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The business and trade secretary says Henry Staunton gave an interview ‘full of lies’Good morning. Yesterday Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, accused the former Post Office chair, Henry Staunton, of giving an interview “full of lies” about the conversation they had when she sacked him recently. Josh Halliday has the story here, and here is one of the tweets from a thread...

As fresh party infighting erupts after two byelection losses, the right are targeting public service funding to pay for tax cuts while others urge restraintRishi Sunak is being warned he risks taking his party further towards disaster by sanctioning a new public spending squeeze in a desperate pursuit of pre-election tax cuts, as more Tories said they feared an election wipeout.With more infighting erupting...

Formal rules to block relevant candidates will make it easier to ‘weed out the bad apples’, politicians sayRishi Sunak has been urged to push through new rules to block anyone convicted of a sexual offence from standing to be an MP before the next election.At least six MPs have lost their seats because of alleged sexual misconduct since the 2019 general election, and 10...

Details about leader’s finances for 2022-23 come after Rishi Sunak revealed he paid more than £508,000 of tax on £2.2m plusKeir Starmer paid £99,431 in UK tax on earnings of £404,030 last year, according to a summary released by the Labour party.The Labour leader’s tax summary for 2022-23 was published a week after Rishi Sunak’s, which revealed the prime minister paid more than £508,208...

Swing in both seats would easily secure a majority at national level, but disillusion among voters is clearUK politics live – latest updatesThe records continue to fall for Labour. The result in the Wellingborough byelection, in which the party achieved a 28.5% swing from the Conservatives, was the biggest Labour victory over the Tories since 1994 and the second biggest since the war.Along with...

Labour leader under pressure over claims Rochdale candidate Azhar Ali’s remarks went unchallenged at eventUK politics live – latest developmentsKeir Starmer is under pressure to suspend councillors who attended a meeting in Hyndburn over claims that they failed call out antisemitic remarks by Azhar Ali, the former Labour candidate for the Rochdale byelection.On Tuesday Labour suspended Graham Jones, the candidate for Hyndburn in Lancashire,...

Labour seeking to take two seats from Tories on Thursday amid fraught week of candidate suspensionsMy colleague Phillip Inman has this analysis on this morning’s inflation figures:Good news came from the food industry, where inflation fell from December to January, but the annual rate remains high at 7% and food and non-alcoholic beverage prices are about 25% higher than they were two years ago,...

In today’s newsletter: The party has disowned candidate Azhar Ali following his remarks about Israel and Gaza, with accusations of hypocrisy over antisemitism levelled at Starmer’s door • Sign up here for our daily newsletter, First EditionGood morning. This week ought to be an excellent one for Keir Starmer, and a terrible one for Rishi Sunak: ONS figures just out which show no fall...

Party criticised for delay in acting over comments in which Azhar Ali suggested Israel had allowed 7 October attack to happenHousing minister Lee Rowley was on the media round for the government this morning, hoping to push their new housebuilding plans. He refused, however, to say how many more homes the government hopes will be built, telling the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he...

Candidate Azhar Ali issues apology after comments emerge in which he suggested Israel allowed Hamas attack to happenA quick scoot around the newspaper front pages. For the Daily Mail, the Labour Rochdale story leads, with the paper asking “So has Labour really changed?”That story also made the front of the Times, with the bonus ban at water companies being the lead item. Our Helena...

Support for Azhar Ali in looming byelection is a failure to tackle antisemitism, says leading campaignerUK politics live – latest updatesLabour is facing criticism for standing by a parliamentary candidate who has been forced to apologise for suggesting that Israel allowed Hamas’s 7 October attacks to take place to provide grounds to invade Gaza.The comments made by Azhar Ali, the party’s candidate in the Rochdale...

Housebuilders and campaigners warn of cold, damp homes and UK missing legally binding targetsLabour’s slashing of proposed spending on home insulation will leave millions of people on low incomes in cold, damp homes and could prevent the UK meeting its legally binding carbon targets, campaigners and housebuilders have warned.The Federation of Master Builders criticised the drastic scaling back of Labour’s low-carbon policies, announced by...

