The government’s flagship “single front door” for international finance, which was sold as a public-private partnership drawing in the City’s biggest firms, has no private sector staff involvement.
At its October 2025 launch, the Office for Investment: Financial Services was billed as “a public-private partnership” bringing together the OfI, HM Treasury, No10, the PRA, the FCA, the City of London Corporation, and “secondees from leading professional services firms.” Guido’s FOI Unit can reveal the private sector half never turned up…
As of last month the unit’s secondees were: two from the Treasury, two from the FCA, and two from the PRA. None from a professional services firm or the City of London Corporation…
The government repeatedly described the wider Office for Investment as “a joint unit of HM Treasury, the Department for Business and Trade, and Number 10.” Guido’s FOI Unit has found that No10 claims it has no involvement, and the Treasury pays nothing to its running costs…
Press releases at its launch claimed it could bring in £10 billion – the unit confirms it has no such target. Meanwhile Santander boss warns that the British tax regime on banks as making “no economic sense” with additional punitive levies and the threat of more bank taxes from Reeves, who is pitching to the left. No number of potemkin joint units could fix that damage…
Every month, we publish the power rankings of all the leading lights in Reform based on our readers’ responses. Click here to fill in the survey, and the results will be published at the end of the month. Here’s how last month played out…
We’re offering £10 off your Guido membership once you complete it. If you’re not a Guido member yet, that’s a whole month as a Co-Conspirator for free. You’ll get instant access to all our exclusive content, including Labour Wars and The Right Angle…
Assistant Chief Constable Ryan Henderson has just finished his news conference in Belfast. He said:
Ball in the Home Office’s court now…
UPDATE: Home Office confirms: “He entered the UK in 2023 and was granted refugee status the same year. The individual claims to have entered the UK via the Common Travel Area.”
There are concerns among hawkish wonks in Westminster that the proliferation of ads on X featuring AI images of Nigel Farage scrapping with Andrew Bailey on Question Time is connected to a foreign state which could be gathering info on Westminster. The ads – coming from any number of small accounts – have been infuriating SW1 types for some days now…
Reform and the Bank of England have both addressed the ads. The latter has urged X to take action against them. Once users click on the images, they are taken to a fake BBC post with links to ‘trading’ websites whose servers appear to be based overseas. A standard strategy here is to buy old X accounts – often around ten years – with a higher trust score, meaning the advert is less likely to be flagged…
Wonks at the Henry Jackson Society say the ads on X are likely targeting followers of accounts with a Westminster audience. They say the ads are powered by a sophisticated agentic AI-powered bot network which are producing many hundreds of assets from user clicks onto overseas servers. They add that scams like this are often traced to Iran or North Korea…
One IP address is based in Belize. While dressed up to look like a crypto scam for boomers could be a trial for a larger attack. Dr Helena Ivanov, Associate Researcher at the Henry Jackson Society, tells Guido:
“The potential implications are deeply troubling and the potential risks significant. Parliamentary authorities and the security services should investigate this urgently.
If this is indeed an example of a coordinated disinformation campaign, it serves as a stark reminder of how quickly such operations can be established in the digital age, and of the potentially far-reaching consequences they can have for public trust, democratic institutions, and political discourse.”
Stay vigilant if you see Farage punching more senior civil servants online…
The small matter of defence spending was not mentioned once at this morning’s Cabinet meeting. The elusive Defence Investment Plan is still without a publication date, and ministers are now in furious clashes over proposed cuts to their departmental capital budgets to fund an uplift. Rather than try to resolve this endless farce, the Cabinet nattered about AI and social media all morning instead.
There was also no discussion of Starmer’s looming reckoning courtesy of Andy Burnham. Even though No10 briefed last night that he had meet junior ministers to convince them he’d fight on, and on, and on…
Former leader of the SNP in Westminster Ian Blackford told Times Radio why he believes Nicola Sturgeon’s claim that she spent no time in the kitchen and therefore didn’t see any of her husband’s purchases:
“She doesn’t have a passion for cooking.”