Raab rejects claim that Johnson’s government was ‘puppet regime’ run by Cummings – as it happened

Boris Johnson and his then special adviser Dominic Cummings during Covid. Photograph: Daniel Leal/AFP/Getty Images

5.30pm GMT

Afternoon summary

• Rishi Sunak has intensified his diplomatic spat with his Greek counterpart, accusing Kyriakos Mitsotakis of using his recent trip to London to “grandstand” over the issue of the Parthenon sculptures.

• Keir Starmer ridiculed Rishi Sunak’s handling of the Greek PM at PMQs, saying Sunak was engaged in a “one-man war on reality”. He also described Sunak as someone with “the reverse Midas touch”. (See 1.36pm.)

• Rishi Sunak has rejected the suggestion that Brexit could be in peril after Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, claimed that the UK could be on a path to rejoining the European Union.

• The Home Office does not know the whereabouts of 17,000 asylum seekers whose claims have been marked as withdrawn, officials have admitted. As Rajeev Syal reports, amid a stalled Rwanda deportation scheme and rising costs for housing people seeking refuge in hotels, the two most senior officials in the department told the Commons home affairs committee that marking those claims as “withdrawn” would help hit Rishi Sunak’s target of reducing the “legacy backlog” by the end of this year. Tim Loughton, a Conservative member of the committee, has just told Radio 4’s PM programme that this was one of the worst performances by senior civil servants at a committee he had ever seen. Stephen Kinnock, the shadow immigration minister, said the hearing showed that the asylum system was broken under the Conservatives. He said in a statement:

Home Office officials let the cat out of the bag that under the Tories, 17,000 asylum seekers have gone missing.

Labour first warned back in August that the Conservatives were cooking the asylum books by withdrawing claims for asylum seekers for spurious reasons, and then allowing those individuals to drift away undetected into the underground economy.

This is more evidence of an asylum system broken by the Conservatives.

• Dominic Raab, the former foreign secretary and former deputy PM, has told the Covid inquiry that he does not accept the Boris Johnson goverment was a “puppet regime” run by Dominic Cummings. (See 4.50pm.) He made his case after Sajid Javid, the former chancellor and former health secretary, told the inquiry that he did think Cummings was the person really in charge in early 2020. (See 3.25pm.)

Keir Starmer at PMQs. Photograph: Uk Parliament/Jessica Taylor/Reuters

Updated at 5.44pm GMT

5.10pm GMT

Turning back to the backlog of asylum applications (see 10.38am), PA Media says data published last week showed the backlog of asylum applications – rather than individuals – stood at 122,585 as of 29 October this year, down 12% from a record 138,782 at the end of February.

The “legacy” backlog of asylum applications (defined as applications submitted before June 2022, when the Nationality and Borders Act came into force) stood at 33,253 as of 29 October, down nearly a half (47%) from 62,157 on 30 July.

To meet Rishi Sunak’s target of clearing the legacy backlog by the end of the year, around 16,630 applications would need to be cleared per month before 31 December.

Some 12,620 were cleared between 24 September and 29 October, and 9,604 cleared between 27 August and 24 September, figures showed.