No 10 staff will be able to give evidence confidentially to inquiry into whether PM lied over Partygate – UK politics live

The Good Law Project, a campaigning group, has launched judicial review proceedings against the Metropolitan police over its investigation into Partygate. It is arguing that the Met was wrong to assume that Boris Johnson had a reasonable excuse for attending some of the No 10 party-type gatherings during lockdown and that he should have received more fines.

There is a summary of its case here, and more details in its statement of claim.

Downing Street said Boris Johnson described the invitation for Sweden and Finland to join Nato as a “great step forward” for the alliance.

Following a meeting with Swedish prime minister Magdalena Andersson and the Finnish president Sauli Niinisto at the Nato summit in Madrid, a Downing Street spokesman said:

The prime minister reiterated his staunch support for Sweden and Finland’s Nato membership aspirations. He described their accession as a great step forward for Nato and welcomed the progress made since his visits to Sweden and Finland last month.

Kit Malthouse, the policing minister, made a statement to MPs about the decision of the Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary to place the Metropolitan police in special measures. Effectively he seemed to blame it all on Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London. He told MPs:

Over the last three years, this government has overseen the largest funding boost for policing in a decade and we are well on the way to recruiting an extra 20,000 police officers nationally, with 2,599 already recruited by the Metropolitan police, giving them the highest-ever number of officers.

By contrast, as many Londoners will attest, the mayor has been asleep at the wheel and is letting the city down.

Teenage homicides in London were the highest they have ever been in the last year and 23% of all knife crime takes place in London, despite it having only 15% of the UK population.

The mayor must acknowledge that he has profound questions to answer. He cannot be passive and continue as he has. He must get a grip.

In response Sarah Jones, the shadow policing minister, said that Malthouse’s statement was “incredibly weak” and that it was for the Home Office to lead on changes to the Met.

Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, has just issued a classy response to Dominic Raab having a go at her during PMQs over her recent visit to Glyndebourne. (See 1.12pm.)

My advice to the deputy prime minister is to cut out the snobbery and brush up on his opera. The Marriage of Figaro is the story of a working-class woman who gets the better of a privileged but dim-witted villain. Judging by his own performance today, Dominic Raab could learn a lesson about opening up the arts to everyone, whatever their background.

Earlier, ahead of PMQs, Rayner posted this on Twitter.

The Commons privileges committee has issued a statement after its first meeting to consider its inquiry into whether Boris Johnson lied to MPs about Partygate. It has issued a wide-ranging call for evidence, and it is inviting whistleblowers to give evidence anonymously if they want.

This provision seems intended to encourage civil servants working in No 10, who may have heard Boris Johnson reveal in private that he knew more about Downing Street partying during lockdown then he let on to MPs, to come forward.

The committee has also elected Harriet Harman, the former Labour deputy leader, as its chair. This had been expected.

And it has said that it will start taking oral evidence in the autumn. It has not said yet whether or not these sessions will be in public or in private. (Standards committee inquires into misconduct by individual MPs hear evidence in private.)

This suggests that the final report may not come until the end of the year, or later. At one point it was thought it could report in the autumn.

Here is an extract from the news release.

Following its first meeting to consider the matter referred to it, the committee is calling for evidence submissions and accounts from those with knowledge of events related to the inquiry. Specifically, the committee is seeking witness information and evidence which would enable it to determine whether or not [Boris Johnson] misled the house. The committee noted this may include evidence of:

-Mr Johnson’s knowledge of the activities in 10 Downing Street and the Cabinet Office under Covid regulations, from the occurrence of those events until now;

-any briefing given to, or inquiries made by, Mr Johnson relating to those events.

The committee will take a range of evidence in the course of the inquiry, including written and oral evidence. The committee also confirmed it would be willing to take oral or written evidence from people who wish to remain anonymous, subject to the chair being able to identify the individual’s identity in conjunction with committee staff, as well as the relevance and probity of their evidence.

The committee also said Sir Ernest Ryder, a former Lord Justice of Appeal, will serve as an adviser to the inquiry. This is in line with a recommendation from a review of the way the standards committees carries out inquiries into MPs; an external legal adviser could make the system fairer, the review said.

Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, has tweeted this about being winked at by Dominic Raab at PMQs. (See 1.21pm.)

