No 10 rejects claims from Nadhim Zahawi allies that inquiry that led to his sacking was rushed – UK politics live

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NEU teaching unions says strike going ahead on Wednesday after talks with Gillian Keegan failed to produce breakthrough

The National Education Union says its strike on Wednesday will go ahead after last-minute talks with Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, failed to produce a breakthrough. In a joint statement after the meeting, the NEU’s joint general secretaries, Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney, said:

Gillian Keegan has squandered an opportunity to avoid strike action on Wednesday.

The government has been unwilling to seriously engage with the causes of strike action. Real-terms pay cuts and cuts in pay relativities are leading to a recruitment and retention crisis with which the education secretary so far seems incapable of getting a grip. Training targets are routinely missed, year on year. This is having consequences for learning, with disruption every day to children’s education.

We can do better as a nation, for education, for our children, if we invest more. That is in the gift of this government. It should start with a fully-funded, above inflation pay rise for teachers.

Kevin Courtney and Mary Bousted speaking to the media before their meeting with Gillian Keegan.
Kevin Courtney and Mary Bousted speaking to the media before their meeting with Gillian Keegan. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

Key events

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Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said the health plan being announced by the government would not lead to patients seeing GPs more quickly, not restore district nursing, not improve nurses and not lead to an increase in the number of doctors and nurses.

And he said the government could not even say when they would get waiting times down to safe times.

Waiting 30 minutes for a stroke or heart attack victim to get an ambulance was not acceptable, he said.

He said, instead of hitting their targets, ministers were moving the goalposts.

Labour announced its own plans for more people to be looked after at home at its conference, he said. What the government has announced is very similar. He said he was happy for the government to adopt Labour’s.

But the government’s plan would not work without extra staff, he said.

Labour had a plan to double the number of places at medical school, he said. It would pay for that by abolishing non-dom status. He said he could understand why Rishi Sunak would not support that.

Steve Barclay, the health secretary, is making a statement to the Commons about the emergency care recovery plan. He says this is the second of three NHS recovery plans. An elective care plan has already been published, and a primary care plan is coming, he says.

He says this plan is based on best practice followed by hospitals around England.

The plan is ambitious and credible, he says.

By next March, the government wants 76% of patients seen within four hours, he says.

And by next March it wants to see category two ambulance response times, covering strokes and heart attacks, down to 30 minutes.

In due course, it wants performance on both measures to get down to pre-pandemic levels, he says.

Barclay says current waiting time data at A&E starts from the point of admission, not the point of arrival. For some time experts have been calling for the clock to start at the moment of arrival. And so from April NHS England will publish data on waiting times from arrival, he says.

He suggests this could be challenging. But he says he hopes the move will be a “catalyst for transformation of the urgent and emergency care pathway”.

NEU teaching unions says strike going ahead on Wednesday after talks with Gillian Keegan failed to produce breakthrough

The National Education Union says its strike on Wednesday will go ahead after last-minute talks with Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, failed to produce a breakthrough. In a joint statement after the meeting, the NEU’s joint general secretaries, Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney, said:

Gillian Keegan has squandered an opportunity to avoid strike action on Wednesday.

The government has been unwilling to seriously engage with the causes of strike action. Real-terms pay cuts and cuts in pay relativities are leading to a recruitment and retention crisis with which the education secretary so far seems incapable of getting a grip. Training targets are routinely missed, year on year. This is having consequences for learning, with disruption every day to children’s education.

We can do better as a nation, for education, for our children, if we invest more. That is in the gift of this government. It should start with a fully-funded, above inflation pay rise for teachers.

Kevin Courtney and Mary Bousted speaking to the media before their meeting with Gillian Keegan.
Kevin Courtney and Mary Bousted speaking to the media before their meeting with Gillian Keegan. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

Defence minister says army in urgent need of extra funding after ‘serial underinvestment over decades’

In the Commons Tobias Ellwood, the Conservative chair of the defence committee, used defence questions to ask about a Sky News report saying that an American general told Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, that the British army was now longer regarded as a top-level fighting force. Ellwood said his committee had come to a similar conclusion.

