Boris Johnson: former PM committed ‘clear breach’ of rules with timing of Daily Mail role, says watchdog – as it happened

Boris Johnson. After the publication of yesterday’s Partygate report the Tory party is now preoccupied by the debate and vote on the report on Monday. Photograph: Alberto Pezzali/AP

5.20pm BST

Afternoon summary

• Boris Johnson committed a “clear breach” of rules on former ministers taking up new jobs by telling an appointments body he was becoming a Daily Mail columnist only half an hour before the public announcement, the watchdog has said.

• Johnson has told allies not to vote against the privileges committee’s report on Partygate on Monday when MPs will decide whether to give it their formal approval.

• Johnson has used his first column in the Daily Mail to confess to “40 years of moral failure”. But he was not talking about his troubled relationship with the truth, his political opportunism or his rackety private life. Instead, he devoted the article to a light-hearted account of trying a weight loss drug. He said that it didn’t work for him, but he concluded that “we are still in the foothills of what these drugs can do” and that one day they will be “transformative”. The only jib directed at Rishi Sunak was a reference to a cabinet colleague looking like a “chiselled whippet”.

• Poor people were hit hardest by Covid – and poor people living in the north of England were hit hardest of all – because of government cuts to health services in the years leading up to the pandemic, experts have said.

5.03pm BST

The Daily Mail has just published the first column by its new columnist, Boris Johnson. It’s about Johnson trying a weight loss drug, which he says in his case didn’t work.