Keir Starmer denies Partygate has distracted Labour from cost of living crisis – as it happened

• Keir Starmer has rejected claims that he let Partygate distract from Labour’s campaigning on the cost of living. (See 2.54pm.)

• Boris Johnson has threatened to “privatise the arse” off the Passport Office if it cannot clear its backlog and deliver better value for money, a senior government source has told reporters. He made the comment in private as the cabinet met to discuss cost-free measures the government could take to help people cope with rising prices. (See 9.17am.) No 10 did not mention the proposal to privatise the Passport Office in its post-cabinet lobby briefing for journalists, but instead Downing Street signalled that one of its cost of living initiatives would involve cutting staff/child ratios in nurseries, to reduce childcare costs for parents. (See 12.33pm.)

• Angela Rayner has revealed she begged the Mail on Sunday not to run a story claiming a Conservative MP compared her to the character in Basic Instinct, saying the “classist” comments in the piece were disparaging about working-class people.

• Ministers appear unlikely to make the forthcoming extra bank holiday in honour of the Queen’s platinum jubilee permanent, as Downing Street poured cold water on the plans and emphasised the high cost to the economy of such a move.

• Imran Ahmad Khan, the MP found guilty this month of molesting a 15-year-old boy, advised the government on child sexual exploitation while under police caution, the Guardian can disclose.

• Peers have been debating Commons amendments to the nationality and borders bill. The bill is in the process of “ping-pong”, where it shuttles between the Commons and the Lords until the two chambers can resolve their disagreements, and peers are still pushing for measures to ensure the bill is compatible with the Refugee Convention, to allow asylum seekers the right to work after six months, to stop the automatic criminalisation of asylum seekers arriving in the UK on small boats and to limit the use of offshoring. A measure of the opposition to the bill came in the debate when Viscount Hailsham spoke about his reservations about the government’s plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. Hailsham - who was seen as a rightwinger when he served as agriculture minister in John Major’s cabinet in the 1990s - said:

The experience of the Israeli government when they tried something rather similar is not encouraging. I have great reservations about the legality of what is proposed.

I do note, of course, that ministers have repeatedly said that the policy is consistent with international law and our obligations under the 1951 convention. However, ministers repeatedly said that the policy of turning back the boats of asylum seekers was both legal and practical. However, it seems that in the face of legal challenge, both as to the practicality and legality of the policy, the Home Office yesterday backed away from that position. I view the advice from the Home Office - this Home Office - on these matters with very great caution.

But above all my reservations about the Rwanda policy are based on my concerns as to its propriety. Can it be right to offload the responsibility for individuals who for a time have come into our jurisdiction, offload them to somewhere else? For by doing so we will have ensure that ministers who are responsible for where they have gone are not accountable for the way they are treated. And I am finding myself extraordinarily uncomfortable with that concept.

Peers will vote on the bill, and three others in the “ping-pong” process”, later this evening.

Britain’s “self-lacerating classes” should realise that much of the world admires their country much more than they do, the outgoing Australian high commissioner has said.

Speaking at an event hosted by the British Foreign Policy Group thinktank, George Brandis, who has represented his country in London since 2018, said:

Britain has a lot of moral authority in far away places.

One thing that rather bothers me is that there are some in the commentariat, possibly some even in the Foreign Office, who are almost guilty about Britain’s imperial past and therefore think notions like the Commonwealth should be uttered sotto voce.

Could I tell you that among the small island states of the south-west Pacific, Britain is loved, the Queen is loved, all of the majesty of the British state is admired in those small nations which are now a very critical part of the world because they’re an object of Chinese ambition.

Britain should not underestimate its soft power in a lot of the small Commonwealth nations as the nation whose head of state is the head of the Commonwealth, and nowhere is that more so than in the south-west Pacific.

I just wish that the self-lacerating classes in Britain would realise that the world respects their own country a lot more than a lot of them do.

Labour says that trying to cut the cost of childcare by reducing staff/child ratios for nurseries (see 12.33pm), as the government seems to be considering, will “drive down quality whilst making no difference to availability”. This is from Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary.

The Conservatives are making high-quality childcare increasingly unavailable and unaffordable. Parents are having to work fewer hours or leave jobs because they cannot find or afford it, once again failing children and families.

Now the government’s solution is to drive down quality whilst making no difference to availability. Labour’s children’s recovery plan would invest in early years places for children on free school meals and boost access to before- and after-school clubs.

