During the last election campaign it was hard to escape the impression that, whatever his other faults, Rishi Sunak just wasn’t very good at politics. The charge sheet included getting drenched announcing the election and leaving D-day veterans on the beaches. And insisting that black was white: that he was stopping the boats, that the economy was in good shape, that the Tories were on course for victory.

Just a couple of months later, it very much feels like Keir Starmer and Labour are saying: “Hold my beer.” Keen to prove that they, too, are amateurs at the political PR game. It’s almost as if there is something about being in government that makes fools of everyone. Though few would have imagined that Labour could manage it quite so quickly. A period of grace would have been more fitting.

Take the freebies. And Keir has. The Arsenal tickets. The Taylor Swift tickets. The suits. The designer glasses. The clothes for his wife. Starmer’s big shtick was that he was going to do politics differently. The antidote to Tory corruption and scandal. A man who could be trusted. He was one of us. So why put himself in a position where you can so easily be criticised by the rightwing press?

If you want to set yourself up as a model of propriety then you can’t start making exceptions. Especially not so early on. A couple of years in and people may not notice so much. You have to be above reproach. Yes, it might be a loss not to go to the football. And you might resent having to buy a few more suits for yourself. But that all rather goes with the job. Being prime minister may be a career highlight for a politician but you have to take the downsides.

Perhaps Starmer has been too honest for his own good. Maybe he should have been more like Boris Johnson. Keir has made himself accountable by listing his freebies in detail. We know exactly where all the money went. With Boris we are largely in the dark. He took whopping gifts from all sorts of undesirables and we aren’t entirely sure of the details. Being prime minister was a licence for Boris to cash in. No one expected any different from him. He never pretended to be on the side of the angels.

Then there is the question of Sue Gray’s pay. You could say that someone should have suggested that Sue drop £4,000 in salary just for appearances. So she earned less than the prime minister. Maybe throw in a clothes allowance and an events expense account to make up the difference. No one will notice. Surely. I guess she is a tough negotiator. One of the reasons she was made chief of staff.

But all this is not really the point. The issue is why the Labour party is indulging in open feuds with itself by leaking the story in the first place. We were promised a government of service and yet it already appears to be totally dysfunctional. It’s as if Starmer has taken the Tories as his role model. How did it come to this that half of the No 10 top team hate the other half? And vice versa. Couldn’t someone have just got in a therapist? Or at the very least established a workplace culture where people talked to one another? Or – and here’s a thought – pay junior staff the proper rate?

Still, Keir isn’t entirely a slow learner. There’s a tradition that prime ministers do a round of regional radio stations on the Thursday before a party conference. But after the last two years, when Liz Truss and Sunak had an hour they would rather forget, Starmer decided to reset the format to pre-recorded outings where he hoped there would be less room for disaster. All the interviews would be released at 5pm when he hoped no one would be watching.

So it was left to the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, to do the morning media round. An experience he would rather forget. Reynolds comes across as a decent man but too much more of this and he will find himself Labour’s answer to Mel Stride. The minister who gets to do the rubbish jobs that no one else will. In future, on days like this, I am sure he will learn to put his phone on mute and not take calls from the No 10 comms team. It’s early days, I suppose.

On Times Radio, Aasmah Mir cut to the chase. Why did Starmer accept so many freebies? Reynolds forgot to engage his brain. It was like this, he said. Politicians get invited to events all the time and it would be rude not to go. It was the way people tried to engage with decision makers. Sure thing. That’s why it was vital for Boris Johnson to accept a freebie to Evgeny Lebedev’s party in Italy. And a Taylor Swift concert is a prerequisite for stopping the winter fuel allowance.

It very much sounded as if he was talking about the perks of the job, said Mir. Oh no, replied Reynolds. Far from it. Perish the thought. Just that politicians worked extremely hard and deserved a little downtime. Especially if they didn’t have to pay for it. The thought occurred that if Starmer was desperate to see Arsenal he could have afforded the cost of a seat with the corporates. It was just strange that all these dazzling freebies were never offered to the rest of us.

Over on Sky, Kay Burley was outraged by the size of Sue Gray’s salary. One wonders what Burley’s wedge is. I’m not sure she would get out of bed for £170,000. She would consider that an insult. But I’m sure that’s not the point. Even so, Reynolds still couldn’t think straight. Why not just say that Dominic Cummings and other Downing Street heads of staff would have been on a similar sort of salary if you allowed for inflation. The same people outraged now were not outraged then. It could just be that £170,000 is the going rate for the job and that it is the prime minister who is underpaid. A thought.

So the nonsense will continue into the Labour party conference starting this weekend. And Labour really doen’t have anyone to blame but itself. Freebies and staff pay should have been headed off ages ago. And maybe it doesn’t matter if we have a government that is bad at politics if it gets the big calls right. After all, the chances are we’ll be talking about something else in a month’s time. Head down and onwards and sideways.

A long and expensive visa route for immigrants has been called racist after analysis showed most applicants who feel forced to go through it are people of colour.

The “10-year route” visa is used by hundreds of thousands of people who are not eligible for other immigration schemes because of a lack of income or professional qualifications. Many work in low-paid jobs, such as cleaning or care work. Other common routes to settlement in the UK take five years.

According to freedom of information data obtained by the charity Ramfel, there are 218,110 people on the 10-year route.

Guardian analysis of Home Office data showed that all but one country in the top 10 nationalities who felt forced to use this route were those with predominantly minority ethnic populations. The top five were Nigeria, Pakistan, India, Ghana and Bangladesh. Overall, 86% using the route were from Asian or African countries, while 6% were from Europe.

