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

Dominic Raab, who was foreign secretary at the start of Covid and who stood in for Boris Johnson after he was hospitalised, has been giving evidence to the Covid inquiry this afternoon.

He said he did not accept the claim made by Sajid Javid (see 3.25pm) and others that Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s chief adviser, was really running the government in early 2020. Asked if he agreed with this view, he replied:

No, I don’t … I just don’t accept the characterisation that there was some sort of puppet regime.

Raab also claimed the best decisions were made with the information available at the time. He said:

When I look back, I am very conscious that we made the best decisions, with the science as fluid as it was, at that point in time, and I think that’s the best you can, in good faith, do.

Nottingham city council has issued a section 114 notice, in effect declaring itself bankrupt, as experts warn an increasing number of councils are “reaching breaking point”, Jessica Murray reports.

Keir Starmer will attend the Cop28 UN summit in Dubai and stay for talks longer than the prime minister has made time for, as he hopes to “bang the drum for Britain”.

Starmer is keen to demonstrate just how important his party deems the climate crisis is, and use the opportunity to “fight for British investment and jobs”.

The opposition leader is expected to stay in Dubai for crunch talks with world leaders, days longer than the prime minister, to showcase the types of projects he’d hope to get investment for if Labour wins the next election.

Starmer’s attendance at the environmental summit may impress many, given it is the first time an opposition leader has attended a Cop UN summit, especially a year before an expected election, for at least a decade. Ed Miliband did not attend Cop20 in Peru, a year before he stepped down as party leader. Jeremy Corbyn didn’t attend Cop25.

A spokesperson for the Labour leader said:

He aims to fight for Britain to bring jobs and investment which will cut bills, make us energy independent and tackle the climate crisis.”

The transition to net zero is a vital opportunity for the country in terms of jobs, growth and the opportunity that it provides. We believe there are great opportunities for this country in terms of being able to reduce bills, and provide energy security for the country with the drive for renewables.

Sajid Javid, the former chancellor and former health secretary, has finished his evidence to the Covid inquiry. Here are the key points from what he said.

• Javid said that, when he was chancellor, he felt Dominic Cumming was prime minister “in all but name”. He told the inquiry:

I resigned in February 2020 before the pandemic in large measure because of the actions of Mr Dominic Cummings, who was in post at the time.

I would say during my time as chancellor I considered he sought to act as the prime minister in all but name and he tried to make all key decisions within No 10 – not the prime minister.

I felt that the elected prime minister was not in charge of what was happening in his name and was largely content with Mr Cummings running the government.

Javid also said that at this point it was not unusual for him to get a request from No 10 that turned out to be inspired by what Cummings wanted, not be something Johnson wanted.

• He said many ministers felt No 10 was “dysfunctional” under Johnson in early 2020. He said:

Broadly, I think it was a widespread feeling amongst a lot of the political advisers working in number 10, many ministers, that the number 10 operation collectively was quite dysfunctional.

Asked how Johnson’s government compared with previous ones he had served under, he said:

Certainly, I think the the extent of dysfunctionality was something I had not experienced before in any government.

• Javid, as health secretary, was excluded from key meetings at No 10 when the Omicron variant was on the rise, the inquiry heard. The inquiry was shown an excerpt from Sir Patrick Vallance’s diary from December 2021. Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser at the time, said:

Health Secretary not invited to the meeting yesterday – quite extraordinary – Frost and Cx (chancellor) but no SoS (secretary of state) DHSC (Department of Health and social Care) – WTF.

• Johnson referred to people reluctant to return to the office in 2021 as “malingering” and “work-shy”, the inquiry heard. In a diary extract from July 2021, Vallance said:

PM meeting – cases up, hospital admissions up. PM looks downbeat and talks of grim predictions. Saj [Sajid Javid] says ‘we are going to have to learn to live with it’, ‘and die with it’, PM says.

Cx [then chancellor Rishi Sunak] pushes very hard for faster opening up and fuller opening up. Getting rid of all restrictions. Repeats his mantra ‘we either believe in the Vx (vaccine) or we don’t’. I pointed out we would be facing a lockdown now if it was not for the Vx.

