It was a busy summer for Josh Babarinde, the Liberal Democrat president and MP. Soon after parliament rose for recess, he and his husband tied the knot in Scotland before throwing a party in his constituency of Eastbourne. 

The other part of Babarinde’s summer was spent reckoning with his party’s current course. As the elected president of the Liberal Democrats, a role he has held since January 2026, Babarinde spent the summer months consulting members on the party’s future direction. He branded this exercise, with some relish, the “summer of strategy”.

The Liberal Democrat presidency is a distinctive role. Babarinde describes his job as split between external responsibilities and internal administration of the party machine. He is also clear, and unapologetic, that he has tilted the balance of the job towards its more public-facing side. 

Babarinde contrasts this approach with that of his predecessor, Mark Pack, who took over after the Liberal Democrats’ near-wipeout at the 2019 election. Pack’s tenure was dominated by fixing the party’s internal machinery. “That was the right approach at the time”, Babarinde reflects. But now with over 70 MPs and the electoral landscape more competitive than ever, he believes the moment demands a more prominent presidential voice. 

Babarinde points to his role in referring Nigel Farage to the parliamentary standards commissioner – part of the chain of events that precipitated Farage’s resignation and the Clacton by-election. “We have been causing a scene from the presidency”, he says, “and will continue to.”

Babarinde cites Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat president from 1991 to 1994, as a source of “huge inspiration”. In particular, he celebrates Kennedy’s opposition to the Iraq War during his time as leader: “When everyone else was kind of going along with it in the political establishment, Charles Kennedy stuck his neck out and said, this isn’t right. And history has very much proved him right.”

He adds: “He was the kind of guy who called a spade a spade, and we need more of that in British politics.”

This instinct for plain speaking runs through Babarinde’s approach to the “summer of strategy”. 

The resulting tranche of recommendations – shaped by over a thousand submissions from Liberal Democrat activists – fits three clear themes. Firstly, Babarinde stresses the importance of attempting to “clarify and refine” a national message. “We’ve got loads of policy as a party, and that’s great, but we need to get far better at telling that story”, he tells me. 

Babarinde adds that the party needs to re-evaluate how it communicates that narrative. “Lib Dems are famed for having an addiction to producing and distributing leaflets, and that will never change”, he says. “But we need to match our physical leaflet prowess with digital campaigning prowess.”

For his final point, Babarinde refers to the “reach” of the Liberal Democrats. He acknowledges the success in breaking the “blue wall” at the last election, but calls for the party to now look beyond it.

Babarinde states: “If we really want to be a party of the whole country, we need to look more like, sound more like, and relate more to those parts of the country that maybe we don’t reflect as much now, and so that particularly means doubling down on our successes in the north of England, in the Midlands, in urban Britain, but also building our presence in Wales as well…

“We need to make sure that we are a broad church and not just a party of Middle England.”

Babarinde’s verdict is shaped by feedback from Liberal Democrat foot soldiers. But it clearly chimes with his own view of how the party should adapt to a fracturing political landscape and the heightened competition it has delivered. The strategy also reflects wider concerns within the party that the Liberal Democrats have failed to make sustained inroads since emerging as the largest third parliamentary party in over a century following the 2024 general election.

“It comes down to storytelling again and narrative”, Babarinde remarks when pushed on these concerns. 

“We have s***loads of policy on every issue under the sun. But what we’ve not been as good at is communicating all of that in a way that inspires people, in a way that motivates people to get out there and vote for it.

“That’s why storytelling and engagement with people all across the country, not just in Middle England, is really important.”

Underpinning all this is Babarinde’s own analysis of the political moment and its new fault lines. 

The postwar “dream” of hard work leading to a better life, he argues bluntly, is “dead.”

“It was the case in the post-war period that if you dream big, if you work hard, you will get to where you want to go, or you’ll at least be able to make yours and your family’s life better…

“People working f***ing hard – they are on the treadmill of life, of work, and more, and they are staying in the same place or worse, sliding into greater financial insecurity, poverty, feeling less safe in their communities.”

