Afternoon summary
- Downing Street has still not received the Sue Gray report into “partygate”, according to a briefing this afternoon, leading to speculation that it will now not be published until Monday.
- Labour has said it is increasingly clear that Boris Johnson has lied about his involvement in the decision to authorise the evacuation of dogs and cats from Afghanisation as part of the humanitarian airlift in August. The shadow levelling up secretary, Lisa Nandy, made the claim about the PM following the publication yesterday of emails showing that Foreign Office officials thought Johnson had agreed to the evacuation of the animals.
"Somebody is lying about what happened" about the evacuation of animals from Afghanistan, says shadow levelling up secretary Lisa Nandy
— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) January 27, 2022
"It's become increasingly clear that the prime minister's story is not credible, he has not told the truth"https://t.co/cmAJ0mFVIm pic.twitter.com/1rtCkZBsUY
Johnson today dismissed the claims that he intervened personally on behalf of the animals as “rhubarb”. (See 1.42pm.) But No 10 has failed to explain why officials in Whitehall, and others (see 3.51pm), thought he was involved, what conversations he had with people about this, and why Johnson’s parliamentary private secretary, Trudy Harrison, was involved in trying to help facilitate the airlift. After the PM’s interview, Newsnight’s Sima Kotecha released extracts from two emails showing that Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, and a senior diplomat both wanted advice from No 10 as to whether the animal charity, Nowzad, should get help. The BBC reports:
In one, a senior official to then-foreign secretary Dominic Raab said Mr Raab was “seeking a steer from No 10” on whether the charity’s staff should be called forward for evacuation.
Another, from the PM’s special representative for Afghanistan, Nigel Casey, suggests National Security Adviser Sir Stephen Lovegrove was asked to “seek clear guidance for us from No 10 ASAP on what they would like us to do”.
Peers have called for Zac Goldsmith to explain why his office sent an email last August which said Johnson had authorised the animal airlift if that was not the case.
Updated
The i’s Paul Waugh has dug out a choice quote from when Liz Truss took a rather different approach to the question of what travel arrangements were most suitable for ministers from the one she adopts now. (See 3.11pm.)
After reports that Liz Truss took a specially chartered flight to Australia, here's a quote from the 'Back to Black' cost-cutting document she co-authored in 2009: pic.twitter.com/zrCpzdMjLb
— Paul Waugh (@paulwaugh) January 27, 2022
James Forsyth’s article in the Spectator on the state of play in the Conservative party at the moment is well worth a read. Here’s an extract.
The mood in the parliamentary party is appalling. MPs are fed up with trying to explain events to voters who are brimming with righteous anger. They also feel resentment at how they’ve been treated. When Johnson pleaded with one new MP not to put a letter of no confidence in, the MP replied that this was the first time Johnson had spoken to him in 25 months. Why should he offer his support? One Tory grandee, also appealed to by Johnson, responded with a list of assurances the PM had given him but failed to honour. ‘This isn’t normal politics. It is mutiny on the Bounty,’ explains one secretary of state.
It is difficult to know how events will unfold for two reasons. First, the precise nature of the Gray report will matter a lot. Secondly, it is, in the words of one member of the government payroll, ‘increasingly hard to read the parliamentary party, as everybody is getting to the lying-to-everyone stage’.
There is a link to the article here.
It is ‘increasingly hard to read the parliamentary party, as everybody is getting to the lying-to-everyone stage’ warns one member of the government payroll https://t.co/NZ9lSrQRLS
— James Forsyth (@JGForsyth) January 27, 2022
No 10 says it's still waiting for Sue Gray report
Downing Street has still not received the Sue Gray report, a No 10 spokesman told journalists at the afternoon lobby briefing.
DUP say 21 February should be deadline for conclusion of talks on Northern Ireland protocol
The DUP has set 21 February as a fresh deadline for the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, to find a solution to the dispute over the Northern Ireland Brexit protocol.
In her first visit to Northern Ireland, Truss, who inherited Brexit negotiations from David Frost at Christmas, met the DUP’s Paul Givan and Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill, the first minister and deputy first minister respectively.
Givan said the government must take unilateral action if an agreed position cannot be reached with the EU by the fourth week of February.
But Sinn Féin has said any attempt to trigger article 16 of the protocol would cause more uncertainty in Northern Ireland.