The Centre for Economic Performance at the LSE has published a report today on the impact of Brexit on trade with the EU.

Described as the most comprehensive study of this topic yet, it says that the introduction of new, post-Brexit rules (under the trade and cooperation agreement [TCA]) from January 2021 led to “a deep and sustained fall in relative UK imports from the EU”. It says: “This is consistent with the TCA causing a substantial increase in UK-EU trade costs and leading to a shift in UK import activity away from the EU.”

The report also says that, surprisingly, Brexit has had less impact on exports. It led to “a small and only temporary decline in relative UK exports to the EU in 2021”, the report says.

But it says that, although the overall value of exports to the EU has not fallen markedly, the composition of those exports has changed. There has been a reduction in the variety of goods being exported, it says, and a reduction in the number of buyer-seller relationships with the EU. This is because firms that were only doing relatively modest amounts of exporting to the EU have stopped. It says:

It would be a mistake to interpret the missing export value effect as evidence that UK exporters were unaffected by the introduction of the TCA. Instead, we conjecture that the TCA has increased the fixed costs of exporting to the EU, causing small exporters to exit small EU markets, but not (or at least not yet) severely hampering exports by large firms that drive aggregate export dynamics.

Commenting on the report, Drew Hendry, the SNP’s international trade spokeperson, said:

With each passing week, we see new figures that highlight the devastating impact Brexit is having on businesses across all four nations of the UK.

Ever since Boris Johnson signed his botched Brexit agreement, businesses have faced unnecessary red tape, dodgy trade deals, skyrocketing tariffs, and untold misery.

This was something Scotland did not vote for, and something Scotland will not continue to settle for.

Downing Street is facing fresh calls to widen the terms of the Covid-19 public inquiry to cover the impact of its own lockdown breaches, including Partygate and Dominic Cummings’ trip to Barnard Castle.

A grieving daughter told MPs and peers investigating the pandemic that rule breaking by the rule makers should be included in the scope of the inquiry, which is still yet to be formally established.

The draft terms of reference, which are due to be finalised by the prime minister, Boris Johnson, do not include the impact of the breaches, which have led to fixed penalty notices for the PM, chancellor and numerous Downing Street officials.

Rabinder Sherwood, who lost both her parents to Covid in January 2021, said: “Any rule breaking by the rule makers should be included in the scope of the inquiry.”

She told the all party parliamentary group on coronavirus that while ministers were breaking the rules, her family took the “painful decision” to tell her parents why they were having to keep socially distanced. That was particularly hard for her father, who suffered from dementia.

Stephen Reicher, professor of psychology at the University of St Andrews and a participant in the SPI-B group of the government’s Sage committee, said:

There is no doubt that, starting with Barnard Castle, the sense of one law for them and one law for us undermined trust.

Sir Geoff Mulgan, professor of collective intelligence, public policy and social innovation at University College London, where international Covid inquiries are being monitored, predicted the process could take three to four years to complete. He said it would require the chair, Dame Heather Hallett, to set up several parallel inquiries. That suggests final results are unlikely to be available until after the next general election, expected in 2024.

Elkan Abrahamson, a lawyer representing the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Group, said they had not seen the amended terms of reference, which will go from the chair to the PM for his approval, making bereaved families “supplicants” rather than participants in setting the agenda. He went on:

Already the openness that we’d hoped for from the inquiry seems to be ebbing away and that is a real concern.

Heating bill increases of up to 150% will lead to the widespread closures of UK swimming pools without an emergency government bailout, ministers have been told. My colleague Matthew Weaver has the story here.

Keir Starmer has rejected claims that Labour has let Partygate distract from its campaigning on the cost of living.

According to a HuffPost story by Kevin Schofield, Lisa Nandy, the shadow levelling-up secretary, complained at shadow cabinet last week that the party was focusing too much on Partygate. In the Commons last week Starmer spoke about Partygate three times: in response to Boris Johnson’s statement on the the matter on Tuesday, at PMQs on Wednesday, and in the debate on the privileges committee on Thursday.

Schofield says:

Nandy said there was a danger that voters would think “we’re all as bad as each other” if Labour continued to focus on Boris Johnson’s woes over lockdown-busting parties in Downing Street. She said Labour risked looking “out of touch” at a time when families across the country are struggling to make ends meet.

