UK director of European development bank reports to Rachel Reeves, who has been critical of previous government

A former Conservative deputy prime minister who lost her seat at the last general election applied for a job in Labour’s Treasury department.

Thérèse Coffey also had a stint as the health secretary and was one of Liz Truss’s fiercest allies when she was prime minister.

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Mel Stride criticises billionaire for sharing fake story about sending people to Falklands and his claim that the UK was set for civil war

Asked about his leadership campaign, Mel Stride said that one of the challenges facing the Conservative party was that the average age of its voters is 63, which he described as “untenable”.

He told listeners to Times Radio.

The fact that the average conservative voter is age 63 that is completely untenable. It is not something that you can solve by leaping on some magical ideological square. It is something you solve through deep, hard work over a sustained period of time, and I believe that I understand that, and I’m the right person to take that forward.

Not a huge amount of surprise, because I think, you know, we have been a party that has been fighting itself and been introspective in a way that most people from the outside would have found pretty selfish.

There are areas where we failed to deliver. And so we have a lot of work to do now to unite our party and to come forward with the right policy platform.

To reach out both to those that were drawn by Reform UK, but also never to forget that we lost people to Labour and the Liberal Democrats [too]. And now we’ve got five years basically in order to assess that policy platform and to get that right.

We’ve got to rebuild our party, and we’ve got to get a hearing with the British electorate, and we’re going to do that through unity, and we’re going to do that through a lot of listening and a lot of hard work and working out the answer to a lot of fundamental and difficult questions.

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Decades after Ted Heath sacked Enoch Powell, the Tories must restore the line that stops immigration policy descending into racial hatred

The last four times the Tories chose their leader, the rest of the UK was obliged to pay attention because the winner of the process would automatically become prime minister. The stakes this year are much lower. The prize is stewardship of a battered party reduced to a 121-seat rump in the Commons, exiled far from government.

The next leader’s first challenge will be adapting to a spectacular fall from relevance. There are nuances to be teased out of July’s election results, but the main message was an instruction to Tories from voters to shut up and leave them alone.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

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Providers warn they lack staff for next month’s expansion of free provision that was promised by Conservatives

Ministers are facing stark warnings that a key pledge on childcare is in serious peril, amid mounting concerns over staff shortages, a fall in the quality of care and fears that parts of the plan are simply undeliverable.

Just weeks away from a widespread extension of free provision, part of what the previous government billed as the “ largest ever expansion of childcare in England’s history ”, nurseries, preschools and childminders across the country have voiced alarm that they are struggling to recruit staff to meet demand from parents expecting a local place.

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Former Home Office minister says he is open capping immigration and wants to reimpose Rwanda scheme

Robert Jenrick has said he would hope to detain and deport people who arrive in the UK on small boats “within days” if he wins the Conservative leadership race and the next general election.

The former immigration minister said he was “open” to a cap restricting immigration to fewer than 10,000 people a year and shared his hopes of reimposing the Rwanda scheme.

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Britain’s first next-generation supercomputer, planned by Tories, in doubt after Labour government move

The new Labour government has shelved £1.3bn of funding pledged by the Conservatives for technology and artificial intelligence projects, putting the future of the UK’s first next-generation supercomputer in doubt.

The projects, announced last year , include £800m for the creation of an exascale supercomputer at the University of Edinburgh and a further £500m for the AI Research Resource, which funds computing power for AI.

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Even the best governments can’t bring about change in a broken system, according to this urgent plea for reform

Most books about politics concern personalities or ideologies rather than systems. Sam Freedman’s first book sets out to be an exception, and he acknowledges at the outset that this comes with risks: “Issues of governance and constitutional failure are inherently abstract and, to most of the population, impenetrable.”

It’s more fun, in other words, bitching about wicked milk-snatching Tories than wading into the weeds of the relationship between the Treasury and regional government, or the effect of the “principle of legality” on the uses and abuses of judicial review, or statutory instruments and skeleton bills.

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The party leadership candidate knows how to make enemies. But to win the prize she’s after, she’ll need to make friends too

It says something about the state of the Conservative leadership contest that even Tory MPs are struggling to get excited about the next three months. “I see them as a pack of quite average greyhounds,” says one MP of the six contenders vying to succeed Rishi Sunak. Others are refraining from publicly backing a candidate on the grounds that they fear in a few years’ time it may all blow up – and they may have to do it all again.

But there is one candidate who still manages to attract plenty of attention: Kemi Badenoch. As the bookies’ favourite for the contest, the former business secretary has a target on her back when it comes to the rival camps. She has also had the most scrutiny to date, with sources – first reported by the Guardian – accusing her of “ bullying and traumatising ” behaviour while running her department.

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Insulting language in private message sent by Oliver Cooper to an activist colleague in 2017 emerged in a high court case

Kemi Badenoch has brought in a Conservative councillor to help on her leadership bid who referred to a female politician in a vulgar manner in a message to another colleague.

Badenoch has Tory councillor Oliver Cooper on her team despite it having emerged in legal action that he had sent messages in 2017 about a female councillor to another activist calling her offensive names.

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