Sources close to the foreign secretary said she was in “listening mode” and told party leaders of her “commitment to securing changes to the protocol that defend peace and stability, protect sovereignty of decision-making for all, and and ensure free flow of GB-NI goods”.
They added that she believed a deal could be done and she was looking for “durable, practical solutions”.
Updated
Ofcom chair recruitment process branded 'a shambles' by senior Tory MP
The government has reopened the application process of the post of Ofcom chair, my colleague Jim Waterson reports.
Government has readvertised the Ofcom job *yet again* after Paul Dacre turned it down and they struggled to get applicants. Should really have been sorted by December 2020. Also Channel 4 now has a temporary chair as all government media appointments are now bunged up.
— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) January 27, 2022
Boris Johnson wanted Paul Dacre, the former Daily Mail editor, to do the job, but Dacre was rejected by the board making recommendations to ministers. Other potential candidates were rejected and, controversially, Dacre was allowed to apply again when the process was reopened, with the job criteria tweaked in a manner that seemed likely to help his chances. But Dacre then pulled out of the contest and instead returned to the Mail, where he is now editor-in-chief of the parent company running the newspaper group.
Julian Knight, the Conservative MP who chairs the Commons culture committee, described the process as a shambles. He said:
The search for the next chair of Ofcom goes on in a recruitment process that would put a reality TV series to shame.
In an unexpected twist to the plot, would-be candidates have been given an extra seven days to apply. Not content with the outcome of the initial round of interviews, the DCMS department restarted the appointments process using specially-employed headhunters to get a better field of candidates, only to see a favourite walk away.
Now, that better field of candidates is not enough. The word shambles has begun to look like an understatement.
Updated
In an interview with BBC News earlier, Dominic Dyer, an animal rights campaigner involved in the rescue of staff and animals from the Nowzad charity in Kabul last August, insisted that Boris Johnson was involved in what happened. Repeating claims he has made in interviews in the past, he said:
We said all along, from the end of August, when this operation completed, that it was something that the government had supported at the highest level. I don’t think any one of your viewers would think that on my own, or working with [Paul “Pen” Farthing, the Nowzad founder] or a few volunteers, we could get an aircraft on the ground in Kabul and undertake an evacuation of this kind, in what was a very highly complex and dangerous situation.
It took an awful lot of support across Whitehall, in Defra, in the Home Office, in the Foreign Office and in Downing Street itself.
Dyer also said he did not understand why Boris Johnson did not “embrace his role in this project”, because there was significant support for the evacuation, he said.
Asked if Johnson himself directed communicated with Farthing about the evactuation, Dyer said:
The prime minister played a role because he’s the head of the government.
There were points in this process where the Ministry of Defence and the secretary of defence clearly had concerns about this operation and did not approve of what we were seeking to do ... And it took the prime minister to unlock that process.
You don’t have ministers working across Whitehall in the way that they were without approval at the highest level.
Lords call for Zac Goldsmith to explain Kabul animal airlift email
Peers have called for Zac Goldsmith to explain why his office sent an email last August which said Boris Johnson had authorised a controversial airlift of animals from Kabul – yet he told the House of Lords in December this was not the case. My colleague Dan Sabbagh has the story here.
Updated
And Keir Starmer has renewed his call for the Sue Gray report to be published in full. He said:
The Sue Gray report needs to be published in full and as soon as possible. And I mean in full - not redacted, not edited, not a summary, not parts left out. In full.
Updated
Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, said today that Boris Johnson should publish the Sue Gray report as soon as he receives it. She told ITV Border:
The report should be published immediately after Boris Johnson receives it and published in full. The longer he was to sit on it, the more suspicion people would have about what he might be doing to it.
But she also claimed it was already clear that Johnson had misled parliament.
I think it’s really hard to imagine anything she could say that would change what we already know from what’s on the record, and that’s that Boris Johnson misled parliament, and I think that’s the severity of the position he’s in.
Truss accused of wasting taxpayers' money by using government jet, not commercial flight, for Australia trip
Opposition parties have condemned the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, for using a government jet for her recent ministerial visit to Australia instead of taking a commercial flight.
The flight was revealed by the Independent, which said it would have cost around £500,000.
Commenting on the story, Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, said:
Liz Truss shows the public exactly quite how little respect this Conservative government has for taxpayers’ money with her ridiculous waste of half a million pounds on a private jet trip. This government is brazen in its disregard for upholding decency.