In response, James Heappey, the armed forces minister, conceded there was a problem, but suggested that defence spending would increase in the budget. He said:

Serial underinvestment in the army over decades has led to the point where the army is in urgent need of recapitalisation. The chancellor and the prime minister get that and there’s a budget coming.

In her Sky News story Deborah Haynes says:

A senior US general has privately told defence secretary Ben Wallace the British army is no longer regarded as a top-level fighting force, defence sources have revealed.

They said this decline in war-fighting capability – following decades of cuts to save money – needed to be reversed faster than planned in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“Bottom line… it’s an entire service unable to protect the UK and our allies for a decade,” one of the defence sources said.

BBC economics coverage not politically biased, but too influenced by groupthink, review concludes

The BBC’s economics reporting does not lean conclusively towards the left or right politically, but can be influenced by groupthink and hype and be led too strongly by the Westminster narrative, a report commissioned by the corporation has said. PA Media says:

An analysis of the corporation’s coverage, which its authors said also largely applies to the rest of the UK media, found that “too many journalists lack understanding of basic economics”.

It revealed that the BBC’s economic coverage at times shows bias towards both the left and the right, making “a charge of systematic political bias in this area hard to sustain”.

The review said “the main issue is lack of impartiality caused by uninformed groupthink and lack of confidence to challenge arguments, often given an extra twist by hype”.

It said that some journalists “feel instinctively” that debt is bad, and do not realise that this is a contestable position.

And it questioned the influence of politics on the corporation’s reporting, with what is said in Westminster often meaning that economic issues are reported on by political journalists.

“‘The Westminster frame on things is the elephant in the room here,’ said one senior journalist, who argued that the political angle of the day often determines coverage whether the specialist judges it significant or not,” the report said.

One person outside the BBC told the authors that political editors are asked to understand economics, trade, law, and political negotiations as well as the ins and outs of daily politics, “and nobody can do that”.

The BBC’s news summary of the report is here. And the full report, which was written by Michael Blastland and Sir Andrew Dilnot, is here.

Steve Brine, the Conservative chair of the Commons health committee, told Radio 4’s the World at One that select committee scrutiny could improve the quality of cabinet appointments. He told the programme:

The way that ministers are appointed I think needs looking at.

I do wonder whether there is more scrutiny on people appointed to the House of Lords or even, dare I say, to become chairman of the BBC … than there is for very senior cabinet ministers.

In the US, for instance, they have confirmation hearings of members of the cabinet.

We have select committees in parliament, we say that we trust them. Why not at some point bring them into that process? I don’t think that is unreasonable.

Brine suggested that after the prime minister appoints, for example, a health secretary, the health committee could hold a confirmation hearing. He went on:

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that – if you wanted to add something new to the principles of integrity in public life, then there is an idea.

Select committees routinely hold pre-appointment hearings with officials selected to run public bodies. They do not have the power to veto appointments (which they would in a confirmation hearing), but on rare occasions a critical report following a pre-appointment hearing has led to a rethink.

Two-thirds of Britons think it’s time for change at next election, poll suggests

Isaac Levido, the strategist who ran the Tory campaign in 2019, reportedly told the cabinet away day at Chequers last week that they had a “narrow path” to victory at the next election. He was arguing that some of the support for Labour is soft, but new polling out today suggests that “narrow” might be understating it.

Ipsos has published its latest monthly political monitor polling and it suggests Labour, on 51%, has a 25-point lead over the Conservatives, on 26%. But governments can recover from setbacks like that. In elections the most potent message is often “it’s time for a change” and the poll suggests that is what two-thirds of voters want.

Here are the key findings.

  • Two-thirds of Britons believe it is time for a change at the next election, the poll suggests. It says 55% of people say that the government has done a poor job and it’s time for a change, and 11% say the government has done a good job but it’s still time for a change.