Babarinde borrows from William Beveridge, the famed Liberal thinker and architect of the welfare state, to frame the challenges facing modern Britain. 

“My view is that there is a modern set of ‘giants’ that are plaguing our society today. Take the water companies taking our money and dumping s*** in the sea, and we are all paying for that. Or whether it is big government – domestic government that’s taking our liberties away; look at the attempted ID cards – or big foreign government that’s doing it, the likes of Trump.

“You have got the likes of big tech, [Elon] Musk, and others, taking our money, taking our liberties, and not taking responsibility. And in all these areas, you have big, unaccountable corporations or governments that are p***ing over our freedoms and p***ing our money away, and that is in huge part responsible for the hardship and the disempowerment that people feel today.”

It is, Babarinde says – in a very Liberal Democrat turn of phrase – time for “folks to rise up.”

Babarinde is willing to grant that Andy Burnham’s instincts – on constitutional reform, Europe and social care – overlap substantially with his own party’s. “On paper… tick, tick, tick”, he says. But he points to a gap between rhetoric and delivery. He singles out electoral reform, which Burnham has ruled out before the next election, and single market membership, which Labour has declined to back.

On the prospect of a hung parliament – something Ed Davey recently floated as built into Liberal Democrat strategy – Babarinde is cautious about getting ahead of voters. “The public don’t like people presupposing how they’re going to vote”, he says. But he is unambiguous that one of the party’s “top missions” is to “deny Reform a majority at any level of government.”

Coalition itself, Babarinde insists, no longer carries the stigma it once did within the party. “Coalitions are not a dirty word”, he says, pointing to local government arrangements across the country. 

He is candid about the mixed legacy of the 2010-2015 government – he campaigned against the tuition fee rise as an activist – while defending its achievements, including same-sex marriage. But he resists dwelling on it. “Andy Burnham gets criticised for constantly talking about the past… we can reflect on lessons of the past, but let’s not be stuck in it.”

***

Babarinde has been branded a “rising star” within the Liberal Democrats. And the presidency, his personal fiefdom, has often served as a springboard to the leadership. Several of his predecessors have gone on to challenge for the party’s top job. 

Does Babarinde recognise this pattern? 

“For me, politics has never been about pursuing positions”, he responds.  

“It’s been about pursuing impact, and actually not just politics, but my career generally. Before I got involved in politics, you know, as a CEO of a social enterprise, supporting kids out of gangs. I didn’t aspire to be a CEO for CEO’s sake; I aspired to provide opportunities for those young people who have been let down…

“I feel exactly the same about being an MP… And I’m party president not for the purpose of being party president. I’m party president for the purpose of being a megaphone for our liberalism as our party, and getting our party in the best place possible internally to fight and win elections.”

The rise of the Liberal Democrat “rising star” is a consequence of the party’s significantly improved stature since 2024. I ask whether Babarinde feels a sense of responsibility to make good on his perceived potential. 

He replies: “I’ve been a councillor for the party. I’ve been a parliamentary candidate for the party, I’ve occupied no office for the party. I’m now an MP and of course party president. 

“In all of those roles, irrespective of you know what others attach to them or project onto them, it has been my mission to make sure that power and cash sit closest to people who it’s meant to empower – to ensure that people can go as far as their talents, their motivation, their commitment can take them, and to abolish the role that luck, particularly bad luck, plays in shaping people’s respective courses and qualities of life…

“The key thing is to focus on what folks in places like Eastbourne and across the country are saying about what they need, rather than a kind of TripAdvisor-style review that they might be offering on my career and prospects.”

Asked to sum up the party’s task between now and the next election, Babarinde returns to the three prongs of the Liberal Democrat party strategy review: sharper message, heavier digital investment, broader geographic reach. 

