Rishi Sunak defends Rwanda asylum policy as Tory split deepens – as it happened

5.10pm GMT

Afternoon summary

• Rishi Sunak has vowed to “finish the job” of getting his Rwanda plan off the ground as he batted away questions about his future and fought to regain control of his mutinous party.

• The former home secretary Suella Braverman has denied spreading poison within her own party to get rid of Rishi Sunak.

• Boris Johnson said there was nothing he could have reasonably done to stop lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street, calling media coverage and TV adaptations of these events “absurd” and “a travesty of the truth”.

• Boris Johnson has told the Covid inquiry that he assumed Rishi Sunak’s flagship “eat out to help out” hospitality scheme had been cleared by government scientists and was surprised to learn later that it had not.

• Russian spies have been targeting British MPs, peers, civil servants, journalists and others with cyber-hacking since 2015 as part of a concerted attempt to meddle in British politics, a Foreign Office minister has said.

• The Conservatives raised three times as much as Labour in the last quarter boosted by £10m from the will of supermarket tycoon John Sainsbury, showing they are on course to benefit from No 10’s decision to raise election spending limits.

• The BBC’s governing body has said the UK’s creative sector will be hit by the government’s decision to limit the expected licence fee increase to £10, after the culture secretary confirmed a below-inflation rise.

Rishi Sunak at his press conference. Photograph: James Manning/PA

5.03pm GMT

David Cameron has said that American lives could be at stake if the US Senate does not approve more military aid to Ukraine. As the BBC’s James Landale reports, he made the comments in a speech in Washington, where the Senate is blocking a further financial aid package.

In a thread starting here, Landale says Cameron, the new foreign secretary, said supporting Ukraine was in America’s self-interest.

UK Foreign Secretary @David_Cameron makes a punchy intervention in US domestic politics. On a visit to Washington, he tells policymakers American lives could be at risk if they do not vote through new money for Ukraine. This only hours after the Senate blocked £61bn for Kyiv.

— James Landale (@BBCJLandale) December 7, 2023

UK Foreign Secretary @David_Cameron makes a punchy intervention in US domestic politics. On a visit to Washington, he tells policymakers American lives could be at risk if they do not vote through new money for Ukraine. This only hours after the Senate blocked £61bn for Kyiv.

He told the Aspen Security Forum he was “worried” the US and the West were not giving Ukraine the support it needed against invading Russian forces & said they had to help Ukraine through the winter so it could rebuild in the spring.

“Anything less than that is a victory for Putin,” Lord Cameron said. “If we let him win in Ukraine, it will be somewhere else next and it won’t just be American money that’s at risk. It might be a Nato country so it could be American lives.”

He added: “If that money doesn’t get voted through, there are only two people that will be smiling. One of them is Vladimir Putin in Russia. The other one is Xi Jinping. And I don’t know about you but I don’t want to give either of those people a Christmas present.”

Lord Cameron challenged and rejected arguments made by some Republican senators, namely that Ukraine’s military campaign was failing, that Europe was not pulling its weight, that the strategy was not clear enough and that Ukraine was corrupt.

He said Ukraine had sunk 1/5th of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, European countries were giving twice as much support as the US, the strategy was to back Ukraine through the winter & rebuild in the spring & Ukraine now had tougher anti-corruption laws than both US & the UK.

David Cameron speaking at the Aspen Security Forum in Westminster. Photograph: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images