Polling on government
Polling on government Photograph: Ipsos

This might not matter much for Rishi Sunak if he were seen as a change prime minister (as John Major was in 1992). But other findings in the polling suggest he isn’t.

  • Sunak’s satisfaction ratings are going down, the poll suggests. In January 55% of Britons are dissatisfied with the job he’s doing, up 6 points from December. And 26% are satisfied, down two points. That gives him a net satisfaction rating of -29, down from -21.

  • Sunak has lower satisfaction ratings at this stage of his premiership than any other prime minister since 1979 at the same point of their premiership – except for Liz Truss.

Polling on prime ministers
Polling on prime ministers. Photograph: Ipsos
  • Only 20% of people would describe the government as competent, the poll suggests.

  • Keir Starmer is ahead of Sunak on who people think would make the most capable PM by a margin of 39% to 33%, the poll suggests. In November, Sunak was ahead of Starmer by 41% to 35%.

No 10 refuses to back Zahawi’s attack on media coverage of his case

Nadhim Zahawi attacked the media in the letter he sent to Rishi Sunak following his sacking at Tory chair. He said:

I am concerned, however, about the conduct of some of the fourth estate in recent weeks. In a week when a member of parliament was physically assaulted, I fail to see how one headline on this issue ‘The Noose Tightens’ reflects legitimate scrutiny of public officials. I am sorry to my family for the toll this has taken on them.

Zahawi was referring to a headline over a splash in the online-only Independent. The wording of that headline was crass, but given that Zahawi last summer threatened to sue reporters who said that he was being investigated by the tax authorities, and dismissed the story as a smear, when essentially it was all true, his decision to depict himself as a victim of the press was odd.

At the Downing Street lobby briefing, asked if Rishi Sunak agreed with Zahawi’s criticism of the media, the PM’s spokesperson implied he didn’t. He replied:

It is important to emphasis that, in a healthy democracy, the media plays a vitally important role in holding the government of the day to account. And I’m sure it will continue to do so.

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

  • Rishi Sunak was not aware of any “outstanding issues” relating to Nadhim Zahawi’s tax affairs when he appointed him to government, the PM’s spokesperson said. He said Sunak did not know Zahawi had paid a penalty to HM Revenue and Customs until Zahawi admitted this in a statement. The spokesperson also confirmed that Sunak was aware of “speculation” in the press about Zahawi’s tax affairs published much earlier, but he would not say why Sunak had not asked Zahawi directly about these stories before appointing him. It is understood that, when ministers are appointed, officials routinely flag up if a minister does have oustanding tax issues. But if a matter has been settled, that is not flagged up as part of the routine process.

  • The spokesperson defended Sunak’s decision to reappoint Suella Braverman to cabinet, even though she broke the ministerial code, while sacking Zahawi for breaking the code. Asked to explain the distinction, the spokesperson said:

Suella Braverman resigned and acknowledged the mistake she made – she took accountability for her actions.

It was on that basis that the prime minister subsequently chose to reappoint her.

  • The spokesperson did not rule out Zahawi being reappointed to government.

  • The spokesperson said that ministers should “pay the right amount of tax”. Zahawi was sacked because he had not disclosed at the right time the HM Revenue and Customs inquiry into his tax affairs, and the fact that he paid a penalty, but the spokesperson’s comment suggests not paying the full amount of tax on time was also an issue.

Penny Mordaunt, leader of the Commons and the MP who came third in the summer Tory leadership contest, is favourite to replace Nadhim Zahawi as the next party chair, Kitty Donaldson from Bloomberg reports.

The bookies make Penny Mordaunt favourite to succeed Zahawi as Tory Party Chairman.

However, if she still harbours ambitions to become leader, she’s already got the grassroots sewn up; it’s MPs she’d need to court, as this profile from last year showshttps://t.co/je400LXgBR

— Kitty Donaldson (@kitty_donaldson) January 30, 2023

William Hill has Mordaunt at 4/1 favourite, ahead of Oliver Dowden and Michael Gove, both on 5/1, and Brandon Lewis and James Cleverly, both on 7/1.