“Our top mission must be to get Liberal Democrats into power. We’re not a pressure group. We are a political party that exists to wield power in order to create a more liberal society in which people can be free. 

“My job as president and our party’s job is to win those elections, and we will win those elections by having a clearer national narrative, by upping the way in which we engage with people, particularly digitally, and making sure that we are reaching out across the whole country and not just Middle England.”

Keir Starmer’s resignation as an MP, delivered mere hours before his successor first appeared at the despatch box as prime minister, sets up the sixth by-election of 2026 and the seventh of this parliament. 

The coming contest in Holborn and St Pancras follows a series of by-elections of varying significance, including Nigel Farage’s recent brush with self-styled “intergalactic space warrior” and satirical candidate Count Binface. The stakes were undoubtedly higher in Makerfield, which returned Andy Burnham to parliament after years in the relative wilderness. Burnham’s Makerfield victory set in train the sequence of events that led to Starmer’s twin resignations – first as prime minister, then as an MP – and therefore this latest by-election.

Future chroniclers of Starmer’s downfall will also consider the February 2026 contest in Gorton and Denton. Here, the decision by the Labour National Executive Committee (NEC) to block Burnham’s candidacy provided a crucial boost to the Green campaign. Hannah Spencer was elected as the MP for Gorton and Denton, becoming her party’s first parliamentarian to represent a constituency in the north of England. The Green rout in Gorton and Denton set the scene for the May 2026 elections and the Labour leadership crisis that followed.

Taken together, recent by-election results – from Runcorn and Helsby in May 2025 (Reform gain) to Makerfield and Clacton – form a pretty complete narrative of the development of British politics. At the same time, the signals sent by these contests have proved strikingly consistent. Voters used each by-election as a means of registering dissatisfaction with the status quo.

The lessons of these contests remain after Starmer’s resignation, but the landscape has changed. Burnham’s succession has translated into polling gains for Labour; Politico’s poll-of-polls metric has Labour tied with Reform UK, while a series of recent surveys have placed the party in the lead. 

This “Burnham bounce” is now set for its first real test in Holborn and St Pancras – provided by Zack Polanski.

Starmer’s resignation immediately prompted speculation that Polanski could stand to succeed him. The Green leader chose not to contest Gorton and Denton, instead signalling an interest in standing in a future London seat should one become available. Starmer’s resignation created that opening, and so Polanski has confirmed his intentions. Speaking to the Camden New Journal, Polanski said he was “excited by the prospect of representing this place in parliament.” Only local members stand between the Green leader and his party’s candidacy in Holborn and St Pancras.

Polanski’s declaration changes the shape of the race.

Firstly, his candidacy will ensure a more competitive contest. In Makerfield, we saw how Burnham’s status and strategy transformed the campaign, dispelling initial concerns that the constituency was prime Reform territory.

Labour’s victory in Holborn and St Pancras in 2024 was comfortable but complicated. Andrew Feinstein, the activist and former member of the South African National Assembly, ran in the then-Labour leader’s constituency on a pro-Palestine, anti-austerity platform, placing second with 7,312 votes (18.9%). The Green Party candidate, David Stansell, came third on 4,030 votes (10.4%). Overall, Starmer dropped 17 points on his 2019 result. These totals point to the existence of a meaningful base of support in the constituency to the left of Labour, which could be energised by a high-stakes campaign fronted by Polanski.

Holborn and St Pancras will be the third by-election in a row contested by a leader of a national party or a de facto leadership candidate. Polanski’s status – leader of the Greens since September 2025 – will ensure stronger cut-through and motivate his supporters. His challenge is to construct a progressive coalition in the constituency, consolidating the left-of-Labour vote. 

Polanski’s prominence also strengthens the Green pitch. His central message will be that, while voters may like Burnham or at least prefer him to Starmer, his election would maintain pressure on the government to pursue a progressive agenda. According to this framing, the choice in Holborn and St Pancras is not simply Green versus Labour, or even Polanski versus Burnham – but between placing a prominent progressive voice in parliament or increasing Labour’s substantial majority by one. 