PM says what will we do if we make masks voluntary. What will ministers say they will do ‘sometimes I will, sometimes I won’t wear one’. ‘Are we going to encourage people to wear masks? Are we going to continue with this bollocks?’

He says he wants everyone back at work ‘we can’t have the bollocks of consulting with employees and trade unions. They need to come back to work. All the malingering work shy people’. Says how much of CS [civil service] is back ‘how would you be able to tell’ he says. Saj argues for caution.

Basically it is PM and Cx against a more cautious [Michael] Gove and Saj. PM in a bad mood. End by joking ‘please record that you have overcome my natural caution and bullied me into opening up’. The whole meeting was political posturing. CS people worried. CMO and I made risks very clear.

Baldwin says she and Hunt both rebelled over the decision of the Boris Johnson government to cut aid spending from 0.7% of national income.

Hunt says he is committed to returning aid spending to the 0.7% figure when it is possible.

Baldwin says the autumn statement figures imply that will not happen in the next five years. Hunt confirms that is the case. He says:

I don’t believe it is possible to budget for that [going back up to 0.7%] in the figures, no.

Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, is giving evidence to the Commons Treasury committee about the autumn statement.

Harriett Baldwin, the Conservative chair of the committee, starts the questioning.

She says the Office for Budget Responsibility said yesterday that Hunt’s fiscal rules are the loosest of any set of fiscal rules the Treasury has had since the OBR was set up.

Hunt accepts that, but he says the OBR also said that he faced the tightest set of public finances.

Baldwin puts to Hunt that his fiscal rules are “mañana” ones – because they assume debt falling, but always in the future.

Hunt does not accept that. He says the plan is for debt to fall.

Labour says the issue of the Parthenon marbles would not be a “priority issue” under a Keir Starmer premiership.

At a post-PMQs briefing, asked if the marbles would remain in the UK under a Labour government, a party spokesperson said:

[A] Labour government will not be spending any time legislating on this matter or giving any government time to this matter. It is not a priority issue for us. There will be no change in the legal status.

As you will be well aware, there are cultural exchanges that happen the whole time between institutions and government.

If the British Museum and the Greek government were to come up with a loan agreement that was acceptable to both sides, then we obviously wouldn’t stand in the way of that. But it is not a process that we would be looking to insert ourselves into.

Asked about fears that the Greeks would not return the ancient sculptures after such an exchange deal, the spokesperson said:

Well, I think that would not meet the definition of a loan if that was the case.

That is for the British Museum and the Greek government to discuss on those terms and clearly any agreement they came to would have to be compatible with the existing law because we are not looking to change the law on these matters.

The UK should rejoin the EU, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has said, admitting that European leaders had “goofed up” on the departure of Britain from the bloc.

She made the remarks at an event in Brussels last night.

Asked if the UK could ever rejoin the EU she replied:

I must say, I keep telling my children: ‘You have to fix it. We goofed it up, you have to fix it.’ So I think here too, the direction of travel – my personal opinion – is clear.

Her remarks at an awards ceremony staged by Politico come as relations between the EU and the UK continue to improve after a near collapse of relations under Boris Johnson and Lord Frost, who negotiated the Brexit trade deal.

The new foreign secretary, Lord Cameron, made his first official return to Brussels this week after losing the keys to Number 10 in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Officially he was in the EU capital to attend a meeting of Nato foreign ministers but he squeezed in an hour-long meeting with Maroš Šefčovič, a vice-president of the European Commission and the chief Brexit negotiator following the UK’s exit from the bloc in 2020.

Although Cameron had campaigned for remain, nervousness about being back in the embrace of the EU given was evident.

He declined to speak to the media on his first day in the Belgian capital and refused any questions on the second.

It is widely assumed that it was Tony Blair who annihilated the Tories in the 1990s, but it was his predecessor, the late John Smith, who first cemented in the public mind the idea that John Major was a hapless incompetent leading an administration of utter uselessness, and he did it in a speech in the Commons in June 1993. You can watch an excerpt here.

