Minister defends No 10 claim that HS2 decision had…

Minister defends No 10 claim that HS2 decision had not yet been taken despite prerecorded announcement - as it happened

4.10pm BST

Afternoon summary

HS2 will not be extended to Euston unless enough private investment is secured, it has been reported.

Mark Harper, the transport secretary, has said there was nothing wrong with Downing Street saying the final decision on HS2 had not been taken when Rishi Sunak had already recorded a video announcing its cancellation. (See 9.31am.)

Rishi Sunak has denied that HS2 high-speed rail will be reduced to a mere “shuttle service” between London and Birmingham.

Ireland’s prime minister has said he is concerned to see the UK “disengaging from the world”, and accused it of turning inwards by leaving the EU, slashing international aid and now considering abandoning a human rights treaty.

Rishi Sunak with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, at the European Political Community summit in Granada, Spain. Photograph: Juanjo Martin/PEUE/EPA

Updated at 4.12pm BST

3.59pm BST

Osborne warns Sunak not to disown achievements of Cameron government

David Cameron and his allies are surprised that Rishi Sunak has chosen to disassociate himself from Cameron-era Conservatism, George Osborne has said.

The former chancellor said that this might just be “rhetoric” in a conference speech. But if it signalled an intention by Sunak to open “a new fight in the Tory party”, it would be a mistake, Osborne said.

Osborne, who is a close friend and ally, was speaking on his new podcast, Political Currency, which he co-hosts with Ed Balls.

Cameron and Osborne have both criticised Sunak’s decision to ditch the second phase of HS2, a project championed by the Cameron government.

But Sunak went further in his speech yesterday. By saying that Britain endured “30 years of a political system which incentivises the easy decision, not the right one”, he was seeking to disassociate himself from every Conservative PM since John Major.

Osborne said this piece of positioning came “as a bit of a surprise to me and my friends, including to David” because, when Sunak became PM, Cameron’s supporters though there was “a return … to a Cameroon way of doing things”. Sunak had “made deliberate efforts to bring people back into the fold, to get the party back together”, Osborne said.

He went on:

We’ll see whether it’s just the rhetoric in a conference speech, whether he’s serious about it …

If it’s just a device, if it’s just a clever way of doing a conference speech – and let’s be fair, it was a pretty good, well-delivered conference speech – fine.

But if he’s really going to set about trying to unpick or tear down what I regard as the achievements of that government, then he is opening up a new fight in the Tory party, and that is not something I think is going to help him electorally.