what I know now?

Most definitely!

Back to plan A for me, applying to be a candidate in the local elections in May. See you all back on the campaign trail!

The ironies just keep piling up.

The day after I reveal that a big majority of Tory members are in favour of the Conservative ban on social media for under 16s, I want to talk about social media for adults – at least those that pretend they are.

I’ve been criticised before – water off my back – for robustly confronting views expressed on ConservativeHome from those who choose to comment below our articles. Just a word of advice to our Reform visitors; being anti ‘bans’ is good solid libertarian stuff but the fact is you are in favour of bans on: under 16s having sex, buying tobacco, or alcohol and wearing headscarves – it is a sign you are in favour of bans – just ones that you like.

I don’t say these are bad ideas, just pointing to the problem. You may want to debate these issues but at least be consistent.

Anyway,  I went ‘viral’ this week. Not like some do, but a Tweet/X post I made got a lot of attention. Supported by the many not ‘the few”.

I, like many, including the Guardian’s editor Kath Viner, were less than comfortable with a piece by Jonathan Liew a man with quite the reputation, who tried to explain that being vile to Gail’s bakery is actually ok.

Now, I’ll be honest, I was merely hoping to point out to people that our columnist Georgia Gilholy had argued the best response to attacks on a chain of bakeries is to go out of one’s way to buy and eat their products as a good way to say ‘NO’ to keffiyeh wearing millennials whose lives are seemingly defined by Gaza.

But such was the response to Jonathan Liew’s article – which I’m not going to link to because it can be found, but doesn’t deserve the oxygen of more publicity – that I’m glad instead of my last viral ‘tweet’ about a jasmine arbour I’d created – my counter did at least get nearly a thousand likes.

Why do I care?

Not for myself I promise. I’ve been a TV presenter so the idea I need exposure is a bit weak to say the least, but because I hate the idea that this thinly veiled argument that it is ok to harass people in the UK “because  Israel, and Genocide” but couch it in a form of “but just support your independent cafés” – especially if the owner is Palestinian – is being normalised.

I loathed Greta Thunberg’s narcissists’ yachting holiday because it was never going to land, was all about them, and because I personally have done more to ensure actual aid gets to Palestinians than they have in their lifetimes. Not a point they can debate.

Here’s the problem.

Even some of the Guardian’s own people seem to think this was a crass article. The left are volubly defending it saying that Gail’s bakery chain are part of wider commercial interests that are investing in Israeli weapons and …here it comes ‘genocide’

The egregious Zara Sultana, she of the ‘Jeremy Corbyn beat you’ Your Party team argued that Greggs was better than Gail’s. How galling for her to find their parent company has the same very, very, very tenuous connections to investments in Israel, she blamed on Gail’s.

But let us leave all of this aside, even the fact that nobody with the actual, genuine, authority to do so – and politicians should never be allowed to –  has declared the war in Gaza ‘a genocide’, what bothers me is thinly veiled attacks on British Jews are becoming normalised – and some people, who should know better, seem fine with this.

I don’t want MPs who are the Member of Parliament for Gaza South. I do not believe the long standing Israel/Palestine conflict – with extreme complexities that it has – is resolved by sixth formers protesting people who serve lattes in the UK.

I went to Israel on the 11^th of October 2023 and what I saw will stay with me forever. I don’t blindly support Binyamin Netanyahu, his government or those Israeli’s for whom the only good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian. Predominantly those who suffered the atrocities on the 7th of October were those Jews most committed to living side by side in peace!

I have been shocked by the deaths of women and children in a genocidal war. The ‘genocide’ advocated by Hamas who – don’t take my word for it – say so themselves that the only good jew is a dead jew.

Yes, I know.

Apparently, those who’ve long been accused of antisemitism tell us they can’t be racists because they have a history of being anti racist. That they are only anti- Zionist, and simply ‘dislike’ anyone ‘complicit in the genocide’ they themselves determined. Silence on the Uighurs, the Rohingya, the thousands of Muslims slaughtered by ISIS, Boko Haram or sympathy for the Ukrainians – because apparently ‘they are fascists’

It was an article about a bakery.