Johnson says he’s likely to attend G20, even if Putin goes too

Peter Walker

Boris Johnson has said he would most likely attend this year’s G20 summit in Bali even if Vladimir Putin decides to go, saying to boycott it would simply “leave the whole argument” to Russia and its allies.

Johnson told reporters he would be “absolutely amazed” if Putin went in person to the leaders’ summit in November on the Indonesian island, noting the Russian president’s lack of recent overseas travel – although Putin has just visited Tajikistan and is due to go to Turkmenistan.

Russia remains a member of the G20, despite being expelled from what was the G8, and the Kremlin has said Putin plans to attend the Bali summit in person.

This would, Johnson said, create “a very difficult question”. He said:

Yes, he’s been formally invited. I don’t think he will go. The question is: do we as the Western countries vacate our seats at the G20 and leave the whole argument to China, to Russia?

Much of the conversation at the G7 has been about, are we doing enough to win over the swing voters? What can we do with the middle of the congregation, the people who look at Ukraine and have mixed feelings? We need to be doing more to win them over. We need to be making our case.

I think if you vacate something like the G20 you risk just handing the propaganda opportunity to others.

David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, has apologised for condemning plans for a strike by workers at British Airways, saying he had “made a mistake” about the facts. My collaegue Heather Stewart has the story here.

Labour urges ministers to meet councils to avert crisis in local government funding

Patrick Butler

Labour has urged the government to sit down with councils and trade unions to avert a looming financial crisis that could spark job losses and strike action in local services from social care to bin collection.

Local authorities in England have warned councils could go bust and services shut down as a result of inflation and spiralling energy bills which have added an unforeseen £2.4bn to town hall costs this year alone.

Councils had factored in 3% staff pay rises into budgets agreed in February but unions want a cost of living increase of 10%, increasing the prospect of strike action and hampering council plans to tackle serious staff recruitment and retention problems.

Speaking at the Local Government Association conference in Harrogate, shadow levelling up secretary Lisa Nandy urged the government to hold urgent talks to ensure local services are not affected over the next few months.

Nandy said:

We need an active government that doesn’t sit on its hands but seeks out unions and employers to square this circle together. We have just seen our railways grind to a halt while the transport secretary refused to lift a finger.

So I say to Michael Gove – the country doesn’t need a Grant Shapps tribute act. Convene a meeting, without delay, with the explicit aim of reducing pressure on councils so they can maintain services and support the staff who are the beating heart that sustains them.

Nandy backed local authority calls for government cash support to plug the multi-billion pound shortfall councils face over the next two years, saying “any responsible government would recognise that a financial settlement agreed when inflation was forecast to be 5% cannot stand when inflation is at 9% and rising.”

Yesterday Michael Gove, the Levelling Up secretary, told the conference he recognised the pressure on councils. But he was more explicit in an interview with Local Government Chronicle they should not expect financial bailouts:

I don’t think it would be fair on local government or on anyone else to hold out the prospect of significant additional public spending.

Tariffs on steel imports from China and other countries are to be extended for another two years, the UK government has announced, admitting that the move risks a legal challenge under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules. My colleague Lisa O’Carroll has the story here.

Here is the PA Media story from PMQs.

Angela Rayner challenged Boris Johnson to call a general election as she claimed Britons will have endured 55 tax rises if the prime minister was to stay in post until 2030.

The Labour deputy leader was involved in a series of fiery exchanges with Dominic Raab as the pair stood in at prime minister’s questions due to Johnson’s attendance at a Nato summit.

Rayner repeatedly asked Raab if he and the cabinet will continue to prop up Johnson or come to a point where they decide “enough is enough”.

Speaking in the Commons, Rayner said: “This week the government lost two by-elections in one day, the first in three decades. It’s no wonder that the prime minister has fled the country and left the honourable member to carry the can. The people of Wakefield and Tiverton held their own vote of no confidence.

“The prime minister isn’t just losing the room, he is losing their country. But instead of showing some humility, he intends to limp on until the 2030s. So, does he think the cabinet will prop him up for this long?”

Deputy Prime Minister Raab replied: “I gently point out to her that we want this prime minister going a lot longer than she wants the leader of Labour party …”

He noted “we have got a working majority of 75” and “we are focusing on delivering for the British people”.

