Mark Menzies allegedly spent £14,000 of campaign funds on medical costs and demanded £6,500 from aide to ‘escape captors’
A Conservative MP has lost the party whip over allegations he misused campaign funds and demanded thousands of pounds from an aide to pay off “bad people” in the middle of the night.
Mark Menzies, 52, was suspended from the Tory parliamentary party on Wednesday night while an investigation is carried out.
Continue reading...Legislation to go back to Commons after peers stand up for rights of Afghans and scrutiny of refugees’ treatment
The parliamentary battle over Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda deportation bill will spill into next week after the Lords refused to budge over the rights of Afghans and scrutiny of the treatment of refugees in east Africa.
The move prompted an immediate backlash from the home secretary, James Cleverly, who blamed Labour for blocking the bill and being “terrified” that the Rwanda plan would stop asylum seekers from travelling to the UK in small boats.
Continue reading...Prospective contenders Badenoch, Braverman, Jenrick and Mordaunt abstained or voted against the ban
In his speech to the Tory faithful at the Conservative party conference in Manchester in October, Rishi Sunak declared that he wanted to ban smoking for future generations.
His announcement – confirming a plan first reported by the Guardian – was met with applause from grassroots members then. But Tuesday night’s vote demonstrates the challenges for a Tory prime minister championing what his own side deems an archetypal “nanny state” policy.
Continue reading...Rishi Sunak’s authority suffers blow as several Conservatives vote against bill, which clears first Commons hurdle with 383 votes to 67
At 12.30pm a transport minister will respond to an urgent question in the Commons tabled by Labour on job losses in the rail industry. That means the debate on the smoking ban will will not start until about 1.15pm.
Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, is one of the Britons speaking at the National Conservatism conference in Brussels starting today. The conference, which features hardline rightwingers from around the world committed to the NatCons’ ‘faith, flag and family’ brand of conservatism, is going ahead despite two venues refusing to host them at relatively short notice.
The current UK government doesn’t have the political will to take on the ECHR and hasn’t laid the ground work for doing so.
And so it’s no surprise that recent noises in this direction are easily dismissed as inauthentic.
Any attempt to include a plan for ECHR withdrawal in a losing Conservative election manifesto risks setting the cause back a generation.
Continue reading...British PM says he will speak to Netanyahu to express solidarity and discuss how further escalation can be avoided
UK general election opinion poll tracker: Labour leading as election looms
David Cameron ruled out trying to become PM again in an interview this morning. (See 9.30am.) But Liz Truss has not done so. In an interview with LBC’s Iain Dale, being broadcast tonight, she did not entirely dismiss the possibility. This is from LBC’s Henry Riley.
Truss is giving interviews to publicise her memoir which is out this week. According to extracts sent out in advance, she also confirmed in her LBC interview that she wanted to see Donald Trump win the US presidential election. She said:
I don’t think [Joe] Biden has been particularly supportive to the United Kingdom. I think he’s often on the side of the EU. And I certainly think I would like to see a new president in the White House …
The thing I would say about Donald Trump is, because I served as secretary of state under both Trump and Biden, and Trump’s policies were actually very effective. If you look at his economic policies, and I met his regulatory czar, I travelled around the United States looking at what he’d done. He cut regulation, he cut taxes, he liberated the US energy supply. And this is why the US has had significantly higher economic growth than Britain.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Tactics include proposals to raise smoking age to avoid outright ban, and exemptions for cigars, says Cancer Research UK chief
Tobacco firms are lobbying MPs and peers in an effort to derail Rishi Sunak’s flagship policy to phase out smoking, the head of Britain’s biggest cancer charity has said.
The prime minister’s landmark legislation – which would bar anyone born after 2009 from buying cigarettes and make England the first country in the world to ban smoking – is due to be debated in parliament for the first time on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Single people with long-term disability that stops them working will be much poorer after rollout, Resolution Foundation says
The rollout of universal credit is on course to make thousands of working-age disabled people significantly poorer, according to a report showing that more than 7 million people will be covered by the six-into-one benefit change before the end of the next parliament.
A single person with a long-term disability that prevents them from working is £2,800 a year worse off when they transfer to universal credit (UC), the Resolution Foundation said, adding that all single people with long-term disabilities will suffer this loss of income when the rollout of UC is completed by 2030.
Continue reading...Labour deputy leader being investigated over whether she gave false information a decade ago
Angela Rayner has handled the controversy over her living arrangements “in the right way”, Yvette Cooper has insisted after a former aide contradicted Rayner’s account.
The shadow home secretary said Rayner was “very keen to be able to provide the facts to the relevant authorities”.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Failure to do so would betray working-class people, shadow health secretary says
Wes Streeting has defended Labour’s plans to use the private sector to help cut the NHS care backlog, arguing that a failure to do so would result in a “betrayal” of working-class people who cannot afford to pay for care.
The shadow health secretary said his approach was a “pragmatic but principled one” as he doubled down on his remarks this week about “middle-class lefties” whom he said risked putting ideological purity ahead of patient care.
Continue reading...London mayor expected to criticise Susan Hall in speech launching panels on school roofs
Sadiq Khan will accuse his Conservative rival in the race to be London’s next mayor of being “Trumpian” over the climate crisis, as he announces plans for solar panels on schools.