But in an article for ConservativeHome at the weekend, its editor, Paul Goodman, predicted a more low-key appointment. He said:

Who will replace Zahawi? Downing Street will want an appointment that creates a positive headline. It may take the view that the appointment of a woman will suit. The women in cabinet are Suella Braverman, Penny Mordaunt, Thérèse Coffey, Gillian Keegan, Kemi Badenoch, and Michelle Donelan.

The first is too senior, the second too ambitious, the third associated with Liz Truss and the fourth difficult though not impossible to move, given her pivotal role at education. Such an appointment would undoubtedly create a splash.

Or the prime minister could go for a safe pair of hands, such as Mark Harper. Or seek minimum disruption to cabinet, and promote from the junior ranks of government or else from the backbenches.

No 10 rejects claims from Zahawi’s allies that inquiry that led to his sacking was rushed, or unfair

The Downing Street lobby briefing has just finished. Nadhim Zahawi’s allies have been claiming that the inquiry into his tax affairs was rushed and that he did not get a chance to make his case properly. In his story on this for the Daily Telegraph, Daniel Martin reports:

On Sunday allies of Mr Zahawi raised questions about the process asking why the inquiry was so short, especially as it had been expected that it would run for three weeks.

Had the prime minister in fact ended up giving in to political pressure to get rid of him early, before Sir Laurie had been able to properly investigate the case?

Downing Street denies the charge, but Mr Zahawi’s allies asked why it was that he only had 30 minutes on Wednesday to put his case to the ethics adviser.

And why did the report not reflect the former chairman’s insistence that he told the top civil servant at the Treasury that he had paid a penalty when he was chancellor?

At the briefing the prime minister’s spokesperson rejected this charge. Asked about these claims, the spokesperson said:

As you know, we didn’t set any time limit on the adviser and he was free to carry out the investigation to establish the facts and [he] concluded his work when he felt he had done.

It wouldn’t be for me to get into the details of that process. I would say that he was able to speak to whoever he wished during that process and we’re confident he established the facts.

It is understood that Downing Street also rejects the claim that Zahawi only had one conversation with Sir Laurie Magnus, the PM’s ethics adviser, during the inquiry. There was a further conversation on Saturday, after the 30-minute one on Wednesday, it is understood.

At the briefing the spokesperson also said that Sunak was told there were no oustanding tax issues relating to Zahawi when he appointed him to government. Sunak was not told that Zahawi had paid a penalty to settle a tax dispute.

But the spokesperson was unable to say why Sunak had not proactively asked about an inquiry or a penalty given the media coverage of Zahawi’s tax affairs over the summer. (See 11.29am.)

Kremlin rejects Boris Johnson’s claim Putin threatened him with missile before invasion of Ukraine

As my colleague Harry Taylor reports, Boris Johnson has claimed that Vladimir Putin threatened him in a call shortly before the invasion of Ukraine. Johnson told a BBC documentary:

[Putin] sort of threatened me at one point and said: ‘Boris, I don’t want to hurt you, but with a missile, it would only take a minute’, or something like that.

This morning the Kremlin has described this as a lie. Asked about Johnson’s comment, the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said the former PM’s account of the conversation was untrue, “or, more precisely, it was a lie”.

As PA Media reports, Peskov said Johnson may have deliberately lied or failed to understand what the Russian leader was telling him. Peskov said:

There were no threats with missiles.

While talking about security challenges to Russia, President Putin said that if Ukraine joins Nato, the potential deployment of US or other Nato missiles near our borders would mean that any such missile could reach Moscow in minutes.

‘It’s a lie’: Kremlin denies Putin threatened Boris Johnson with missile – video

William Hague rules out becoming next Conservative party chair

Some Tories would like Rishi Sunak to appoint William Hague, the former Tory leader and former foreign secretary, as the next party chair, Jason Groves reports in the Daily Mail. Groves says:

Last night two ministers told the Mail that former Tory leader William Hague was among the possible candidates for the job.