But what it said, by ever being published, is that today, arguing the rights and wrongs of the Middle East’s problems, especially if those  rights are Palestinian and the wrongs anybody with the remotest connection to a being jewish, is apparently both virtuous and acceptable in a mainstream newspaper and our wider public discourse.

No.

We are at risk, if we haven’t already fallen to a  normalised form of debate on this that would have appalled us twenty years ago.

It’s not ok, and I’m glad the Conservatives have not given it credence.

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Helping your child navigate something as big and complex as emotional wellbeing can feel pretty daunting, if you ask me.

But there are ways to support your child to understand and manage their feelings that can be “fun and even enlightening”, according to Hayley Standen, a social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) advisor, who’s teamed up with Learning Resources to create a Kids’ Wellbeing Toolkit.

Emotional literacy is the ability to recognise, name and talk about feelings – children learn this over time, and it’s pretty important for everything from self-awareness and empathy to maintaining healthy relationships.

You can start building emotional literacy by helping children learn the words for different feelings. “Naming emotions makes them easier to understand and manage,” explains Standen.

Some practical ways to build emotional literacy include:

On that latter point, here are 10 toys and books which can help kickstart some all-important conversations about how your child feels.

Alex Burghart MP is Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, and Conservative MP for Brentwood and Ongar.

The Mandelson-Epstein scandal continues to spread. Last night I had a drink with a long-experienced political hand who told me it bore all the hallmarks of Watergate.

Watergate brought down the White House Chief of Staff, its Chief Domestic Adviser, its Counsel, two Attorneys General, a Deputy Attorney General, and a President. So far Mandelson-Epstein has taken the jobs of the UK’s Ambassador to Washington, Downing Street’s Chief of Staff, and it’s Communications Director. It is unlikely to stop there.

The Conservatives have forced the issue from the start, pushing the Prime Minister repeatedly on what he knew and when and forcing the first major defeat of the Labour government last month with our Humble Address. This requires the Government to hand over all of its documentation about Mandelson’s appointment.

Since Kemi Badenoch forced it out of him last month at Prime Minister’s Questions, we have known that the Prime Minister was well aware that Mandelson had maintained his friendship with Epstein even after the latter’s conviction for child sex offences. Following the first Humble Address return we have it in black and white along with, in bold, a warning that there was “general reputational risk”. Who’d have thought it about a man already twice fired?

But the documents have huge lacunae. Either the government was not maintaining a record of what it was doing, or it has not handed over the documents. Last week I wrote to Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, pointing out 56 instances where there should have been a record to publish. The absurdity of it all is highlighted by the fact that there is not one read out, response or reply from the Prime Minister, from his Chief of Staff or Peter Mandelson in the whole release. No notes, no emails, no forms. Nothing. It is as though their fingerprints have been forensically removed from the process.

The seriousness of this is simple. If the Government did not follow due process, the Prime Minister has lied to the House. If the Government has not handed over the documents, it has not complied with the Humble Address and is in contempt of Parliament.

On 11 November 2024, the Cabinet Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted to make a political appointment to Washington, the civil service would “develop a plan for … the necessary security clearances and do due diligence on any potential Conflicts of Interest”. Where, then, are the documents that show these security clearances and declarations were down? They are not in the papers the government has released.

I dragged the Government to the House with an Urgent Question to put this to them. There were no satisfactory answers. The Minister refused to confirm either that the security clearance had been done or that Mandelson had submitted a declaration of interests.

We know that at least one document has not been published at the request of the Metropolitan Police. This contains the questions that Morgan McSweeney asked Peter Mandelson. (The absurdity here is, of course, that Mandelson’s vetting was being done by a close friend who wanted him to have the job.) But what is key is that the Government has admitted the existence of the document. If there are other key documents being held back by the police, there is nothing to stop the Government telling us what they are.

So there is no reason for the Government to hide the fact that a security vetting form exists. There is no reason for the Government to hide the fact that Mandelson submitted a declaration of interests. And that means that it is likely those documents do not exist. And if they do not, due process was not followed. And if due process was not followed, then when the Prime Minister assured the House in September that “full due process was followed”, he lied.