Smith described Major as the “man with the non-Midas touch” and went on to say: “It is no wonder that we live in a country where the Grand National does not start and hotels fall into the sea.” Today Keir Starmer referenced that speech when he told Rishi Sunak:

It is ironic that he has suddenly taken such a keen interest in Greek culture when he has clearly become the man with the reverse Midas touch. Everything he touches turns to … maybe the home secretary can help me out here.

It is always quite risky resurrecting a joke that someone else has used brilliantly in the past. But by the time Starmer used this line, in his sixth question, he had already performed a fairly effective demolition job on Sunak, and so it worked fine.

The exchanges covered immigration policy and Sunak’s row with the Greek PM, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, about the Parthenon marbles. In the long term, migration is probably the most serious problem for Sunak, but today he was at his most inept trying to justify the Mitsotakis snub. Starmer asked:

Never mind the British Museum, it’s the prime minister who has obviously lost his marbles.

The Greek prime minister came to London to meet him, a fellow Nato member, an economic ally, one of our most important partners in tackling illegal immigration.

But instead of using that meeting to discuss those serious issues, he tried to humiliate him and cancelled at the last minute. Why such small politics, prime minister?

Sunak could have tried to play down the whole affair. But instead he escalated, by denouncing the Greek PM as someone who cannot be trusted to keep his word. This is what No 10 was in effect briefing yesterday, but for the prime minister to say this in parliament, about leader of a friendly country, is highly provocative. Sunak said.

Of course, we’re always happy to discuss important topics of substance with our allies, like tackling illegal migration or indeed strengthening our security.

But when it was clear that the purpose of a meeting was not to discuss substantive issues for the future, but rather to grandstand and relitigate issues of the past, it was inappropriate.

Furthermore … when specific commitments and specific assurances on that topic were made to this country and then were broken, it may seem alien to him, but my view is when people make commitments they should keep them.

Starmer replied:

I discussed with the Greek prime minister the economy, security, immigration, I also told him we wouldn’t change the law regarding the marbles. It’s not that difficult, prime minister.

And then, when Sunak in his reply said that Starmer was “backing an EU country over Britain”, Starmer hit back:

The prime minister is now saying that meeting the prime minister of Greece is somehow supporting the EU instead of discussing serious issues. He’s just dug further into that hole that he’s made for himself. Rather than deal with the facts, he’s prosecuting his one-man war on reality.

That clinched it. Wit and eloquence can count for a lot in debate, but being right is normally even better, and Starmer’s attack was powerful today because it crystallised what many Tories, as well as Labour MPs, will be thinking.

After his “hotels fall into the sea” speech (which followed Black Wednesday), Smith had the authority of a prime minister in waiting, while Major could never quite shake off the perception that he was a bit of a joke. The relationship is broadly similar today. That is not a result of today’s PMQs, but the exchanges this afternoon do confirm the picture.

Tulip Siddiq (Lab) asks about the claim in the Covid inquiry that Sunak’s view was that the government should “just let people die”. No 10 did not deny this last week. So how did people at the top of government get this idea?

Sunak says he will give evidence to the inquiry. But if Siddiq had listened to the evidence, she would have seen that Sir Patrick Vallance, whose diary was quoted, said he had not heard Sunak say that. Sunak says that is because he did not say that.

Siddiq is referring to a diary entry in which Vallance quoted Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser at the time, as saying: “Rishi [Sunak] thinks just let people die and that’s okay.” Cummings was not quoting Sunak; he was just summarising Sunak’s position as he saw it (with characteristic hyperbole).

UPDATE: Sunak said:

There is an ongoing inquiry into Covid and it’s right that process is followed, and I look forward to providing my own evidence.

But if [Siddiq] had taken the time to actually read the evidence submitted to the inquiry, she will have seen that … the chief [scientific] adviser confirmed that he did not hear me say that.

And that’s because I didn’t.

At the Covid inquiry Sajid Javid, the former chancellor and former health secretary, is giving evidence. The inquiry has just been shown an extract from his witness statement in which he said that Boris Johnson’s cabinet lacked experience, and that ministers were chosen “with a preference for loyalty over experience”. He suggests this “caused difficulties” during the pandemic.

PMQs is starting soon.

Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.

Prof Dame Jenny Harries has been giving evidence to the Covid inquiry this morning and she has had to defend an email she sent in March 2020 saying it would be “entirely clinically appropriate” to discharge Covid patients into care homes.