One said: ‘If the PM could persuade Hague to do it, it would be fantastic. He is hugely popular with the party in the country and he is someone who could clearly and forcefully articulate the government’s message.’

No 10 hinted that the search could take some time and said the PM had not yet ‘sounded [anyone] out’, including Lord Hague, who is a close ally of the PM and was invited to attend last week’s cabinet ‘away day’ at Chequers.

This morning Hague has ruled it out. He did not quite say he wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole, but he might just as well have done. He said:

Since I’ve seen reports of people placing bets on me being the new party chairman, please be aware that I will absolutely not be returning to politics in any shape or form, including that one.

Since I’ve seen reports of people placing bets on me being the new party chairman, please be aware that I will absolutely not be returning to politics in any shape or form, including that one.

— William Hague (@WilliamJHague) January 30, 2023

Health department publishes plan for up to 50,000 patients per month to be treated in ‘virtual wards’

The Department for Health and Social Care has published more details of its plans for up to 50,000 patients a month to be treated in “virtual wards”, or “hospital at home” beds, by next winter in England. In a news release it says:

The NHS has already rolled out virtual wards – treating patients from the comfort of their own homes – with growing evidence that these are a safe and efficient alternative to hospital care, particularly for frail patients. These see patients supported by clinicians to recover in the comfort of their own home, rather than in hospital – and has increased the number of patients that can be cared for in this way by 7,000, a 50% increase since last summer. Another 3,000 ‘hospital at home’ beds will be created before next winter and the plan will include an ambition to see up to 50,000 people supported a month.

Hi-tech virtual wards currently support frail elderly patients or those with acute respiratory infections and cardiac conditions. Patients are reviewed daily by the clinical team who may visit them at home or use video technology to monitor and check how they are recovering.

Steve Barclay, the health secretary, is expected to make a statement about this to MPs tomorrow, and the government says its full urgent and emergency care plan will be published tomorrow.

Sunak claims he ordered inquiry into Zahawi ‘as soon as I knew about the situation’

Here is the full answer that Rishi Sunak gave to Sky’s Beth Rigby when asked about the Nadhim Zahawi affair. (See 10.57am.)

What I have done is follow a process, which is the right process.

Integrity is really important to me – all of you guys want to see that government is run properly, that it is run with integrity and there’s accountability when people don’t behave in the way that they should or if something doesn’t go right, and that’s what we’ve done.

We have an independent adviser – that’s what the government has, it’s not me who’s doing it – and what I asked when all these questions started coming to light about Nadhim Zahawi, I asked the independent adviser to get to the bottom of it, and to provide me with the facts.

And then, on the basis of the facts, which he did relatively quickly over the past week, I was able to make a very quick decision that it was no longer appropriate for Nadhim Zahawi to continue in government, and that’s why he’s no longer there.

That’s what I’ve done. It relates to things that happened well before I was prime minister, so unfortunately, I can’t change what happened in the past.

What you can hold me accountable for is, what did you do about it? What I did, as soon as I knew about the situation, was appoint somebody independent, looked at it, got the advice and then acted pretty decisively to move on, because that’s what I think all of you deserve, from me and from the government.

Other reporters tried asking about the Zahawi affair too, but in response Sunak just delivered an abbreviated version of what he told Rigby, or ignored the question altogether.

Sunak obviously wants to draw a line under the story and move on. But the claim that he acted “as soon as I knew about the situation” is not persuasive. At the weekend my colleagues Pippa Crerar and Anna Isaac reported that Sunak was warned that there was a risk when he appointed Zahawi to be Conservative chairman in October. No 10 disputes this, but it cannot deny that stories about Zahawi being investigated by HM Revenue and Customs over his taxes first appeared in the papers last July. Sunak hasn’t explained why he never asked anyone to get to the bottom of these reports until Monday last week.



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