But Rayner said the country cannot “stomach” Johnson for another eight years after the prime minister outlined his ambitions to continue in office into a third term.

She said: “The truth is what I want for my honourable friend the leader of this opposition [Keir Starmer] is not to be the leader of the ppposition, but to be the prime minister of this country. To be honest, it could not come quick enough.”

Raab defended the government’s economic record, adding: “Sir Tony Blair – he has actually got some experience of winning elections – says there is a gaping hole in Labour’s policy offer and all the while she is revelling in it. We are getting on with serving the people of this country. She is just playing political games.”

Rayner countered: “I’d revel in the opportunity for the people of this country to have more than just by-elections to see what they think of this government. Call a general election and see where the people are.”

PMQs, the deputies’ edition, is always a lighter and breezier version of the normal version, and usually it is more entertaining too. There is less at stake, and so the edginess quotient is lower. The tone is generally nicer; Dominic Raab and Angela Rayner may even like each other, and their exchanges are not freighted with the mutual contempt on display when Boris Johnson comes up against Keir Starmer.

Above all, they both know they’re understudies, and so they can afford to be less serious. Raab more or less conceded this today – or at least his eyelid did – when he winked at Rayner as he tried to have a go at her over attending Glyndebourne last Thursday. This was a scoop in the Daily Telegraph, which seemed to to find it noteworthy that someone who was a single mum at 16 might be sipping champagne at an opera event, and implied that she should have been on a picket line – even though, if she had been, the Telegraph would have been the first to crucify her for that too.

Whether the wink was friendly or sexist is a debate going on right now on Twitter, but what it did illustrate was the fundamental flippancy in what Raab was saying at this point. He had some successful moments in his exchanges with Rayner – he was not wrong about her ambition, and the jibe about Starmer describing Labour’s policy agenda as a clean slate was effective (if Boris Johnson had been doing PMQs, we would have heard much more about it) – but mostly his anti-Labour material was routine and forgettable.

Rayner was better, although she has had more impressive PMQs in the past and her questions seemed to veer all over the place, in scattergun fashion. But there were two arguments she was making that stood out as full of potential.

First, she was explicit in calling for cabinet ministers like Raab to “grow a backbone” and depose Johnson. (See 12.14pm.) Many Conservative backbenchers have been making this argument, as well as the entire anti-Johnson commentariat, but it is not a line we have heard much from Starmer. He should grab it, because it speaks to leadership.

Second, Rayner repeatedly used the phrase “enough is enough”. The best instance was probably in this passage.

Britain can’t stomach this prime minister for another eight years. His own backbenchers can’t stomach him for another eight minutes. And if they continue to prop him up, I doubt the voters will stomach him for even eight seconds in the ballot.

Now, let’s imagine the prime minister is still clinging on into the 2030s, under this tax high, low growth Tory government at this rate by 2030, the British public will have endured 55 tax rises. So, how many more tax rises will this government inflict on working families before he says enough is enough?

There were other “enough is enough” quotes too. As a soundbite, it might be just a bit too vanilla to succeed, but at a general election there is no more powerful argument than “it is time for a change” and Rayner was at least trying to find a form of words to encapsulate this.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Lab) says the Home Office regularly splits up families when it deports people. Given that the Home Office regularly gets things wrong, how many people have been taken off a forthcoming flight to Nigeria, and when will these flights be stopped.

Raab says people must be treated decently. But illegal routes into the UK should not be tolerated, he says. And the government should have the power to deport foreign criminals.

And that’s it. PMQs is over.

Angus Brendan MacNeil (SNP) says he cannot overstate the fury of the international trade committee over the failure of Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the secretary of state, to give evidence to it this morning. (See 11.47am.) He asks if approval of the Australian trade deal can be delayed to allow proper time for parliamentary scrutiny.

Raab says Trevelyan will appear before the committee as soon as possible.

Gill Furniss (Lab) says women abused by John Warboys could take action against the police for their failure to investigate under the Human Rights Act, but would not be able to do that under Raab’s bill of rights. She asks him to change this.

Raab does not accept her argument.

Johnny Mercer (Con) asks if the government will accelerate plans to modernise the NHS.

Raab says the government has the largest hospital building plan in history. Plymouth wll benefit, he says.