But Schofield also says that other members of the shadow cabinet did not agree with Nandy’s point.

Asked about this today, Starmer insisted that Labour’s campaign had remained focused on the cost of living. He said:

When we started the campaign, we had a laser-like focus on the cost of living and we’ve maintained that throughout.

Starmer also restated Labour’s call for an emergency budget (see 10.10am), saying that this was what the country needed, not a cabinet meeting. He said:

The cost-of-living crisis has been staring us in the face for six months now and it’s a real problem for people struggling with their bills – and the cabinet meeting this morning isn’t going to change any of that.

The BBC has a report with more on Boris Johnson’s threat to privatise the Passport Office if services do not improve. The news was originally leaked to the Evening Standard. (See 1.14pm.)

As the BBC’s Nick Eardley reports, bosses from the agency are expected to be called in for talks next week. Eardley says the PM sees this as a cost of living issue, because people are having to pay for the premium service to get their passport on time because of the delays, and he thinks privatisation could provide better value for money.

And here are some more lines from the Downing Street lobby briefing.

• Downing Street played down suggestions that the extra bank holiday being held this year in honour of the Queen’s platinum jubilee could become a permanent event. The idea has been widely floated in the media.

But the PM’s spokesperson said he was not aware of any plans to make the bank holiday permanent. He said each bank holiday “presents a considerable and significant cost to our economy and therefore each proposal would have to be considered carefully on that basis”.

• Boris Johnson has still not had a call with Emmanuel Macron, the French president, following his re-election on Sunday, the spokesperson revealed.

• The spokesperson did not deny a Sun report saying ministers are looking at plans to cut tariffs to make imports cheaper for consumers.

• The spokesperson would not comment on reports that Boris Johnson has not yet received a questionnaire from the Metropolitan police about his attendance at the party in the No 10 garden on 20 May 2020. Some fines have already been issued in connection with this, but Johnson has reportedly not been asked about it. In the Times today Steven Swinford says Johnson is “increasingly confident” that he will not be fined over this event. Sources think the Met has accepted the PM’s argument that he did not break the rules because Downing Street is his home and so he was in his own garden.

No 10 has given a fresh hint that ministers will relax the rules to allow nurseries to have fewer members of staff to help parents with costs.

In a statement about today’s cabinet, where the focus was on the cost of living, the prime minister’s spokesperson told the morning lobby briefing:

The prime minister said that, whilst our recovery from the global pandemic was faster than anybody previously expected, continued disruptions in the global economy, including in China where widespread lockdowns are still taking place – coupled with Putin’s continued crazed malevolence in Ukraine – meant the public was facing real pressures and that the government would continue to be on their side.

He said there was more to do, including in areas like childcare, to further ease pressures for those that need it most and to get even more people into high skilled, high-wage jobs.

This seemed to be a reference to plans, that have been floated before, to reduce the staff/child ratios for nurseries. As Nursery World reported last year, one plan was to allow nursery staff to supervise five children under two, rather than three, as the current rules stipulate.

Downing Street said earlier that Johnson was particularly keen to find measures that would cut costs for people without requiring the government to spend more money. (See 9.17am.)

Asked to give more details, the spokesperson said:

I think all I can say is that this is an area where the government recognises there is more to do. It is live policy work taking place and I’m sure we’ll have more to say in the future.

The spokesperson also revealed that Johnson would be personally chairing meetings of the cabinet’s domestic and economic strategy committee to finalise measures that might help people deal with the cost of living. Ministers talked through “a number of ideas” during cabinet meeting, the spokesperson said, and they would “feed into a more formal process”.

I will post more from the lobby briefing shortly.

At the Commons standards committee Mark Spencer, the leader of the Commons, and Michael Ellis, the Cabinet Office minister, have been giving evidence about the MPs’ code of conduct.

Asked if the MP responsible for the sexist briefing about Angela Rayner to the Mail on Sunday had broken any rules in the code of conduct for MPs, Spencer said the person was not showing leadership or integrity - two of the general principles in the code that MPs are meant to uphold.

But Spencer said he did not think the MP has broken any specific rule. He said:

I don’t suppose they’ve broken any rule in the house, or committed a crime that could be charged in general society. I think they’ve just acted, frankly, in an inappropriate way, and that should be roundly condemned.

Ellis said that the MP who briefed the story may have broken the rule at paragraph 17, saying MPs should not bring the house into disrepute.

