Nicholas Watt

New: Dame Meg Hillier, Labour chair of the commons treasury select committee, tells MPs she is to write to the Financial Conduct Authority to see if there was a leak of market sensitive information around the Budget. Hillier is intervening after bank shares rose before the chancellor started speaking. In his budget John Healey announced a lower than expected increase in bank tax

Here’s my encounter with Kemi Badenoch when I caught up with the Conservative leader after her speech to her party conference. More on #Newsnight at 10.30pm

My encounter with Kemi Badenoch after shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith told the Conservative Party conference he would abolish the charge on higher value properties. More on #newsnight at 10.30pm

Here are concerns I picked up from Sharon Graham and members of the Labour left at the changes to the pension triple lock. Andy Burnham’s ally, Ian Byrne, tells me he will be speaking directly with the prime minister #newsnight

My chats for #newsnight with cabinet ministers and Andy Burnham’s old boss David Blunkett who all seemed pretty bowled over by his speech

Out of the blocks at great speed: the IFS explainer on the Andy Burnham triple lock announcement

“A cornucopia of psephological fruit.” That’s how the late Roy Jenkins described the vast array of differing electoral systems that could be introduced to replace Westminster’s first past the post system in his report commissioned by Tony Blair

Looks like Andy Burnham going for something akin to the Australian system on the state pension, according to this IFS note from earlier this month. No automatic annual link with earnings but a link maintained over time

My encounters for #newsnight at the Labour conference with multiple members of the cabinet in which I asked them about….the pensions triple lock

Here’s my #newsnight interview with Andy Burnham on the eve of the 2016 Brexit referendum in which he said there was a strong chance that Leave would win. Me: Are you concerned this referendum could be slipping away from you? Andy Burnham: Yes. I think here we are two weeks away from a very real prospect that Britain will vote for isolation.

Here is my encounter with Sir Ed Davey at the #libdem conference in Brighton as he walked to a lift for an evening reception on the eve of his speech @EdwardJDavey @LibDems @BBCNewsnight

Allies of Sir Keir Starmer are strongly disputing what this cabinet minister told me last night. One Starmer ally tells me that earlier this year the former prime minister asked his aides to chase Foreign Office ministers for “proper advice” on blocking settler trade or imposing sanctions on West Bank settlements. “He was no blocker,” the Starmer ally told me. They claim that the Foreign Office told them the issue was “complicated” which showed, according to that ally, that they simply “had no plan”. The ally tells me: “There’s just a lot of rewriting of history going on.” The critics of Starmer point to evidence given on 15 July - five days before Andy Burnham became PM - to the business select committee by the then Europe minister Stephen Doughty and the then trade minister Sir Chris Bryant. They both talked about how the powers in place did not go far enough to impose blanket sanctions on West Bank settlements. The two ministers, who are both still in government, said they would like to have gone further. The dispute now is: Critics of Starmer say he was the block on going further Allies of Starmer say the Foreign Office was the block because they reportedly didn’t have a plan in this area