Labour will plan to continue the momentum of the Makerfield insurgency. The campaign could point to Burnham’s progressive pedigree and even the criticisms he made of Starmer during his long leadership campaign. Labour will want to secure an endorsement for Burnham’s approach to government, treating the campaign as a de facto vote of confidence. 

The Holborn and St Pancras by-election will ultimately be shaped by the tension between Labour’s strengthened national position under Burnham and Polanski’s capacity to consolidate and mobilise the constituency’s progressive base.

Above all, Polanski’s challenge means that the outcome will be of immense national significance, whichever party prevails.

For the Green leader, the contest offers a chance to arrest his party’s recent decline and atone for his own missteps. For the prime minister – whose path to power was shaped by the rise of a credible challenger on Starmer’s left – it presents an opportunity to seize on recent polling gains and inflict a significant setback on the Greens, triggering deeper disillusionment within their ranks. 

Victory for Labour would also represent a second by-election triumph for Burnham since June: one in a Reform-facing constituency and the other in Green target territory.

A significant loss for Polanski would surely weaken his hold on the Green Party and risk exposing internal tensions. It would undoubtedly reinforce the prevailing narrative that his standing has waned in recent months, and further complicate claims that the Greens are a genuine rival to Labour’s historic dominance of progressive politics.

But the greatest risk for Polanski would have been not standing at all. That decision would have been treated as unequivocal evidence of both his and his party’s relative decline in recent months.

In Holborn and St Pancras, Polanski has placed himself at the centre of British politics again. He stands ready to reap the rewards or suffer the consequences.

In today’s tech driven world, it is almost impossible to be offline. According to Ofcom, the average UK adult now spends around a quarter of their waking life on the internet and last year one third of all retail sales were online. But this time spent online has allowed tech companies to undertake a stealth-twinning of individuals meaning you can be exploited, groomed, targeted and mis-sold – by a digital version of yourself.

Tech platforms including X, Facebook and Amazon have a model of you, based on hundreds or thousands or millions of data points they hold on you: what you purchase, content you engage with, streaming preferences. These inputs are collated to create “digital twins” which are then used to predict your behaviour, to target advertising and, in some cases, to groom extreme behaviours in ways outside of your control.

The ability to model human likeness and personalities represents a fundamental shift in power from us as individuals to large American and Chinese tech companies. If the state had been holding huge files on everything we had done online, we would rightly be outraged and the fact that this is being done by a small number of big, foreign companies, only makes it more outrageous. Andy Burnham.

Some may be asking what the need to tackle this now – I know Meta has collected data on me since I joined Facebook in 2005. But back then the content they fed you was based on your expressed preferences, friends you had chosen or people you followed. That is not the case now.

As part of my committee’s inquiry into social media and algorithms, we heard from witnesses how content data is being curated, not just stored. Through this curation, posts are being fed back to you to drive your engagement, generally to drive revenue but in some cases, to groom particularly vulnerable people to extract certain behaviours.

The impact on children is of particular concern, given their potential exposure to this technology literally from the cradle – an AI camera pointed at them in a cot, a ‘smart toy’ on their pillow, smart phones in their hands. Imagine someone was following your child with a clipboard and made a note of everything they did. That is how these digital twins are being created – what they ate for dinner, how they sat, what they watched on TV or books they read before bed.

My committee also heard awful examples of the potential for algorithmic grooming. A fourteen-year-old girl was engaging with content online about weight and weight issues; the algorithm drove weight-loss and ultimately self-harm content at that child.

With AI we are now at an inflection point in automated personality capture and must establish the principle that you have a right to your personality and likeness in the AI age.

That is why I will be introducing a bill that would make creating a digital twin to simulate human appearance and cognitive performance illegal without the express consent of the individual. This builds on legislation in the United States, Europe and China to protect personhood and reflects concerns over copyright and deepfakes.

