Conservative MP who dedicated her energies to the rights of the consumer

Sally Oppenheim-Barnes, who has died aged 96, was the former Conservative minister of state for consumer affairs and a politician with an intuitive understanding of what was of concern to the public in general and her constituents in particular. She had recognised the growing importance of the rights of the customer in the booming Britain of the 1960s and on arrival in the House of Commons in 1970 immediately set about making the subject her own.

She was a bright, brash, assertive woman who made full use of three years’ Rada training for the stage and who was famed for an eye-catching wardrobe, wrist-rattling jewellery and a large helmet of blond hair that would not have been out of place on the set of Dallas. She knew what she wanted and set out to get it, and having decided on a political career (early marriage and motherhood having put paid to acting), she took advice on how to proceed.

Russian-born UK citizen and Tory party activist Sergei Cristo fought to make MI5 sit up and take notice of the Russian political interference operation now threatening democracy in Britain – and around the world

In the dark days of the spring in 2022, as Russian troops terrorised Bucha and every day brought shocking new scenes of Ukrainians fleeing for their lives, I rang an old acquaintance, Sergei Cristo. Cristo is a Russian-born British citizen and I prepared for what I suspected might be a long conversation: he is a talker. He was born in Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia, but he moved to Britain when he was 19 and it’s fair to say we’re not the most obvious of allies. He loves the royal family and is a passionate Conservative party activist. He used to be on the committee of a donor club for young Conservatives, “and then I became vice-chairman, I knew the cabinet, I knew the leader, everybody”.

He’s not kidding. He has photos of himself with everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Boris Johnson, and his favourite place to hang out used to be the Carlton Club, the grand Conservative private members’ club in central London.

Home Office official says data protection laws caused the cost of its forced removal programme to increase

The Conservative government spent more than £130m on IT and data systems for the scheme to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, which will never be used, the Observer can reveal.

Digital tools needed to put the forced removal programme into effect made up the second-largest chunk of the £715m spent in little over two years , behind only the £290m handed directly to Paul Kagame ’s government.

MP says he is totally committed to his constituency after Isabel Oakeshott moved to the Emirates

One weekend, it will be the straightforward delights of Skegness seafront; the next, the flashy private beach clubs of Dubai.

Richard Tice , deputy leader of Reform UK and its MP for Boston and Skegness, is splitting his time not just between his Lincolnshire ­constituency and the House of Commons, but is also spending time 3,500 miles away in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). “We are spreading our international reach,” he said.

Leader urged to clarify suggestion lock could be means-tested amid fears party will lose support among older voters

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Kemi Badenoch has been urged by a former Conservative pensions minister to clarify “what on earth she means” by suggesting the pensions triple lock could be means-tested, amid alarm within the party that she will lose support among older people.

The Conservative leader suggested she could back a major policy shift away from the universal promise introduced under her party that the state pension will rise each year by whichever is highest out of 2.5%, inflation, or earnings.

Lisa Nandy defends Yvette Cooper’s decision to order urgent review following pressure driven by Elon Musk

Lisa Nandy has said government ministers are considering a “whole range of alternatives” to the BBC licence fee, criticising it as “regressive” but also saying it raises “insufficient money to support the BBC.”

Speaking on BBC Breakfast, Nandy appeared to rule out raising money for the BBC from general taxation. She said the licence fee was “not only insufficient, it’s raising insufficient money to support the BBC, but it also is deeply regressive.”

We’ve seen far too many women prosecuted over recent years for being unable to pay it, and it’s a flat fee that means that poorer people pay proportionately more than anybody else. I think that doesn’t help the BBC, it doesn’t help the government, and it doesn’t help people in this country.

The Tory leader gave an address that was full of candour about her party’s failures. You can sense Nigel Farage’s delight

Well, finally. Only eight years on from kneecapping the economy and crowing “you lost, get over it” at anyone impertinent enough to notice, a Conservative party leader has tacitly admitted the painfully obvious : Brexit was an act of wilful negligence by a government that dragged Britain out of its most important trading relationship “before we had a plan for growth outside the EU”. There wasn’t a considered Plan B, just a government frantically trying to catch itself up as it went along. And that’s only the start of it, Kemi Badenoch argued this week, in the first interesting thing the Conservative party has had to say to the nation since its bone-crushing defeat.

Successive Conservative governments dating back to David Cameron’s had promised to get immigration down but hadn’t thought through how to do that either, she pointed out, and consequently achieved the opposite. (You may well think the country would be even worse off had they succeeded but, either way, whipping up public anger against something and then blithely delivering more of it is the height of irresponsibility.) They bound themselves in law to achieving net zero by 2050 but only worried afterwards about how exactly they might do it. Each time, she conceded, Conservative governments told voters what they wanted to hear and gambled on working it all out later.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Kemi Badenoch professes herself sorry not sorry for the mess 14 years of Conservative rule left the country in – but seems not have a clue about how to dig us out of it

Seeing is not always believing. Fair to say that Kemi Badenoch’s time as leader of the Tory party has not got off to the best of starts. Hopeless at prime minister’s questions and seemingly already out of ideas, many in the party are already looking around for possible successors. Even Robert Jenrick. Things really are that desperate.

Even so, 10 weeks in feels a little premature for a relaunch. If that’s what it was. Hard to know really as no one was much the wiser after Kemi had finished what had been billed as an “important” speech at the Institute of Directors in central London. No one does pointlessness quite like KemiKaze. She is the queen of futility.

Tory leader says her party offered policy without plan while in government and politicians are not being honest with public

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Kemi Badenoch has said the UK is getting poorer and people should be honest that it is failing to compete with the rest of the world.

In a speech billed as the Conservative leader confronting the party’s mistakes in government, Badenoch failed to offer a specific apology but said that the party had offered policy without a plan, including on Brexit and net zero.