Khan is expected to acknowledge resistance to his expansion of the ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) in a speech on Friday but insist that he still intends to “go further”.
Continue reading...Estimated 7.54m treatments waiting to be carried out at end of February in slight fall for fifth month in a row but list remains high
The waiting list for routine hospital treatment in England has fallen for the fifth month in a row, figures show.
An estimated 7.54 million treatments were waiting to be carried out at the end of February, relating to 6.29 million patients, down slightly from 7.58 million treatments and 6.29 million patients at the end of January, NHS England said.
At the end of last year, we promised to change the migration system to deliver the biggest ever cut to migration numbers. And today, we’ve enacted the final part of that plan.
Taken together, the measures we’ve introduced will radically reduce legal migration. 300,000 people who arrived in the UK last year, would no longer be eligible to do so under these new rules.
Continue reading...Former PM laments state of Tory party saying it is ‘mad’ that party of Winston Churchill is ‘banning cigars’
Boris Johnson has attacked Rishi Sunak’s smoking ban, calling it “absolutely nuts” in a lament about the state of the Conservative party in Britain.
Speaking at an event in Canada on Wednesday night, Johnson said it was “mad” that the party of Winston Churchill was “banning cigars”.
Continue reading...In unusual election pledge, Keane Duncan says he will use public money to buy 1867 hotel, forcibly if necessary
Built for wealthy Victorian holidaymakers as the biggest hotel in Europe, Scarborough’s iconic Grand has stood proud since 1867, perched high on the seafront, just metres above the sandy South Bay beach.
So for many in the town, it has been embarrassing to watch the Grade II-listed building suffer a sad reversal of fortunes in recent decades, becoming the “shame of Scarborough”.
Continue reading...Foreign secretary says Britain’s position on export licences is ‘unchanged’ after reviewing latest legal advice
David Cameron has confirmed the UK government will not suspend arms exports to Israel after the killing of seven aid workers in an airstrike on Gaza last week, as he insisted the UK would continue to act within international law.
The foreign secretary said that he had reviewed the most recent legal advice about the situation on the ground but this left the UK’s position on export licences “unchanged”.
Continue reading...MP will now sit as independent after admitting passing details to someone he met on dating app
William Wragg has resigned the Conservative party whip days after admitting to giving out colleagues’ personal phone numbers to someone he had met on a dating app.
Wragg, who represents Hazel Grove, will now sit as an independent MP. Earlier on Tuesday he resigned as chair of the Commons’ public administration and constitutional affairs committee and as vice-chair of the 1922 Committee of backbench Tory MPs.
Continue reading...The shadow chancellor said £5bn raised by clamping down on tax avoidance will fund slew of promises on NHS and primary school breakfast clubs
Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves also repeatedly attacked Conservative plans over non-dom tax status. Having defended the status against calls for abolition for years, in March Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt announced it would adopt Labour’s policy and scrap the status. However, the way they are planning to do so has been criticised for including a significant number of loopholes.
Speaking on BBC Breakfast this morning, Reeves said:
The government’s plans that they announced in March about non-doms, they said they were taking our policy, well it turns out they’ve taken it but left a load of loopholes in it. And so if you are a non-dom you can still get out of paying inheritance tax: in the first year of their policy there’s a 50% discount, we don’t get 50% discounts on our taxes.
People who go out and work today – teachers, plumbers, doctors, they don’t get a 50% discount – why should some of the wealthiest people in the country get that discount? We would abolish that and we would put that money into frontline public services, where it belongs.”
You can ramp it up pretty quickly. At the start you might need to bring in extra resource but then you need to train people up within the government to do this work.
This isn’t rocket science, previous governments have managed to close that tax gap, as it’s called.
We’ve got to invest in and improve the customer service at HMRC because, you know, we had this urgent question in parliament just before the recess, which was about HMRC closing its phone line for six months a year. Because the service was so bad, they just decided to close the phone line. And we say, look, you have to invest in digital solutions and modernise HMRC.
Continue reading...Kevin Hollinrake has said in his view ‘people should be prosecuted’
I mentioned in the introduction that Reform UK are giving a press briefing that they have billed as being about “Labour’s betrayal of the working class”. That will be starting in a few minutes and I will bring you any key lines that emerge …
John Harris writes for us today, cautioning against schadenfreude at the Tories’ apparently inevitable defeat in the next election. He writes:
Continue reading...Message comes as pressure builds on Tories to take disciplinary action against MP William Wragg
Downing Street has urged MPs to be cautious when responding to unsolicited messages, after the “spear-phishing” attack that targeted more than a dozen MPs, staff and journalists working in Westminster.
Number 10 issued the warning on Monday morning, days after two police forces launched an investigation into what is being described as an attempted “honeytrap”.
Continue reading...Evans says he was first to alert authorities after receiving messages in what is suspected to be part of wider attempt to target MPs
A Conservative MP has revealed that he was targeted in the Westminster sexting scandal and was the MP that first alerted the authorities.
Luke Evans said he was messaged in what is suspected to be part of a wider attempt to target MPs.
Continue reading...William Wragg says he was pressed for colleagues’ details after sharing compromising photos of himself
A senior Conservative MP has reportedly admitted to giving out the personal phone numbers of colleagues to a person he met on a dating app.
William Wragg told the Times that he gave the information after he had sent intimate pictures of himself, saying he was “scared” and “mortified”.
Continue reading...