And Sarah Olney, the Lib Dem business spokesperson, said:
This is a staggering waste of taxpayer’s cash at a time many families are feeling the pinch. Once again we see just how out of touch this Conservative government truly is to the millions of people struggling to get by.
The Foreign Office told the Independent the jet used by Truss was a government one and that the decision to use that, instead of a commercial flight, was taken in line with the ministerial code.
The Independent reports: “It is understood the private flight was chosen for ‘security considerations’ amid fears that conversations could be overheard by other passengers.”
Updated
Johnson says tighter unemployment benefit rules will help address shortages in labour market
In a previous era the change to unemployment benefit rules announced today would have been presented, and understood, as a straightforward tightening of claimaint rules by a Conservative government likely to cut the welfare budget. (The press release about the announcement is here, and here is my colleague Patrick Butler’s story about what’s proposed.)
But, describing the policy in his pooled TV interview in north Wales, Boris Johnson presented it not as a standard Tory crackdown on benefit claimants unwilling to work, but as a necesssary response to economic success. He explained:
The difficulty is actually this economy is going so well post-Covid that we’re short of hundreds of thousands of pairs of hands to do vital jobs. So the point of Way to Work is to shorten the period when people are off work, shorten the period when people are feeling that sense of low self-esteem, maybe, because they haven’t got a job, get them into work and help to get the economy moving.
Johnson said there were 1.25m job vacancies in Britain, but 1.8 million people on welfare who might be available to fill those vacancies.
Today’s announcement does not just involve tighter sanctions; it includes a programme called Way to Work which will offer more support for job seekers, such as time with work coaches.
Updated
Johnson defends £12bn national insurance increase, claiming people understand why it's 'absolutlely vital'
In his pooled TV interview in north Wales, Boris Johnson also said that it was “absolutely vital” for the £12bn national insurance increase to go ahead. He claimed that the public understood this.
Asked about the tax rise, which is due to go ahead in April but which is now the target of a campaign by Conservative MPs and rightwing papers who want it abandoned, he said:
Every penny will go towards fixing the Covid backlogs and also social care. And the two things are connected. Don’t forget, if you go around hospitals, as I have done a lot in the last 18 months, two years, so much of the problem is caused and aggravated, made worse, by the numbers of people that are waiting in hospital that can be discharged, but they can’t be let out of hospital because we can’t find the right package of social care, and it does need to be sorted out.
But when asked to confirm that the increase would definitely go ahead, he refused to give an absolute assurance. Instead he replied:
It is absolutely vital. We have to fund the Covid backlogs, we have to fix social care. Every penny will go to that end.
I think people do understand. I don’t think there’s a family in this country that hasn’t been affected by the Covid backlogs in one way or the other ...
We had to spend over £400bn keeping the British economy going during the lockdowns.
We’ve got now to move forward, we’ve got to fix the Covid backlogs and we’ve got to sort out social care. I think that’s the right thing to do.
Updated
Newsnight’s Sima Kotecha has been tweeting some of the documentation suggesting that, despite Boris Johnson’s denials, No 10 was involved in the decision to authorise the evacuation of Nowzad staff and animals from Kabul.
Here’s the letter authorising the evacuation of Nowzad charity from Kabul (including animals) signed by the PM’s Parliamentary Private Sec .. PM says he had no involvement so bound to raise questions why his PPS was writing this letter ..? pic.twitter.com/Ew7ovCkuGM
— Sima Kotecha (@sima_kotecha) January 27, 2022
Trudy Harrison says this was written as an MP and not in her capacity as PM’s PPS
— Sima Kotecha (@sima_kotecha) January 27, 2022
2 emails seen by @BBCNewsnight showing PM’s permission was requested regarding Nowzad evacuation .. PM has always denied any involvement pic.twitter.com/czvwV3tkZF
— Sima Kotecha (@sima_kotecha) January 27, 2022
Updated
Johnson says it's 'total rhubarb' to say he authorised animal airlift from Kabul
Boris Johnson has restated his claim that he was not involved in the decision to authorise the evacuation of animals as part of the airlift evacuation from Kabul overseen by the British army last August.
In a pooled broadcast interview in north Wales, asked if he had authorised the evactuation of animals from Kabul, he said:
No, this whole thing is total rhubarb.