But, when it was put to him that the current rules did not seem to stop briefings like this happening, Ellis said that he would be concerned if the rules were tightened to stop MPs being “obnoxious” because of the importance of protecting freedom of speech. Responding to a question from Chris Bryant, the Labour chair of the committee, Ellis said:

If your contention is that there ought to be a new requirement to explicitly, or more explicitly, demonstrate anti-discriminatory attitudes, then the balance that has to be borne when one starts to drill down ... one has to consider the chilling effect that, unwittingly, on debate that might be affected.

As [Spencer] was saying, nobody wants to stifle legitimate debate, even raucous, robust debate, even politically contentious issues where people express themselves in an obnoxious fashion, because it’s important to our democracy don’t people don’t feel intimidated into expressing their views.

So the challenge, as ever with difficult issues, is to balance those two very important [principles].

The committee published a report in November with draft proposals for reforms to the code of conduct. One of its most controversial proposals was for a descriptor to be included saying the principle of respect means MPs should “demonstrate anti-discriminatory behaviours”. The draft descriptor says:

Members should abide by the parliamentary behaviour code and should demonstrate anti-discriminatory attitudes and behaviours through the promotion of anti-racism, inclusion and diversity.

William Hague, the former Conservative leader and former foreign secretary, is a Tory loyalist who does not criticise the party lightly. In his Times column today he devotes the first six paragraph to saying how he always wants to defend the party leader and why he believes Boris Johnson has done “much” that is worth supporting. However, the column only gets going with the seventh paragraph, which starts with the word “But ...”

Hague says that defending Johnson is “very hard”.

More than any other Tory leaders in my lifetime, Johnson also does things that make defending him very hard. It is bad enough when ministers and officials hold what look to be parties during a national lockdown, but much harder to excuse when the explanation varies over time.

Hague says a key problem is that Johnson does not stick to a consistent message.

Johnson has a natural, irrepressible tendency to try to cheer up the audience in front of him. Even if he has to go through the humblest apologies on the floor of the Commons, as he did last Tuesday, he will then go upstairs to the 1922 Committee of his own MPs and seek roars of approval for jokes and ripostes to the attacks of the Archbishop of Canterbury. And in meetings with MPs in January he often gave the impression he thought he had done nothing wrong, even though he was apologising to parliament in the same week. The inconsistency of manner and approach tends to undermine his support rather than secure it ...

The desire to lift the morale of those around him, irrespective of the wider message, is probably how the whole parties saga started for Johnson. If he is not careful it will be how it ends. He will only survive if his party hears the same message, inside and out.

In interviews this morning James Heappey, the armed forces minister, said he approved of the Speaker’s decision to summon the editor of the Mail on Sunday, David Dillon, to a meeting to discuss its sexist article about Angela Rayner. Heappey said:

If the Speaker is going to put a shot across the bows about the way women in parliament are being reported, that’s a good thing. I have no doubt he is protecting freedom of speech and he won’t want to see that impinged but I do think that Westminster has got itself into a mess and it looks awful.

Associated Newspapers, which publishes The Mail on Sunday, has declined to comment on the controversy.

Here are the main points from Angela Rayner’s interview with ITV’s Lorraine Kelly.

• Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, said the Mail on Sunday article published about her at the weekend was not just sexist, but classist too. She said:

It wasn’t just about me as a woman, saying that I was using the fact I’m a woman against the prime minister - which I think is quite condescending to the prime minister as well, it shows you watch his MPs think about his behaviour - but it was also about steeped in classism as well, and about where it come from, and how I grew up, and the fact that I must be thick and must be stupid because I went to a comprehensive school.

And they talk about my background, because I had a child when I was young, as if to say I was promiscuous - that was the insinuation - which I felt was quite offensive for people from my background.

• She said that when she heard the article was going to be published, she was particularly worried about the impact on her children. She said:

When I heard of the story that was coming out, and we rebutted it instantly, [saying] ‘this is disgusting, it’s completely untrue, please don’t run a story like that’. Because I’ve got teenage sons, and I was with my teenage sons, and I felt really sad again that my weekend ... I was trying to prepare my children for seeing things online, they don’t want to see them often portrayed that way. I felt really down about that.

• She said she felt she felt she can “hold my own” against Boris Johnson, “more so when we’re in the debating chamber”.

