Health secretary wrong to say many junior doctors do not support strike, says BMA – as it happened

4.41pm GMT

Afternoon summary

• The BMA has hit back at Victoria Atkins after she claimed that many junior doctors were unhappy about its decision to call strikes for this week, and for six days in early January. (See 3.07pm.) But it has defended her decision to call junior doctors “doctors in training” during interviews this morning, even though Labour said the term was insulting. (See 11.24am.) The BMA said it found the term junior doctors “infantilising”. (See 1.57pm.)

• Cancer patients and women having induced or caesarean section births could come to harm unless junior doctors in those areas of care abandon their plans to strike in January, hospital bosses have warned.

• Keir Starmer has backed calls for a change in the law on assisted dying after the issue was brought to the fore by Dame Esther Rantzen.

• Government borrowing was higher than expected last month despite an increase in tax revenues and a reduction in the level of energy support for millions of households.

• A coroner has given the Home Office six weeks to provide a written statement on the case of an asylum seeker who is believed to have killed himself onboard the Bibby Stockholm barge.

• The UK government’s decision to set catch limits for fish populations above those recommended by scientific advice is to be challenged in the courts by marine conservationists who accuse ministers of breaking their own post-Brexit rules.

Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, and Swiss federal councillor Karin Keller-Sutter holding a press conference after an agreement of mutual recognition covering financial services in Bern, Switzerland, this afternoon. Photograph: Peter Schneider/EPA

4.41pm GMT

Last month, after the autumn statement, George Osborne, the former Tory chancellor turned podcaster, was one of the first commentators to suggest that Jeremy Hunt’s announcements had made a May election more likely. Today, proving that he has grasped the first law of punditry, which is to cover all your bases so that you never look wrong, he has said that he expects the election to be in November or December.

On his Political Currency podcast, which he co-hosts with Ed Balls, Osborne said:

I’ve been talking to various people … and so all my conversations do indicate to me that they [Downing Street] are looking at the back end of next year. I don’t think anyone at the top of the Tory party is now thinking that a spring election, a May election, is a running possibility.

And even an October election is not really on the cards because they’ll be thinking of using September, October, to launch what is more likely, in my view now, to be a November, December election. But it will be in 2024.

To be fair, Osborne never said he expected the election to be in May; he just said that the autumn statement opened that up as an option.