Nestle has fired its chief executive after just one year in the job because he failed to disclose a “romantic relationship” with a “direct subordinate”.

The Swiss food giant, which makes Kit Kat chocolate bars and Nespresso coffee capsules, said Laurent Freixe has been dimissed with “immediate effect” following an investigation led by Nestle’s chair and lead independent director.

The BBC understands the inquiry was triggered by a report made through the company’s whistleblowing channel.

Nestle chair Paul Bulcke, said: “This was a necessary decision. Nestlé’s values and governance are strong foundations of our company. I thank Laurent for his years of service at Nestlé.”

The relationship was with an employee who is not on the executive board and the investigation began because it represented a conflict of interest, the BBC has learned.

Mr Freixe had been with Nestle for nearly 40 years but stepped up to the global chief executive role last September, replacing Mark Schneider.

Philipp Navratil has been appointed as Mr Freixe’s successor.

Mr Bulcke said the company was “not changing course on strategy and we will not lose pace on performance”.

Dan York-Smith, the former senior Treasury official Keir Starmer has appointed as his principal private secretary, is a qualified international gymnastics judge – a skill set that may come in handy as Labour limbers up for the formidable balancing act of Rachel Reeves’s autumn budget.

After a dizzying series of backflips on tax and spending, some of which were blamed squarely on the chancellor, the government is preparing to raise taxes – at the same time as acknowledging that with inflation on the rise again, the public are still in the grip of a cost of living crisis.

As well as York-Smith, who previously coordinated fiscal events at the Treasury and is well liked by colleagues across Whitehall, Starmer has pinched Reeves’s No 2, Darren Jones, to be his own “chief secretary” – a previously nonexistent job. The former Bank of England deputy governor Minouche Shafik, a well-respected economist, will be Starmer’s economic adviser.

Economists and former government advisers welcomed the reshuffle, suggesting it was high time for Starmer to take more interest in the direction of economic policy.

Jonathan Portes, a former senior government economist, said it was always a mistake to subcontract tax and spend entirely to the Treasury. “It is a well-functioning department staffed by people who know what they’re talking about and if it’s not politically challenged by No 10 things go wrong,” he said.

“Because of the way the Treasury works, it’s intellectually predisposed to do things that are not just politically counterproductive but economically counterproductive. You need somebody in No 10 to push back, and that’s in the interests of the government as a whole.”

Tim Leunig, the chief economist at Nesta, who advised Rishi Sunak when he was chancellor, agreed that part of the problem had been a lack of direction from No 10. However, he suggested any number of new appointments would make little difference without a clearer sense of what the prime minister wants.

“I think all this adds up to absolutely nothing, until Keir Starmer decides what he stands for, and what he stands against,” he said. In particular, Leunig said that would mean deciding which groups to single out to bear the brunt of tax rises – which are widely viewed as inevitable, with the Office for Budget Responsibility expected to downgrade its growth forecasts.

“Unless Labour are willing to say: ‘We’re never going to be a good government unless we’re lucky enough to get growth,’ then they’ve got to learn to pick some losers,” he said. Another former Labour adviser said these risks were particularly grave during tough economic times, when the Treasury tends to go into “finance ministry mode” – focusing above all on balancing the books.

However, Labour’s first year in power has underlined the political challenges of either cutting spending or raising revenue – particularly given the manifesto promises they made not to touch key taxes, including income tax.

Business groups have reacted with fury to Reeves’s £25bn increase in employer national insurance contributions, which has been blamed for putting the brakes on hiring and exacerbating inflation, while backbenchers forced the abandonment of £5bn-worth of disability benefit cuts. The removal of the winter fuel allowance from most pensioners was also almost completely reversed after months of damaging criticism.

Memories of previous disastrously received fiscal statements abound – including George Osborne’s “omnishambles” budget and, of course, Liz Truss’s “mini-budget”, much of which subsequently had to be ditched in the face of market chaos. With bond markets already skittish, the pitfalls are obvious.

As one Labour insider put it, the government’s task in the budget – which is still at least 10 weeks off, with no date yet announced – is to “fill a hole, in a way that makes it not look like they’re filling a hole”.

