The international development minister, Andrew Mitchell, is taking the unusual step of trying to build explicit cross-party support for a white paper due to be published this autumn amid a string of critical global summits.
Announcing the initiative this week, he told the Guardian: “The white paper will be a parliamentary command paper by the government, but it does not work unless you have agreement across the political parties. After all, international development and British leadership on this is not a Labour or Tory thing. It’s a British thing.”