I was very proud of what our armed services did with Op Pitting and it was an amazing thing to to move 15,000 people out of Kabul in the way that we did.
I thought it was also additionally very good that we were able to help those vets who came out as well.
But I can tell you that the military always prioritised human beings and that was quite right.
I think we should be incredibly proud of Op Pitting and what it achieved.
At the time of the evacuation, the Ministry of Defence insisted that in facilitating the departure of a charter flight taking staff and animals from Nowzad, an animal shelter run by the former Royal Marine Paul “Pen” Farthing, it was not putting animals ahead of humans because by that stage of the evacuation operation all the people who could have been evacuated by the MoD had already been helped.
However this claim has been widely challenged, including by a Foreign Office whistleblower. It is claimed that helping Nowzad get its animals out was a distraction from the evacuation effort for humans.
Updated
And here is a summary of the main points from the Downing Street lobby briefing.
- The PM’s press secretary said that the Sue Gray report could “hypothetically” be published today or tomorrow - but he said No 10 has still not received it. (See 12.33pm.)
- The spokesman said No 10 was “in no way” seeking to block the Gray report and that claims to the contrary were false. He said:
We are in no way seeking to block the report nor are we seeking to do as Mark Harper suggests. It remains our intention to publish the report as it is received from the investigation.
The spokesman was responding to this tweet from Mark Harper, a former Conservative chief whip.
Heartbreaking and so difficult to watch. This happened to families up and down our country.
— Mark Harper (@Mark_J_Harper) January 27, 2022
That’s why Sue Gray’s report matters.
The report must be published in full. Any attempt to conceal or suppress crucial details would be wrong. https://t.co/69ssGfAMtL
- The spokesman said there were “no plans” to abandoned the national insurance increase set to take effect in April. But he would not absolutely commit to the tax rise coming into force at that point.
- The spokesman rejected claims that partygate has led to paralysis in government. “Absolutely not,” he said, when this claim was put to him. As examples of the government taking important decisions, he cited plan B ending, changes to unemployment benefit rules announced today and the role in tackling Russian aggression on the border with Ukraine.
- The spokesman said that Trudy Harrison was acting as a constituency MP when she tried to help find a flight to evacuate animals from Kabul. Harrison is also Johnson’s parliamentary private secretary and the firm thought Harrison was acting with Johnson’s support. But the spokesman would not say why Harrison was acting in this case when she had no direct constituency link with the animal charity needing help. And he did no deny suggestions that Harrison spoke about the case with Johnson. The spokesman also restated the No 10 claim that Johnson was not involved in the decision to authorise the animal evacuation.
Updated
No 10 says Gray report 'hypothetically' could be out today or tomorrow - but PM still not received it
At the Downing Street lobby briefing the prime minister’s spokesman said that No 10 has still not received the Sue Gray report. No 10 had had “no sight [of it] whatsoever”, he said.
The spokesman also said it was “hypothetically” possible for the report to be published today or tomorrow. He said:
It remains hypothetically possible to still publish it today or tomorrow.
We have committed to publishing in the house. I think, hypothetically, it is not a requirement under the terms of reference. Obviously we would want to do so at the earliest possible opportunity but we are not in control of at which point we are in receipt of the report.
Asked what would happen if No 10 received the report on Friday night, he said:
We would need to make a decision in conjunction with the Speaker about what he thought was acceptable, obviously balancing the significant public interest in having sight of the report.
The spokesman was referring to the Speaker’s desire for important announcements to be made in parliament first, and his likely anger if the report were to be published at the weekend when the Commons was not sitting.
Earlier, during business questions, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the Commons implied that publishing over the weekend with the house not sitting would be wrong. He said:
I don’t know when the report will be published, I don’t know when it will be possible to announce a statement, but I am certainly of the view, and I know Mr Speaker you share this view, that this house has the right to know first.
Here are three stories from other papers today about the efforts Boris Johnson has been making to win over Conservative MPs who might be tempted to call for a no confidence vote.
- Tory MPs want Johnson to reverse the national insurance increae, the Daily Mail reports.
MAIL: Tory MPS tell Boris: spike tax hike and we’ll back you #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/x3x9lTs19Q
— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) January 26, 2022
The Daily Mail is campaigning for exactly this outcome, and so a splash like this is not particularly surprising. But that does not mean that Tory MPs aren’t making this argument.