No one has the right to impersonate you for gain; impersonating human likeness to reap revenues or achieve social and political goals should not be legal. This bill will establish the principle that there is only one me, for everyone.

During the very difficult years of the Corbyn era, Hollie Ridley still managed to pull off impossibly difficult by-election wins as in Peterborough, for which she was publicly thanked by the leader on Sky News. That’s how good a campaigner she is.

It all feels like a long time ago. Fast forward to September 2026 and I joined a very large number of Labour Party folk from all wings of the Party, including former prime minister Sir Keir Starmer, to mark the imminent end of Hollie Ridley’s tenure as general secretary of the Labour Party. You have to conclude that she is almost certainly the most consequential general secretary Labour has had in a generation. The case is built on one simple fact. She built and ran the ground campaign that took Labour from 202 seats in 2019 to 411 in 2024.

Winning is the most important thing a political party does. A party that loses cannot deliver any of its plans. Labour had lost four general elections in a row and had been out of power for 14 years. The 2019 result was its worst in seats since 1935. Five years later it formed a government with one of the largest majorities in its history.

Of course, that victory belongs to many, many people – but Hollie’s role in delivering the party’s ground campaign made everything else that followed possible.

The vote share shows what her ground campaign achieved. Labour’s share of the vote rose from 32.1 per cent in 2019 to 33.7 per cent in 2024, an increase of 1.6 points. Its seat count more than doubled. The party put its money, staff and volunteers into the seats it needed to win. It kept them out of seats it could not win and seats it could not lose. Hollie Ridley, at that time executive director for nations and regions, designed and ran that operation. The part that turned votes into seats was her responsibility – and it was a resounding success.

A small number of general secretaries have changed what the party could do. Morgan Phillips built a professional staff in the 1940s and oversaw the 1945 victory. Larry Whitty rebuilt the organisation for Neil Kinnock after the defeat of 1983. Tom Sawyer ran the party through the rewriting of Clause IV in 1995 and the 1997 victory. The much missed Margaret McDonagh, the first woman in the post, ran the organisation behind the 1997 campaign and then the 2001 victory as general secretary. David Evans repaired the party’s finances and its disciplinary processes after 2019 and made it fit to fight an election.

The closest comparison is McDonagh. Both ran the organisation behind a winning campaign and then took the top job with Labour in government. The difference is the starting point. In 1997 Labour started from 271 seats. In 2024 it started from 202. The gain of 209 seats was the largest Labour has made at a single election since 1945. That is why I put Hollie at the top of the list.

As general secretary she ran the party through two years in government, two difficult sets of May elections and a change of leader. When Keir Starmer announced in June that he would resign, she did not wait for the new leader to replace her. In July she told staff she would leave after conference so that the NEC could choose a general secretary to work with the new leader. She told the prospective leadership candidates the same and offered her support to whoever won. Few people in her position handle a change at the top with such professionalism and dedication to the party – but that sums up how Ridley operates.

She did all of this – in my personal experience – with kindness. In my dealings with her as a Labour candidate she was kind and compassionate and politically savvy. Anna Turley, the party chair, said in July that party staff hold her in the highest regard. Keir Starmer called her “one of the most formidable campaigners the Labour Party has ever produced”. Both are right.

She grew up in Dagenham, the daughter of a family support worker and a lorry driver. She joined the party as a trainee organiser in 2011, in a post part-funded by the GMB and a private donor. She has said the party took a chance on her. She then made a point of creating the same chances for others, in particular working-class women. She delivered the first two rounds of the party’s Jo Cox Women in Leadership programme, which trains Labour women for senior roles.

The NEC will choose her successor this autumn. It seems that Joe Fortune (lovely bloke) and Claire Reynolds (formidable and brilliant) are the leading contenders.  Whoever is chosen will take over an organisation that won a general election two years ago and has the people and systems to do it again. Hollie Ridley built that organisation and those of us associated with the party should be eternally grateful.

