Afternoon summary
- Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons Speaker, has summoned the editor of the Mail on Sunday, David Dillon, to a meeting to discuss a story published by the paper yesterday that was widely condemned as sexist. Hoyle said reporting like this discouraged women from standing for parliament. (See 2.54pm.) Earlier Boris Johnson described the article as “sexist, misogynist tripe” and said if the Tory source for the story were identified, they would be punished.
- British universities are facing a brain drain as the row over Brexit in Northern Ireland threatens £250m in research funding from the EU, it has emerged. As my colleague Lisa O’Carroll reports, the European Research Council (ERC) has written to 98 scientists and academics who were recently approved for €172m (£145m) in grants telling them that if the UK’s associate membership of the €80bn Horizon Europe programme is not ratified they will not be eligible to draw down the money.
- The Labour party has vowed to abolish the “non-dom” tax loophole used by Rishi Sunak’s wife to save paying up to £20m in UK tax. Labour says the move could raise up to £1bn for the exchequer, but tax experts have questioned this, on the grounds that the 76,000 non-doms in the UK contributed £7.9bn in tax in 2019-20 (the most recent year for which data is available), including £5.6bn in income tax. “If non-dom status is scrapped, there is a real risk that the net effect on the UK tax base will be negative, not positive,” said Josie Hills, a tax manager at the law firm Pinsent Masons.
ITV’s political editor Robert Peston says in a blog that Boris Johnson has not even received a questionnaire from the Metropolitan police about his attendance at the party in the No 10 garden on 20 May 2020, even though some fines have already been issued in connection with the event. He says his brain is aching trying to comprehend the logic behind the Met’s approach. He says:
I want to stress, for the avoidance of doubt, that I am not saying it is a scandal or miscarriage of justice or wrong that the PM hasn’t been fined for the event on May 20, 2020. The point is I don’t know.
It is also theoretically possible that Boris Johnson will end up receiving a questionnaire and being fined, and that he is simply at the back of some weird bureaucratic queue. But this anomaly is not trivial. It matters, to the public reputation of the prime minister, how many times he is fined for breaching the Covid rules he wrote ...
Even when there are bigger problems directly affecting our lives to solve - Vladimir Putin, the cost of living - a police investigation of a serving prime minister is a massive deal. The lack of clarity and transparency on it undermines confidence in our version of democracy.
Public understanding of how the police conduct the probe and reach their decisions will be hugely important if the police themselves are to avoid the taint of incompetence or political partiality.
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