Matt Finnegan 🇺🇦

The government’s grandest plane, an A321 jet, took off from Stansted at 6.05 a.m. this morning. Burnham wasn't on it. It flew 34 minutes to Manchester to collect the PM, then set off for the Commonwealth summit in Antigua. Guido estimates the detour cost around £20,000 of taxpayer cash. Avanti not good enough for him? Flight tracking data shows the jet landed in Manchester at 6.39 a.m. and left again at 8.06 a.m., heading for a refuelling stop in Newfoundland before the Caribbean. The government eventually publishes what every trip on the plane costs. Starmer’s same-day trip to Paris on in April came to £39,756 at roughly £20,000 a leg. Stansted to Manchester is shorter than Paris, but every additional leg brings its own landing and handling fees. About £18,000-20,000’s worth according to Guido’s fag packet maths… The whole jaunt, there and back, comes to about 21 hours of flying. Based on Starmer’s £121,239 trip to Yerevan in May and Yvette Cooper’s £148,700 trip to Washington in December, long-haul flying on the plane costs between £9,500 and £12,400 an hour. That puts Burnham's full trip at about £250,000. Burnham took the same government jet from Glasgow to Manchester in July to open No10 North, despite a choice of trains. When Liz Truss used the same plane to fly to Australia, @AngelaRayner called it a “ridiculous waste of half a million pounds on a private jet trip”. Thoughts on this one, Ange?