Tim Shipman and James Heale: can Reform make good on their promises? Tim Shipman and James Heale reveal that Nigel Farage will tell Reform UK’s conference this week that ministers ‘will be forced to resign or face being kicked out’ of a Reform government if they fail to fulfil their promises. ‘Nigel doesn’t give a f***,’ says one aide. Richard Tice will use his platform speech ‘to outline plans to revive housebuilding and Britain’s high streets’. He will simplify planning: ‘On brownfield sites there will be a complete removal of many of the costs, impediments and delays.’ Reform’s conference will focus on delivery. Farage will unveil ‘between three and five’ appointments to his ‘shadow cabinet’. ‘Some are really amazing,’ a source suggests. Despite a rocky summer and splits between top personalities, the party will beat the Tories, Tice suggests, ‘by being better’; when asked about Rupert Lowe, Restore Britain’s leader, he merely says: ‘Rupert who?’ Reform’s challenge, Tim and James suggest, ‘is to show voters that Reform can make meaningful changes quickly’.

Noa Hoffman: London’s Green zone. When Sir Keir Starmer announced that he was standing down as an MP, Noa Hoffman reports, jubilation erupted among Green activists. In the ‘Greens for Palestine’ WhatsApp group, excitement about the impending contest was accompanied by a striking lack of enthusiasm for [Zack] Polanski, she says. Members suggested the seat needed ‘a global majority rep for once and also a true anti-Zionist’; another lamented the terrible ‘way selections in our party are run’, with a trans activist suggesting there was lots of ‘room for unconscious bias and structural injustice’. Another suggested members should be ‘mindful’, in case their ‘conversations end up in an article by Noa Hoffman in The Spectator’. Earlier this year, Polanski suggested that he would run, but the ‘safer option would be to wait and see whether Diane Abbott retires’ in Hackney. Members are worried that the party has ‘run out of steam’, but the question for Andy Burnham is how far Labour should go in chasing progressive votes ‘up the garden path’.

Robert Hardman: after Harald, what’s the future for Norway’s royal family? Norway’s monarchy, Robert Hardman suggests, ‘perhaps most closely resembles our own’. The Windsors have ‘so often cast an envious glance across the North Sea’. But following King Harald’s death, ‘it is royalists in Norway who now look wistfully across at the UK’. Harald married Sonja Haraldsen, a former Cambridge barmaid. When Hardman interviewed them in 1994, he found the pair ‘strong-willed’ but ‘the first to admit that being monarch of a small nation is much easier than reigning over a large one’. But ‘luck is not hereditary’. Haakon VIII, Norway’s new King, faces ‘serious challenges’. Queen Mette-Marit had a lung transplant just ten weeks ago, was a friend of Jeffrey Epstein and has a son convicted of rape. The King’s sister is married to a bisexual American shaman who claims to be a reptilian reincarnation of a pharaoh. It puts the Windsors’ ‘own problems with American spouses into some sort of perspective’.

Francis Pike: will the British government stand up for Imran Khan? ‘Imran Khan is dead,’ declares Francis Pike – or ‘he may as well be’. The former cricketer and politician has been ‘incarcerated under increasingly tough conditions’ in Pakistan since 2023, locked in an ‘incommodious cell’ and denied ‘visitors and books’. What explains Khan’s enduring popularity, which ‘makes the Pakistan army and the traditional elites so determined to kill him?’ Khan is Pike’s former brother-in-law via Jemima Goldsmith. He went from a ‘globe-trotting playboy’ to a ‘demi-god’ who receives ‘gushing adoration’ worldwide. Pike recalls having to ‘wade through crowds in their thousands’ when they went for dinner in India. Pike tried to warn Khan off going into politics, but he was ‘fearless’ in the face of assassination threats and determined ‘to eradicate Pakistan’s endemic corruption’. But in the ‘game of realpolitik’, the West ‘cannot afford to weigh the human rights of a former great cricketer’ in the balance – which is why Andy Burnham has so far said nothing.

Matt Ridley: don’t blame China and climate change for the Himalayan flash flood. Some people, Matt Ridley laments, are already certain about what caused the tragic and terrifying Himalayan flash flood – either ‘climate change did it or China did it’. But both theories are ‘clutching at straws to advance political agendas’; this ‘catastrophe was far more likely to have had an entirely natural cause’. Climate change ‘might conceivably have helped unglue the rock but such collapses have been happening for millions of years naturally’; as for ‘Chinese infrastructure’, allegations of ‘data centres hidden under Himalayan glaciers are a myth’, even if the Chinese government ‘is not helping itself by being typically secretive’. But ‘unlike Wuhan in 2019’, Ridley believes ‘there is no reason to suspect Chinese culpability’. He says that many who are quick to assert this disaster was man-made were quick to dismiss any attempt to blame human beings for releasing Covid-19, even as evidence accumulated. The natural explanation for Nepal, Matt says, ‘deserves the benefit of the doubt far more than the natural-zoonosis explanation for Covid ever did’.