-
“Boris Johnson has told Tory MPs that he has received “bad advice” and warned that deposing him could result in a general election, the Times (paywall) reports. It says:
The prime minister held 15-minute meetings with more than a dozen Tory MPs in recent days as he tries to shore up his support before a potential confidence vote.
He has claimed that his successor would have to hold an election to legitimise their leadership and also argued that now is the wrong time to remove him given that Russia is on the brink of invading Ukraine.
- Johnson has “privately pleaded with at least 30 potential rebels in a bid to head off a leadership challenge”, the Telegraph (paywall) reports. It says:
Several of the prime minister’s most loyal supporters are running a “shadow whipping operation” to bring wavering MPs back on side. They are telling rebels they do not have enough support on the Tory benches to reach the 54 letters of no confidence required to mount a challenge.
Mr Johnson is insisting to colleagues that he will not resign over the latest allegations of parties in Downing Street during the pandemic, which are being investigated by both Sue Gray, a civil servant, and the Metropolitan Police.
Lord Frost, who resigned as a Brexit minister before Christmas saying that he was unhappy with the goverrnment’s domestic policy agenda, has restated his call for a shift to the right in government policy. In tweets backing the argument in a Telegraph column by Allister Heath, Frost said “huge changes” were needed “to make sure we can create wealth and enhance freedom”.
1. As always @AllisterHeath is spot on in @Telegraph.
— David Frost (@DavidGHFrost) January 27, 2022
https://t.co/MwvfBpOiBI
Whatever conclusions about the leadership Tory MPs may draw from the Gray report and whatever follows, the crucial thing is significant change in policies and in systems & people around the PM:
2. In policies - so we start delivering the huge changes needed to make sure we can create wealth & enhance freedom
— David Frost (@DavidGHFrost) January 27, 2022
In systems & people - so the levers of government work, and, as Allister says,"with all the neo-socialists, green fanatics and pro-woke crowd exiting immediately".
Frost was too modest to say that one of Heath’s recommendations was for Johnson to “recant his worst policies and delegate huge amounts of power to a David Frost-like CEO in No 10”.
Labour restates threat to use vote to get Gray report published in full if parts of it held back
Lisa Nandy, the shadow levelling up secretary, said this morning that the public is getting “deeply frustrated” by the delays in the publication of the Sue Gray report. She said:
I think the whole country is deeply frustrated about this run-around that the prime minister is giving the public with this delayed report into what has been going on in Downing Street.
I think people up and down this country have made enormous sacrifices and are finding it very, very difficult to witness a prime minister who doesn’t seem to think he needs to abide by the rules that he himself made, that they stuck by at great personal cost.
The prime minister needs to just get on with this now, he needs to come clean about what’s been going on Downing Street and his part in it as well.
Nandy also restated Labour’s threat to use a parliamentary vote to try to get the full Gray report published in the event of some of it being held back. She said:
If [the PM] won’t publish it in full, we will take every step that we can to make sure that information is in the public domain.
Labour could table a “humble address” motion when it next allocated time for a debate in the Commons demanding the publication of the full report. Humble address motions are binding on the government and if the motion were to pass - quite a big if, because it would require around 40 Tories to rebel - the document would have to be published.
Thérèse Coffey, the work and pensions secretary, was also asked about the Afghan dog rescue story on her morning interview round. Unlike Jacob Rees-Mogg (see 11.11am), she did not just dismiss the story as an irrelevance. Instead she said that Boris Johnson has said he had no role in “individual evacuations” and that Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, has said that he personally was in charge of the operation.
Asked, if that was the case, why a Foreign Office official wrote an email saying “the PM has just authorised [animal charity Nowzad’s] staff and animals to be evacuated”, Coffey told LBC:
It’s not unusual in parliament and in government for people to say, for their pet projects, the PM said it’s a priority.
There will be an urgent question on this in the Lords later.
MEDIA: @LordSpeaker has granted @Lord_Collins an urgent question re: expectations on Ministers to abide by standards of conduct set out in para 1.3(c) of #MinisterialCode & para 4.67 of @UKHouseofLords Companion to Standing Orders.