Harries, who is now chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency, was one of the deputy chief medical officers for England at the time.

In an email to a Department of Health and Social Care civil servant sent on 16 March 2020 (a week before the full lockdown was announced), Harries said:

Whilst the prospect is perhaps what none of us would wish to plan for, I believe the reality will be that we will need to discharge Covid-19 positive patients into residential care settings for the reason you have noted.

This will be entirely clinically appropriate because the NHS will triage those to retain in acute settings who can benefit from that sector’s care.

The numbers of people with disease will rise sharply within a fairly short timeframe and I suspect make this fairly normal practice and more acceptable, but I do recognise that families and care homes will not welcome this in the initial phase.

Sky’s Tamara Cohen has posted the screenshot on X.

Asked about the email, Harries said it “sounds awful” but was intended to provide “a very, very high level view” of what would happen if there was an “enormous explosion of cases”. She went on:

It was a very bleak picture because I think the reality was this isn’t an invitation to be discharging Covid patients, it’s actually a reality that says if hospitals overflow … those who are physically well to go will go.

When Andrew O’Connor, counsel for the inquiry, put it to Harries that the email implied “some degree of equanimity” about discharging Covid patients into care settings, she said that was just “an interpretation”. Harries went on:

This was a very high-level picture to reinforce, if you like, the position that the country was in at that weekend, and I think we’ve heard that in other places.

If people were not thinking through what likelihood was in the rising numbers of cases, as we’ve heard, I don’t think we have sensible conversations about managing risks.

This is not a policy at all. This is a statement of ‘if you have a pandemic in a country, how on earth are you going to manage that exponential rise in cases?’

Lee Anderson, the Tory deputy chair and a member of the committee, asked Rycroft and Ridley to say how many asylum seekers whose applications have been turned down have been deported in the past three years, excluding criminals and Albanians.

The two Home Office officials said they did not have those figures. They offered to write to the committee.

Anderson asked if they had figures for the last year, or for the past week, or for the last six months.

“Do you have any figures about anything?” Diana Johnson, the Labour chair of the committee asked.

Anderson went on:

I’m sorry, chair, but I find it absolutely staggering that the big boss hasn’t got a clue – not just on this question, but on nearly every other question we’ve asked today.

Rycroft repeated his promise to send the figures to the committee.

Loughton is now asking about the government’s plan to clear the number of “legacy” asylum applications – defined as applications submitted before June 2022, when the Nationality and Borders Act came into force.

Rycroft confirms that the government expects to clear these by the end of the year.

He says this has happened because more cases workers have been hired, and because more decisions are being taken a week.

Loughton asks him to confirm that one reason the backlog is being cleared is because of the big increase in the number of cases being withdrawn.

Rycroft says that is correct.

Loughton says 17,316 claims were withdrawn between September 2022 and September 2023. He says that is a 307% increase on the withdrawal rate for the year before. Is that just “fortuitous”, he asks.

Simon Ridley, the interim second permanent secretary at the Home Office, who is giving evidence with Rycroft, says it is not fortuitous.

Loughton says 5% of cases were withdrawn because they were not substantiated, 95% of withdrawals were categorised as for other reasons. The previous year only 45% of withdrawals were in the other category, he says. He suggests this is strange.

Isn’t it strange that conveniently, when faced with a very stiff target, there has been a three-fold increase (in withdrawals) for undetermined reasons, people magically not going forward with their claims, and where are those people?

He asks what has happened to the asylum seekers whose applications have been withdrawn.

Ridley replies: “In most cases I don’t know where those people are.”

Loughton sounds astonished. He asks Ridley to confirm that the Home Office hasn’t got “a clue” where these people are.

Ridley says these are people who made an asylum claim, were invited to interview, and did not turn up.

But they have not gone home, Loughton says.

Ridley says he does not know what has happened to them.

Diana Johnson, the Labour chair of the committee, intervenes. She says it is “amazing” that Ridley did not come to the hearing with precise figures on these cases, and she says that he has been “really disrespectful to this committee”.