As she said at her leaving do, Labour rarely gets majorities like this, and there is still plenty of time left for the new PM, and talented and resilient politicians like Lucy Powell, Jonathan Reynolds and John Healey, to ensure that majority is not wasted. And as for Hollie Ridley, she deserves the very best of luck in whatever she does next.

Even though I’ve been in and around politics for more than 40 years now, the stupidity and ideological idiocy of some politicians still never ceases to amaze me.

Across the political spectrum, everyone agrees that the hospitality sector is on its knees, with huge numbers of restaurants, hotels, pubs and B&Bs closing down due mainly to increased costs, but with ever increasing regulation playing its stultifying role too.

The only thing government and local authorities can do to help is to ease regulatory burdens and costs, and reduce taxes.

Labour, of course, plans to do the exact opposite. After hitting these businesses with NI rises and various other burdens, they now plan to go one better and give local mayors and councils powers to levy a tourist tax, arguing that the money raised will be reinvested in local economies. Of course it won’t. It won’t be hypothecated, so will just be used to plug gaps elsewhere in local budgets. Local businesses, who already pay sky high business rates, will be fleeced to mask the incompetence of local politicians.

Never having started or run a business – true in 99 per cent of cases – Labour’s national politicians are blind to the effect this will have. I’ve seen people argue that a £5 or £10 per night levy won’t make any difference to the number of people booking a hotel. The elitism and lack of awareness involved in this argument is spectacular. People from the north of England on an average to middling wage already struggle with the cost of a weekend in London, where they’re likely to be paying in excess of £200 per night for a hotel. Think of a family of four going on holiday for a week in Bournemouth. At a stroke, their family has just got £35 more expensive. That won’t sound much if you’re on £50k a year, but if you’re on a lower than average wage, that may mean the difference between going on a week’s holiday and not doing so. Or it means you still go but you don’t spend as much on the local economy. Whichever way you look at it, the local economy will lose out.

The very name Tourist Tax makes people think that only foreign tourists will pay it. But it will affect all overnight stays. Seventy per cent of overnight stays in the UK are by UK citizens. Many of them are by businesspeople, travelling salespeople and the like. Their expenses claim just got more expensive, thereby increasing their employer’s overheads and reducing their profitability.

Ah, they say, but many European countries and cities charge an overnight stay tax. This is true, but most European countries charge a much lower VAT rate for hotel stays than the norm. In Belgium it is 6% compared to 21%. France is 10% VAT compared to the normal rate of 20%. In Germany the figures ate 9% and 19%. Out of the 27 EU countries, 25 charge a reduced rate. Only Denmark and the Netherlands are similar to Britain and charge the same.

Labour mayors say they will not charge more than 5%, but apparently under the suggested rules, councils in theory can charge what they like. This is a recipe for chaos.

And then in the same week, it is being suggested that the proposed Mansion Tax should be expanded to apply to properties worth £1.5 million or more. Wicked. It’s the modern-day equivalent of the window tax, which was introduced in 1696 and then abolished in 1851. It gave rise to the phrase ‘daylight robbery’. The Mansion Tax is a tax on aspiration and home improvement, all in the name of ‘taxing the rich’. If you live in the South East, you’re not considered rich if your house if worth £1.5 million. It’s perfectly normal. If you’re a Labour MP in a marginal seat in London or the surrounding counties, the introduction of this tax will lose you your seat. It’s unfair, unjustified and tantamount to lunacy.

Has it ever occurred to these people that the solution is not to put up taxes, it is to cut spending, which is getting out of control.

It was revealed today that the DWP will be almost doubling PIP payments to disabled people from £19 billion this year to £45 billion in 2030. This is totally unsustainable, but no politician can ever argue that payments to disabled people should be cut. By 2030 the number of people being awarded PIP will be 5 million – a 25 per cent increased in four years! Mad. Anyway, this is a subject for another day.

What did “influenza” originally mean?