— LabourLordsUK (@LabourLordsUK) January 27, 2022
Happening at 11.50am#Nowzad #ZacGoldsmith
Rees-Mogg accuses MP questioning PM's Afghan dog rescue denials of 'fussing about a few animals'
In the Commons Chris Bryant, the Labour MP and member of the foreign affairs committee, asked Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the house, about the new email evidence that was published yesterday suggesting that Boris Johnson was lying when he said he was not involved in the decision to authorise the rescue of dogs and cats from Afghanistan last summer as part of the humanitarian airlift.
Bryant said it was important to get to the bottom of what actually happened. He went on:
There may be a perfectly innocent explanation - but it may be guilty as charged, mayn’t it?
In response, Rees-Mogg did not addresss the disrepancy between the email evidence and the No 10 claims at all. Instead he just criticised Bryant for “fussing about a few animals”. He said
Under Operation Pitting (the Kabul evacuation) our armed forces and civil service worked around the clock to evacuate 15,000 people, including around 8,300 British nationals and 5,000 people through the Afghan relocations policy.
This was an incredibly successful and pressurised operation and our armed forces once again, showed what amazing things they can do when called upon to do it.
And [Bryant] is fussing about a few animals. I think it shows the level of seriousness which he characteristically brings to today’s debate.
Updated
Politics Live celebrates 2,500th edition, with more than one billion page views
Normally I’m not big on birthdays, or boasting, but as someone who has played a role in embedding daily live blogs in the media ecosystem, I’d like to point out that today is a special day for the Guardian’s Politics Live blog. It’s our 2,500th edition.
Politics Live started here, soon after the May 2010 general election. During the campaign I had been writing a daily election blog which was innovative and turned out to be popular, and afterwards I just kept going under the PL banner.
Colleagues who crunch data for the Guardian have been looking at the statistics, and they are remarkable. Since 2016 (the first full year for which we have data), the blog has received just over one billion page views (or hits, as they are more commonly called). That is when someone clicks on a story to read. It’s an astonishing figure.
Websites like the Guardian also record how long people spend reading online articles and since 2016 the total amount of time all readers have spent reading the blog comes to 21.4 million hours. I hope that wasn’t all the guy who was in touch the other day to recall being distracted by the blog during Brexit while he was meant to be revising for exams.
And since 2016 we’ve published 17.4 million words in the blog - equivalent to 250 normal novels, or 30 copies of War and Peace.
Not all those words are from me. I quote and aggreggate a lot, so much of that content will have come from somewhere else. And I’m not the only person writing Politics Live. Guardian colleagues regularly write the blog too, particularly in the evening or on Fridays if I’m not around. (You can always check who the actual writer is at any given moment by checking the byline in the top left hand corner.)
And it is not just Guardian journalists who contribute. We only have data on this since 2019, but over the last 30 months we have published 6.7 million comments below the line. Thank you.
A few years ago I discussed what it is like writing the live blog, and why I think it is a valuable contribution to Guardian journalism, in more detail here.
I haven’t been ambushed by cake yet, but the day is young. Back to work ...
Updated
Rees-Mogg signals Johnson won't be making statement to MPs on Sue Gray's report today
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the Commons, has just said that the government wants to ensure MPs can spend all day in the Commons today debating Holocaust Memorial Day. He said the government had not tabled any statements that might take away time from the debate, and he thanked the opposition for not tabling urgent questions either. The government wanted to “devote the whole time to debating Holocaust Memorial Day”, he said.
He did not categorically say that there would be no Commons statement on the Sue Gray report later, but he might just as well have done. Increasingly it looks as if the Johnson stateement won’t come until next week.
Dorries backs claim replacing Johnson would lead to early general election
Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary and one of Boris Johnson’s most diehard ministerial supporters, has backed Jacob Rees-Mogg’s claim that the removal of Johnson would lead to a general election. Johnson and his team have been making this argument to Conservative MPs in the hope that, given the healthy Labour lead in the polls, this might help to discourage them from calling for confidence vote in Johnson.
Blair as example of why we won’t need GE is wrong. It was yonks ago Blair to Brown smooth pre announced handover, no leadership election. Brown was still pressured to go, bottled it and then lost.
— Nadine Dorries (@NadineDorries) January 27, 2022
V different times pre rolling 24hr news / social media.
Rees-Mogg, the leader of the Commons, argued on Newsnight earlier this week that, because the UK was moving to a “presidential system”, a new PM would have to call an election.
