In your briefing today:

📣 Lord Mandelson has been released on bail overnight, hours after he was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The Metropolitan Police said a 72-year-old man was released pending further investigation, and Mandelson was seen letting himself into his central London home at 2am.

Police have been investigating allegations that, while a government minister, Mandelson had passed on market-sensitive information to Jeffrey Epstein.

Lord Mandelson has not commented in public in recent weeks on the Epstein files, but the BBC reports his position is that he has not acted criminally and was not motivated by financial gain. (BBC)

📣 Tourette’s campaigner John Davidson has said he is “deeply mortified if anyone considers my involuntary tics to be intentional or to carry any meaning” after he shouted a racial slur at the Bafta awards. (Scotsman)

📣 Police Scotland is investigating the racist abuse of Rangers players Emmanuel Fernandez and Djeidi Gassama, after the pair shared screenshots of abuse sent to them after Sunday’s game in Livingston.

Rangers have described the abuse, sent on Instagram, as “unacceptable”, and reported it to the social media platform’s parent company, Facebook owner Meta. (BBC)

If your job touches cybersecurity, software, cloud, or IT operations, staying informed isn’t optional.

IT Brew is a free, four-times-a-week newsletter covering the trends shaping business tech—from infrastructure and strategy to the tools teams actually rely on.

Clear context. Focused coverage. Built for professionals running IT—not just talking about it.

Check it out

📣 Police are spending more on informants as they look to bring Scotland’s bitter gang war under control. Touts were paid £342,730 last year, versus £303,610 a year ago. (Daily Record has the exclusive)

📣 The SNP could spend an extra £1 billion a year on benefits by making them easier to claim, after a review called for widening eligibility for the adult disability payment, which is claimed by about one in eight working-age adults in the country. (The Times)

📣 The leader of the Alba Party, Kenny MacAskill, has said its financial difficulties are the result of fraud. He’s facing calls to resign after he said the party would be unable to field candidates in the forthcoming election. (BBC)

📣 Electric car owners beware: some are finding aggressive car park owners are hitting them with fines for “parking” their car while it charges. (Daily Record)

📣 Russian soldiers have talked about the brutality of life on the front line in a documentary, saying they saw soldiers executed by their own officers. Their accounts are grim and, be warned, graphic. (BBC)

📣 A first British baby using a transplanted womb from a deceased donor has been born. His mother says her little boy, Hugo, is “simply a miracle”. (BBC)

📣 Amid violence in Mexico after the killing of a notorious cartel leader, 25 National Guard troops have been killed. (CBS News)

⚽️ Manchester United notched up a valuable win at Everton last night, with the club now finding itself in the Champions League places in the Premier League. (BBC)

⚽️ Benfica’s Prestianni has been suspended by Uefa after claims he racially abused Real Madrid’s Vinicius Junior. (Guardian)

⛷️ American skier Lindsey Vonn, who raced with a torn ligament in her knee and then suffered a huge crash, says she nearly lost her leg in the wake of that accident. (Guardian)

🗣️ Most by-elections don’t matter, especially when the government of the day has a rock-solid majority. But Thursday’s by-election in Gordon and Denton, the Greater Manchester constituency, really does matter.

It’ll be taken as more than a barometer of Keir Starmer’s (un)popularity as a Prime Minister, or a score on his administration’s work to date. It’ll be seen as a bellwether for where politics in this country are going: will opinion poll support for Nigel Farage’s reform translate into people (i) turning out and (ii) putting an X in the box?

Reform’s candidate in the constituency is a star in his branch of politics. Matthew Goodwin has, as the modern cliche has it, been On A Journey: from student of and renowned expert on far-right politics to… well, many would argue he’s now a leading light of right wing politics himself.

He’s certainly not a neo-Nazi like the people he studied. But the former academic, who took redundancy from his university in 2024, is on the hard right. His platforms include a huge Substack newsletter and gigs on GB News. His views include articulate fears about “mass uncontrolled immigration”, sympathy for some of Donald Trump’s views on Europe, and suggestions that people from minority ethnic backgrounds, born in the UK, are somehow not as British as others.

As Damon Wilkinson reports at the Manchester Evening News, in an excellent profile of Goodwin: “Those views appear to enamoured him to the types of groups he once dedicated his career to studying. After news of Mr Goodwin's candidacy broke […] far-right activist Tommy Robinson posted on X: ‘Vote Matt.’”

In a long read in the Guardian, Jonathan Liew finds the candidate elusive, in “a campaign conducted for the benefit of the internet: consisting of a handful of carefully curated media appearances, arranged meetings and brief photo opportunities.”

By all accounts, he’s doing well in Gorton and Denton, where at the General Election in 2024 Andrew Gwynne - who has resigned on health grounds - took more than 50% of the vote. Reform, with a relatively unknown candidate, came second with 14.1%.

It’s far closer this time, according to the limited polling available. An Omnisis poll, the fieldwork for which took place last week, paints a picture of a three-way firght: the Greens leading on 33%, Reform on 29%, Labour on 26%. Details are on The Week in Polls.

Senior Labour figures have publicly attacked that poll, saying its methodology is off. But, in private, one Labour activist I’ve spoken to, who’s been working in the constituency, is gloomy about the party’s chances. It could be generous to paint this a three-way fight: such is the dismay with Keir Starmer on the doorstep, it really could be enough voters are viewing the Greens as the viable, left-wing vote, against Reform on the right.

The Greens are running Hannah Spencer, a plumber and local councillor who is campaigning effectively. Manchester Mill notes her canny personal branding: “She’s not one of those politician-types that everybody hates - she’s a plumber! She eats pasties on Instagram and shows up to our interview with a Greggs sausage roll.” She’s done well to position herself as a viable candidate, even for those who clearly don’t share Green views on the world.

As Owen Jones has it, “people don’t always fit into neat boxes.”

Taking a walk around the constituency, the Guardian columnist writes: “An older woman in Denton voices her grievances about ‘illegal migrants’ taking jobs and then tells me she’s voting for the Green candidate, local plumber Hannah Spencer. A white man in his 70s uses his thick Mancunian accent to denounce Rachel Reeves for what he sees as a vendetta against pensioners – and says he too will back the left-wing insurgents.”

Or maybe it’s less about neat boxes, or a considered view of candidates, and more a desire to revolt against government, and the wider political mainstream. As Prospect suggests, it’s about “the death of establishment politics”.

Sir Keir Starmer was in Gorton and Denton yesterday, saying the poll was a “battle of values”, warning Green supporters they could split the anti-Reform vote. He was with Labour candidate Angeliki Stogia, who lacks the profile of her rivals, and also met Andy Burnham - the Greater Manchester mayor who’d wanted to fight the seat, so he could then challenge Starmer for Number 10.

Labour, come Friday, may be left pondering the choice to block Burnham’s run - both for its short-term chances in this byelection, and its longer-term chances at the ballot boxes nationally.

What is not clear, yet, is who will represent the area in Parliament. What is clear is that the repercussions of the vote will be felt for far longer than this weekend.

Sent this by a friend?