Summary of the day …
Humza Yousaf has said he is shocked by the embezzlement charges levelled against Peter Murrell, the former chief executive of the Scottish National party. Police Scotland announced on Thursday evening that Murrell, who is married to Yousaf’s mentor and predecessor as first minister Nicola Sturgeon, had been rearrested and charged with embezzlement of SNP funds. Sturgeon said the situation has been “incredibly difficult”
Rishi Sunak has faced criticism from healthcare professionals and been accused by Labour of trying to score “cheap headlines” after the prime minister outlined a plan he said would end “sicknote culture” in the UK. Speaking in London, Sunak said “We don’t just need to change the sicknote, we need to change the sicknote culture so the default becomes what work you can do – not what you can’t”. He outlined five reforms he said the Conservative government would undertake in the next parliament. Keir Starmer suggested Sunak should focus on his pledge to reduce NHS waiting lists rather than producing a “reheated version” of something the government announced years ago. The British Medical Association (BMA) described the prime minister as “pushing a hostile rhetoric”.
The prime minister also said his patience has “run thin” on his failure to get his Rwanda deportation plans through parliament, and has pledged that the Commons will “sit there and vote until it’s done” on Monday.
Rodric Williams, a senior in-house lawyer at the Post Office, has been accused of being involved in “suppression, obstruction and cover up” by Ed Henry KC, who is representing victims at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry. Chair Wyn Williams told Rodric Williams that “those two things don’t sit very easily together, do they?” when he was confronted with evidence that the Post Office was maintaining that the 2010 conviction of Seema Misra was safe in 2014 when it had been advised in 2013 that an expert Fujitsu witness was unreliable.
Carers have described suffering an “avalanche of utter stress” due to the government’s “abhorrent” approach to clawing back benefits, as official figures revealed the widespread ill health of those caring for loved ones
Starmer and his deputy Angela Rayner campaigned together in Derby to highlight Labour’s plans to release some green belt land in areas without enough brownfield sites as part of its housing policy if it wins the next election.
Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey has claimed his party could outperform opinion polls on general election voting intention and gain coucil seats in what he called “blue wall” constitunecies.
Disgraced former prime minister Boris Johnson has breached UK government rules by being “evasive” about his relationship with a company that set up a meeting between him and Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro, the business appointments watchdog has said. It has written to Johnson and deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden warning of the breach
The delivery of the CalMac ferry MV Glen Sannox has been delayed again for another two months
Thank you for reading, and all your comments today. I am off to listen to the new Taylor Swift album. I will see you somewhere on the Guardian website soon.
The Post Office Horizon IT inquiry has finished for the day. It will resume on Tuesday with Susan Crichton, the former company secretary and general counsel of the Post Office as the witness. Her name has cropped up a lot in the evidence so far and it should prove to be fascinating.
BBC business correspondent Emma Simpson has noted that one of the key bits of evidence to be laid bare today, as Rodric Williams, a senior in-house lawyer at the Post Office, was giving evidence, was the discrepancy in what the Post Office was saying in public about potential remote access to the Horizon IT system by Fujitsu compared to what it appeared to know. Simpson wrote:
Subpostmasters were repeatedly told that no one else but could access their branch accounts. Prosecutions hinged on this crucial point.
Rodric Williams commissioned the Deloitte Report on Horizon in 2014. It finds remote access was possible, without postmasters knowing about it, but it would have to be a deliberate act.
Yet at the same time Second Sight [independent investigators hired by the Post Office] and BBC Panorama were being told it wasn’t possible.
Williams said he’d “missed”’ these key details of the Deloitte report, despite being the point man on it. He didn’t recall anything being done to correct the statement to the BBC.
What the Post Office was saying publicly was very different to the emails flying behind the scenes.
Crucially, once the Post Office had this information, they also didn’t appear to take any action to disclose this to the legal teams of subpostmasters who had been convicted prior to that date.