Lee Anderson, the Tory deputy chair and a member of the home affairs committee, asked Sir Matthew Rycroft about the clause in the Rwanda deal saying that, as part of the agreement, the UK might take some asylum seekers from Rwanda. He asked how many people might come to Britain.

Rycroft refused to say. He said it was not a one-to-one agreement, and he said the government had “not got a number in mind”. He suggested that the clause was in the agreement so that, if for example someone sought asylum from Rwanda, they would not be returned to the country.

Anderson then asked if the Home Office was working on a “plan B” in case the Rwanda scheme did not work. Rycroft would not use that figure, but he said the government was working on various plans.

Here is the line in the agreement that Anderson was asking about.

The participants will make arrangements for the United Kingdom to resettle a portion of Rwanda’s most vulnerable refugees in the United Kingdom, recognising both participants’ commitment towards providing better international protection for refugees.

At the time the agreement was published, Home Office sources suggested that this clause was referring to cases where refugees might come from Rwanda to the UK in limited circumstances, such as where they might need specialised medical help.

Sir Matthew Rycroft, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, has just started giving evidence to the Commons home affairs committee, and within minutes he was struggling badly. Here are the takeaways from the early exchanges.

• Rycroft implied that the government may be giving more money to Rwanda this year – even though £140m has been given to the country, and not a single person has been deported there yet. The Labour chair of the committee, Diana Johnson, started by asking Rycroft to say how much money the government was giving to Rwanda under the scheme. He said Rwanda had already had £120m under the Migration and Economic Development Partnership (MEDP) and £20m as an upfront payment for the costs of housing asylum seekers. He said the deal anticipated additional payments each year. But he refused to say if further payments were being made, telling Johnson that ministers had decided not to give a “running commentary”. Instead the Home Office will reveal the figure in the next set of annual accounts published next year, he said.

• Rycroft said the cost of sending an asylum seeker to Rwanda would be “about the same as they would be if persons were staying in the UK”.

• But Rycroft refused to say what those costs might be. When it was put to him that the Home Office itself published an impact assessment putting the cost per person at £169,000, Rycroft accepted that was the figure in the document, but he said the Home Office did not accept it as the accurate figure.

Good morning. It’s environment day on the No 10 grid and, ahead of the Cop28 summit starting in Dubai later this week, Rishi Sunak is announcing some green initiatives. As Helena Horton reports, they include plans to designate a new national park. And, in an article for the Daily Telegraph, Sunak says he will stop councils cutting down trees without consulting residents properly.

But, on net zero, Sunak has been strongly criticised by Theresa May, the former prime minister. As PM May legislated to put the 2050 net zero target into law and, speaking to the Times, she said she was opposed to the plan in the king’s speech to legislate to ensure new North Sea oil and gas licences are issued every year. Sunak has said he wants to “max out” these resources. But May said:

I take a different view from the government on the oil and gas licences. This is about [a] phase-out and, ultimately, that is what it has to be about in terms of fossil fuels …

Obviously, energy security for us is important but … new oil and gas licences only provide for energy security if all that energy is sold into the UK and, actually, it will be sold on the world market, so I think there are some questions around that.

No 10 may want it to be environment day, but at PMQs other issues are likely to dominate. The gap between what Tory backbenchers want Sunak to do about cutting immigration, and what he seems likely to announce, seems to be growing bigger by the day, and this row is bound to come up. And Sunak is still facing widespread criticism over his decision to snub the Greek PM.

Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: David Cameron, the foreign secretary, is at the Nato-Ukraine council in Brussels.

9.30am: Sir Matthew Rycroft, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, gives evidence to the Commons home affairs committee.

10am: Prof Dame Jenny Harries, chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency, resumes giving evidence to the Covid inquiry. Sajid Javid, the former health secretary, is also due to give evidence in the morning.

10am: The OECD publishes its latest economic forecasts.

Noon: Rishi Sunak faces Keir Starmer at PMQs.

2pm: Dominic Raab, the former deputy PM, gives evidence to the Covid inquiry.

2.15pm: Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, gives evidence to the Commons Treasury committee about the autumn statement.

Also today Steve Barclay, the environment secretary, is announcing plans to designate a new national park, as part of the government’s response to the Glover review of national parks.

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