• She said she was “overwhelmed” by how much support she had had since the article was published, from people condemning its sexism.

• She said she had worn a trouser suit for the Lorraine interview because she did not want to be judged by what she wore. She said the Mail on Sunday article had been illustrated with a picture of her from a previous appearance on the show, wearing a skirt. It was a John Lewis tailored dress, she said, which she thought was “quite posh”. She said:

I wanted to be defiant as well, because I don’t think that women should be told how to dress - but I didn’t want to distract from the fact that, actually, it’s not about my legs.

I didn’t want people at home thinking ‘Let’s have a look to see what her legs are like and how short her skirt is or not’.

Because I feel like I’m being judged for what I wear, rather than what I’m saying to you and how I come across.

Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, is being interviewed on ITV’s Lorraine.

Rayner says she asked the Mail on Sunday not to run the story it did at the weekend. When she was told about it, she was with her children. She did not want to be portrayed like that.

She was “crestfallen” that someone had said that to a paper, and they reported that.

But she was “heartened” by the response, and the overwhelming condemnation the story attracted.

The story was not just sexist. It was “steeped in classism” too, she says. She says it implied that she was thick. And the reference to her having a child aged 16 implied she was promiscuous, she says.

She says the story was offensive. “I think I hold my own against Boris Johnson in the Commons chamber,” she says.

Good morning. Boris Johnson is chairing cabinet this morning, and normally we are only told what’s on the agenda once its over. But ahead of today’s meeting No 10 aissued a lengthy press release saying that Johnson would order his minister to focus on the cost of living crisis.

Downing Street press releases are often rather dull, but this one was anything but. Here is an extract.

[Johnson] will call on his cabinet colleagues and departments to double down on exploring innovative ways to ease pressures on household finances, promoting the support that is available but not widely taken up, and helping people into high-quality, well-paid jobs across the UK.

People around the country are already benefiting from new financial support this month, including immediate help with energy bills through the £150 council tax rebate, an uplift to incomes of the lowest paid through the National Living Wage, and the biggest cut, in cash terms, on fuel duty. £22 billion worth of support is being made available this year.

The prime minister will urge ministers to continue working at pace to ease living costs without solely relying on new government spend. High levels of public debt following the unprecedented support provided during the pandemic, together with rising inflation and interest rates, mean we must maintain control of the public finances rather than burden future generations with higher debt.

The press release goes on to mention three things ministers are doing to help people manage with the cost of living crisis (see below), but they are all minimal measures and the reference to asking ministers to “double down on exploring innovative” solutions implies that No 10 is desperate for some better ideas. That might not inspire great confidence. Many of us don’t have a solution to the cost of living crisis, but Johnson is prime minister, and he’s running a government, not a thinktank.

No 10 cites three “non-fiscal” measures it is already taking to help people.

1) Encouraging people to check they are claiming all the benefits for which they are eligible. “For example, it is estimated that around 1.3 million families could be taking up government support through tax free childcare, which offers up to £2,000 towards childcare costs a year, and there are still an estimated 850,000 eligible households who are not claiming pension credit, which could be worth over £3,300 a year for pensioners,” it says.

2) Freezing energy bill deductions from universal credit. This move will give claimants more time to discuss with energy companies how they pay higher bills, the government says.

3) Urging private companies to “play their part”. Ministers “won’t hesitate to crack down on unacceptable behaviour taking place within industry, where they are unfairly pushing up bills further for hard-working people”, No 10 says.

As my colleague Jessica Elgot writes in her overnight story, today’s initiative is a tacit admission that Rishi Sunak’s spring statement failed to satisfactorily address the cost of living crisis.

Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: Boris Johnson chairs cabinet.

10am: Sir Patrick Vallance, the govenrment’s chief scientific adviser, gives evidence to a Lords committee on climate change.

10.45am: Mark Spencer, leader of the Commons, and Michael Ellis, the Cabinet Office minister, give evidence to the Commons standards committee on reform of the MPs’ code of conduct.

11am: A National Farmers Union official and other experts give evidence to the Commons international trade committee about the trade deal with Australia.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

11.30am: Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

Afternoon: Peers debate Commons amendments to the nationality and borders bill. In an intense bout of “ping pong” (the process where bills shuttle between the Commons and the Lords until outstanding disagreements can be resolved), they will also consider Commons amendments to the building safety bill, the health and care bill and the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill.

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