There comes a point in any scandal where the cover up becomes the crime. The Government is not being honest. The Prime Minister is not being honest. And that means that the Mandelson-Epstein scandal, will continue to spread.

Katie Lam is a shadow Home Office minister and MP for Weald of Kent.

If you put aside money for your retirement, and entrust it to a company to manage, who do you expect to make the decisions about how to invest that money – your money?

Most people would very reasonably expect that their cash would be invested by whatever company they had asked to to invest it, in line with whatever instructions they had given about their preferences and risk tolerance.

Shockingly – but perhaps not surprisingly – this Government doesn’t agree. Their Pension Schemes Bill would give the power to direct pension investments to Government ministers, who could, for example, force private pension providers to invest in British assets, even if those assets will provide lower returns than assets abroad. You can work hard for a lifetime, save a little at the end of each month – and at the stroke of a pen, ministers will be able to decide where that money goes, even if it means that you’ll end up with less money in your retirement.

As shadow welfare secretary Helen Whately has already said, this is an absurd power grab. It is a breathtaking violation of basic property rights: your money is yours to do what you want with, not just a vehicle for the state to achieve its ideological aims.

The Government is right to identify that British assets are not always attractive investments. But the solution is not to just force people to invest in them anyway. It is to make the British economy a better place to operate and grow, to let people take risks, and allow businesses to do what they’re good at, so that people choose of their own free will to invest here.

We see this approach from the Government all the time: overregulate something to destruction, and then either force people to support it, or use taxpayers’ money to subsidise it. It’s exactly the approach they’ve taken to employing young people: they’ve made it prohibitively expensive, so now they’re offering businesses thousands of pounds of your money in subsidies.

And the general approach of Government knows best is one we see writ large all over the economy. Too many people, whether politicians or bureaucrats, have decided that secondary social aims are a good reason to interfere with how businesses operate. We are now harvesting the bitter fruits of this approach – which is a large part of why I haven’t experienced proper economic growth in my adult lifetime.

The market economy is exceptionally good at providing, or inventing, goods and services that people want, at a cost that they’re willing to pay. If individual businesses are allowed to fulfil that function, and are good enough to succeed against their competitors, then they can create jobs, and invest in coming up with new goods and services, or improving their existing offering.

The net result is that we get to live in a country where people have more money, and more choice over how to spend it. This simple premise is what made Britain so successful for so long. Indeed, it has been the single most reliable blueprint for human flourishing and prosperity in history.

However, if politicians try to use the market economy as a tool to achieve other aims, it will be less effective at that original function. The net result is that people end up with fewer job opportunities, less money to spend, and less choice about how to spend it.

These directives are bad enough when they come from ministers – but far more corrosive when they’re set, or enforced, by unaccountable regulators and bureaucrats.

While regulators are sometimes directed by legislation, they have a tendency to take the maximalist position on implementation. After all, if somebody is employed to think about eliminating risk from the financial system, or achieving a particular demographic makeup in the boards of companies, then that’s exactly what they’ll do.

And if the public doesn’t like what those regulators have achieved, or how they’ve achieved it, then they have no mechanism by which to remove them.

Yet we find ourselves in a position where these unaccountable regulators have the power to set, and enforce, all sorts of rules about things that have nothing to do with profit-making or the stability of our financial system.

For example, publicly traded companies must have, or must “explain to the regulator” why they don’t have, an ethnic minority board member, and a minimum of 40 percent women on their board of directors.

It is absurd that our financial regulator cares more about whether you have enough women on your board than if you actually make any money. Unsurprisingly, businesses have simply decided not to list themselves in Britain – with CRH, a building materials firm valued at £50 billion, ditching London altogether this week.

The Shadow Chancellor was absolutely right to say at Party Conference last year that we must scrap these absurd rules. Whenever we’ve let people take risks, and allowed people to hire on the basis of merit and ability, this country has succeeded. Whenever countries have tried to interfere with the market economy in the name of secondary social outcomes, they’ve failed.

We must not let Britain become the latest in a long line of economic basket-cases which have endlessly, and fruitlessly, tried to legislate their way to prosperity. Instead, as ever, we must trust in the entrepreneurial spirit of the British people. 

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