People seeking to gain a visa via the 10-year route must renew their leave to remain with the Home Office every 30 months, meaning four renewals. The fee for each renewal is £3,850. The Home Office can grant a fee waiver but many requests are refused.

According to a 2023 report on the 10-year route by the legal advice and support service Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit (GMIAU), the thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research and the charity Praxis, the most common way of covering the fees was to borrow money, leaving many people in debt and struggling to pay for basic living costs.

A 41-year-old woman from Ghana said she was struggling with the 10-year route. She has a British child, who was born in 2017, and was granted leave on the 10-year route in 2018 after applying. But she was several weeks late in applying to renew her leave in March this year and has become an overstayer awaiting a new decision from the Home Office.

Because of her late application, she has lost the years accrued and has to restart the 10-year route from day one. “This immigration route is brutal. It makes me feel like I’m in a prison. I want to go to university and qualify as a nurse but I can’t do that until my immigration status is sorted out. The government should at least change this route to five years, not 10,” she said.

A GMIAU spokesperson said: “These numbers confirm what people on the 10-year route already know: it is a racist policy. People are being driven into debt, forced to choose between paying thousands of pounds in visa fees to keep their legal status and keeping their families fed and warm.

“Ten years is far too long for anyone to wait to settle. The route must be scrapped. A good place to start would be to cap all routes to settlement at five years.”

Nick Beales, of Ramfel, said: “The 10-year route is an enduring legacy of the hostile environment. Like many other Conservative policies from this period, the racist intent is clear, with African and south Asian nationals far more likely to be placed on this arduous and often brutal route towards securing permanent immigration status.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “In cases where a family does not qualify for a five-year route, but where refusal would breach obligations under the European convention on human rights, the Home Office places them on a 10-year route. Neither the race, ethnicity, nor nationality of an applicant is a factor in the decision to place individuals on this route.

“We encourage all individuals to apply for any visa renewals prior to their leave to remain ending in the UK.”

The governor of the Bank of England has signalled readiness to resume interest rate cuts despite keeping borrowing costs unchanged on Thursday at 5%, amid concerns over lingering high inflation.

Andrew Bailey said the central bank was “now gradually on the path down” from borrowing costs that were among the highest since before the 2008 financial crisis. “I think interest rates are going to come down, I’m optimistic on that front,” he said.

Earlier on Thursday, the Bank’s monetary policy committee (MPC) had voted by a majority of eight to one against launching a back-to-back reduction in interest rates, pausing its efforts to ease the pressure on household budgets.

Last month, the Bank cut interest rates for the first time since the Covid pandemic was declared four years ago, after a sharp fall in inflation from a peak of more than 11% in late 2022 – the highest level since the early 1980s.

Bailey said that while inflationary pressures had continued to ease, he wanted to caution people against expectations of a rapid easing of monetary policy. “We need to be careful not to cut too fast or by too much,” he said.

The annual rate of inflation remained unchanged at 2.2% in August, marginally above the Bank’s 2% inflation target.

The decision to keep rates on hold had been widely expected in the City. The pound jumped to its highest level against the dollar since March 2022 after the Bank’s decision, hitting $1.33.

The US Federal Reserve cut interest rates by half a percentage point on Wednesday, the first reduction in four years, as the world’s most powerful central bank stepped back from its aggressive bid to cool inflation in the US economy. The European Central Bank has also cut interest rates twice, by a quarter of a percentage point at non-consecutive policy meetings.

Most economists predict the Bank will resume cutting rates within months should inflationary pressures in the UK economy continue to fade, with financial markets pricing in the expectation of a further quarter-point reduction in borrowing costs to 4.75% at its next policy meeting in November.

Since cutting interest rates last month, the MPC said inflationary pressures had continued to ease as expected. One member of the committee, the independent economist Swati Dhingra, voted for another immediate quarter-point cut in borrowing costs, going against most of the nine-strong panel.

However, the Bank said headline inflation was on track to rise to about 2.5% before the end of this year – a marginally lower level than it anticipated in August – amid resilient price growth in the UK service sector and a tight jobs market.

In the minutes of its meeting, the MPC said: “Monetary policy would need to continue to remain restrictive for sufficiently long enough until the risks to inflation returning sustainably to the 2% target in the medium term had dissipated further.”

Highlighting concerns over inflation above the 2% target, the central bank said it would maintain a process of selling government bonds amassed on its balance sheet under its crisis-era quantitative easing programme.

Threadneedle Street said it would reduce the stock of UK government bonds by £100bn over the next year, aiming to reduce the total amount to £558bn. At its peak, the Bank held up to £895bn of bonds, in a policy designed to lower borrowing costs and keep markets functioning efficiently during the 2008 financial crisis and the peak of the Covid pandemic.

The development is likely to be closely watched by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, before next month’s budget, amid speculation she could change the government’s self-imposed fiscal rules to exclude the impact of the Bank’s quantitative easing programme.

Some economists have suggested such a change could open up additional headroom of about £20bn.

Andrew Goodwin, chief UK economist at the consultancy Oxford Economics, said that although the Bank had paused its round of interest rate cuts, it would probably resume its efforts at the MPC’s next policy meeting in November.

“We regard another rate cut in November as almost certain,” he said. “There’s also been a clear change of tone by central banks globally in recent months, moving from a total focus on inflation towards giving greater consideration to growth concerns.”