Megan Kenyon

1 week ago | newstatesman.com | Megan Kenyon

Ed Miliband likely breathed a sigh of relief on Friday morning after Ofgem announced a 7 per cent reduction in the energy price cap. Average bills will go down by £129 a year for a typical household (or around £11 a month) from 1 July. This is not quite the £300 reduction Miliband and his team promised in the run-up to the election, but it’s certainly a start.

2 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Megan Kenyon

Shortly after Labour’s landslide victory at the general election in July 2024, the party removed the whip from seven of its MPs. All seven had voted for an amendment to the King’s Speech tabled by the SNP, which would have removed the two-child benefit cap. Among the seven was Ian Byrne, the 52-year-old MP for Liverpool West Derby, a former trade union organiser and previously the office manager for fellow Liverpool Labour MP, Dan Carden.

2 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Megan Kenyon

The front page of the Sun on 22 May was typically subdued. The headline read: “Justice Secretary’s vow: Paedos to be castrated”. Readers of the morning papers would be forgiven for thinking they’d woken up in an alternative universe mirroring the novels of Aldous Huxley or HG Wells. But this is a policy being considered by a Labour government.

2 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Megan Kenyon

It all started with a selfie. It was 2015 and Hannah Mossman Moore, a 23-year-old graduate, had just arrived at her first London Fashion Week, bristling with excitement. Mossman Moore was interning with Alighieri, a jewellery start-up. Her job involved rubbing shoulders with models, fashion insiders and journalists. She was searching, among the hordes of well-dressed somebodies, for a cash-rich foreign buyer. And it wasn’t long before she found one.

2 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Megan Kenyon

Monday’s meeting could have gone very differently for Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister, flanked by the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, was met with rapturous applause as he entered the stuffy committee room where more than 200 Labour MPs awaited him. This rousing welcome is pretty standard for a prime minister (particularly for one only nine months into the job). Privately, however, the party’s backbenches are, as one MP put it to me “almost universally pissed off”.