Reeves, meanwhile, has not yet found a replacement for her former chief economic adviser John Van Reenen, who has cut back his role at the Treasury – although she has roped in the pensions minister and wonks’ wonk Torsten Bell to be her wingman on budget prep.

Jones will be succeeded by the safe pair of hands James Murray, moving up from the post of exchequer secretary to the Treasury. Murray’s successor is another graduate of Bell’s former thinktank the Resolution Foundation – the MP for Chipping Barnet, Dan Tomlinson.

Shafik, too, had some involvement at Resolution, serving as one of the commissioners on its landmark Economy 2030 review – although she is better known as an expert on the international economy.

Margaret Thatcher famously used her economic adviser Alan Walters as an intellectual battering ram against the then chancellor, Nigel Lawson, ultimately leading to the latter’s resignation in 1989.

Few at Westminster expect Shafik to play such a divisive role, however. “She’s not like an Alan Walters figure: she’s not an ideological person,” one Labour insider said.

But given the political somersaults required, Portes argues that it will take serious political commitment from the very top of government to make another tax-raising budget stick. “No 10 and No 11 have to argue it out, agree, and then come out and sell it together,” he said. “And Starmer has to own it, not just Reeves.”

Donald Trump’s imperial tendencies see the US president wield tariffs and sanctions in the expectation that America will receive tributes. Yet his latest move – punishing India with 50% tariffs for Russian oil purchases once encouraged by the US – has produced not submission but spectacle. It has sent India’s Narendra Modi to China for the first time in seven years as Xi Jinping hosted more than 20 leaders for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin. And it is in Tianjin, not Washington, where it looks as if the hinge of history is moving.

The SCO is easy to dismiss: the bloc is a bundle of contradictions. India and Pakistan remain adversaries. China and India still stare across a garrisoned Himalayan frontier, though relations have thawed since last October’s border breakthrough. Russia and China vie for influence in Central Asia. Unlike Nato, the SCO has no binding defence commitments. For much of its life, it has looked like a paper tiger, sending out communiques that were all roar and no bite.

But in geopolitics, appearances are important. To see Mr Modi, Mr Xi and Vladimir Putin smiling and joking is to watch Washington’s influence fade. Mr Trump’s tariff broadside against India makes Tianjin significant. Here was the prime minister of India – supposedly the US’s Asian counterweight to China – affirming that New Delhi and Beijing are “partners, not rivals”.

India’s calculation is straightforward. It has red lines: agriculture will not be opened up to US demands; oil purchases cannot be determined by Washington; the ceasefire with Pakistan was conceded by Islamabad, not brokered by Mr Trump. Backing down would look like weakness. Far better, from Mr Modi’s perspective, to demonstrate that the US cannot take India’s partnership for granted, and to seek friends elsewhere.

For China, the rewards are immediate. Mr Trump has given Mr Xi a stage on which to pose as the host of an important multipolar gathering. Cai Qi, Mr Xi’s chief of staff and a member of China’s top ruling body – the first to hold both roles since Mao’s era – was dispatched to meet Mr Modi, an unmistakable gesture of intimacy from China’s rulers. Beijing sees the SCO as emphasising the US’s absence and letting others seize the stage.

The implications stretch well beyond South Asia. For Moscow, every handshake in Tianjin underlines that sanctions have not made it a pariah. For Turkey, attendance preserves its ambiguity as a Nato member. For Iran, the SCO condemned the US-Israeli attacks it suffered this summer. The more this theatre normalises China and Russia as leaders of a non-western bloc, the harder it becomes for Washington to muster global consensus – notably over Ukraine – in future crises.

Nor was Tianjin just about Eurasia. A spat with the Philippines over Taiwan on the eve of the summit reminded delegates of China’s reddest lines. The SCO claims it is inclusive. But Beijing runs the show. Mr Trump sought a kowtow from Delhi. Instead, he has handed Beijing the platform for its long game – building a system beyond the reach of the US. Whether that would allow more room for other states to manoeuvre is moot. The SCO may never fight China’s wars, but it ensures Beijing will never stand alone. That is the high price the west may end up paying for Mr Trump’s narcissistic delusions.