Last night, on ITV’s Peston, Damian Green, the former first secretaray of state, became the latest Tory to accuse Rees-Mogg of getting this wrong. He said:
Jacob, bless him, is talking nonsense in that. We have a system of parliamentary democracy, he’s leader of the House of Commons, he must have noticed that.
And just, you know, probably the two most presidential prime ministers we have had in my lifetime have been Thatcher and Blair. Both of them left in the middle of a parliament and both of their successors went on for the whole term of that Parliament.
So this idea that every time you change prime minister you have to have a general election is just constitutional nonsense.
As mentioned earlier, the BBC were calling it Grayja vu this morning. A reader has been in touch to suggest that an alternative would be Groundhog Gray.
PM leaves London for trip, making statement on Gray report today increasingly improbable
Boris Johnson has left No 10 and is doing a visit later this morning, Sky News reports. That means the prospect of his doing a statement in the Commons on the Sue Gray report later today is increasingly unlikely. In his Red Box briefing (paywall) for the Times, Patrick Maguire says the planned trip today will take the PM several hundred miles away from London.
Updated
Johnson will not have to resign if police interview him under caution, ministers say
Good morning. As one journalist on the Today programme put it this morning, it’s Grayja vu. We’re still waiting for the report from the senior civil servant Sue Gray into partygate that could determine whether or not Boris Johnson gets to stay on as prime minister. Earlier this morning it still had not formally been submitted to No 10. Johnson says he wants to publish it soon after he gets it, and make a statement to MPs too, and it is possible that this could happen today. But many MPs are not at Westminster. The business is light, with a debate on Holocaust Memorial Day the main focus, and Tory MPs are on a one-line whip, which means they don’t have to attend. As the Telegraph’s Christopher Hope reports, a delay until next week is looking increasingly possible.
LATEST As things stand, senior Government figures are expecting the Sue Gray report early next week.
— Christopher Hope📝 (@christopherhope) January 27, 2022
The wait goes on ...
Thérèse Coffey, the work and pensions secretary, was on the interview round this morning. Asked when the Gray report would come out, she replied: “I genuinely don’t know.”
Boris Johnson is still trying hard to shore up support among Tory MPs, and I will post more on that later. But in interviews last night at least one new line emerged: ministers say that, even if Johnson were interviewed by the police under caution, he would not have to resign.
When Tony Blair was PM, and the police wanted to interview him about the cash-for-honours affair, he made it known to them that, if they interviewed him under caution (ie, as a suspect, not a witness), he would feel obliged to resign. The police backed off, and interviewed him without cautioning him first. (In the event, no one was charged at all.) If Blair thought he was establishing a precedent, it is not one Johnson intends to follow. In an interview on Channel 4 News last night Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the Commons, was asked if Johnson would resign if the police felt the need to read him his rights before taking a statement from him on partygate. Rees-Mogg replied:
No, of course that wouldn’t be a resigning matter because people are innocent in this country until proved guilty. And it is worth bearing in mind the police themselves have said that the fact that they are investigating something doesn’t mean that any crime has necessarily been committed. They are investigating because that is what the police do.
(Rees-Mogg was wrong about this. On Tuesday Dame Cressida Dick, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, said the police were only investigating these “after the fact” lockdown incidents because they appeared to be “serious and flagrant” breaches of the rules and there seemed to be no “reasonable defence”.)
And later, on ITV’s Peston, Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, was also asked if being interviewed under caution would be a resignation matter for the PM. He replied: “No I wouldn’t go that far.” He also implied cash for honours was a more serious scandal, saying it raised “very serious questions about propriety and ethics”.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.30am: Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary, gives a speech at the advertising industry’s annual conference.
After 10.30am: Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the Commons, takes questions in the Commons on next week’s business.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
12pm: Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, takes questions from MSPs.
I may cover some UK Covid developments here, but there is more on our global live blog, including details of this morning’s announcement that restrictions on visiting people in care homes in England will be eased from Monday.
I try to monitor the comments below the line (BTL) but it is impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to holdinanswer questions, and if they are of general interest, I will post the question and reply above the line (ATL), although I can’t promise to do this for everyone.
If you want to attract my attention quickly, it is probably better to use Twitter. I’m on @AndrewSparrow.
Alternatively, you can email me at andrew.sparrow@theguardian.com
Updated