Entrepreneur Stuart Marks reportedly featured on – but was removed from – Boris Johnson’s resignation honours listA major donor to the Conservative party who reportedly featured on Boris Johnson’s original resignation honours list is among 13 new peers announced by the government on Friday evening, eight of them Conservatives.Stuart Marks, a technology entrepreneur who has served as a senior treasurer for the Conservatives, has...

Shadow chancellor says Labour will receive a ‘bleak inheritance’ from Tories and has had to make changes as a resultRachel Reeves has defended Labour’s U-turn on its pledge to spend £28 billion a year on green projects.The shadow chancellor blamed the Tories and the economic impact of Liz Truss’s mini-budget, as she told BBC Breakfast she would not “make any apologies” for fiscal responsibility.I’ll...

Charlotte Nichols says Brianna gave people someone to identify with and humanised discussion on gender issuesBrianna Ghey’s murder has “humanised the debate” around transgender people in her native Warrington, and stopped local Conservative politicians from using trans issues for “culture war” attacks, according to Brianna’s local Labour MP.“Most people haven’t necessarily met a trans person. And I think what happened to Brianna really gave...

Labour MP Barry Gardiner, former shadow climate change minister, criticised Starmer’s plan to scale back the £28bn plan Good morning. It will come as no surprise to anyone who has been following Westminster news in recent weeks, particularly if they have been reading the Guardian, to learn that Labour is no longer committed to spending £28bn a year on its green investment plan. The...

PM says he is ‘not a betting person’ after making £1,000 bet during an interview with Piers MorganGood morning. Rishi Sunak gave an interview to Rachel Burden on Radio 5 Live this morning and he was asked about £1,000 bet he appeared to accept from Piers Morgan about the success of his Rwanda policy. The move has been widely condemned as distasteful. Sunak did...

Plans to reform social care and House of Lords are trimmed as Keir Starmer’s party opts for caution ahead of voteLabour is planning only limited first-term reforms of social care and the House of Lords and a smaller green investment plan as part of a stripped-down general election manifesto, as it seeks to make its policies “bombproof” to Tory attacks.Shadow cabinet ministers have been...

Sources say party will keep plan to invest in green infrastructure but will in effect cut green ambitions by about two-thirdsThe Green party is calling for a wealth tax to fund a green investment programme. Here is another extract from the statement issued by Carla Denyer, the Green party’s co-leader, criticising Labour for dropping the £28bn a year target for green investment. (See 9.19am.)...

The chancellor said he wanted to manage people’s expectations ahead of the spring budget In his interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson, Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, criticised Richard Hughes, head of the Office for Budget Responsibility, for calling the Treasury’s long-term public spending forecasts worse than “a work of fiction”.Hughes told a Lords committee last month:Some people call [the projections] a work of fiction,...

The DUP has endorsed a deal with the UK government to restore power sharing in NI, paving an end to two years of political deadlockGood morning. Rail strikes are still going on in England, but in one part of the UK a long-running “strike” by key public sector workers seems about to come to an end. DUP MLAs (members of the legislative assembly) have...

Former PM is fomenting revolt describing proposal as ‘absurd’ as government set to go ahead with plans to ban disposable vapesGood morning. Two weeks ago Rishi Sunak saw off the Tory rebels wanting him to toughen up the Rwanda bill, last week former cabinet minister Simon Clarke was shouted down by colleagues when he called for a new leader, but the turmoil in the...

Individuals deemed unfit for office still walked away with payments from taxpayers, says shadow Cabinet Office ministerLabour has pledged to reform the rules surrounding ministerial redundancy payments after it emerged that the high turnover of cabinet ministers under the past three prime ministers generated a severance bill worth more than £930,000 in the last financial year.Since 1991, sacked ministers under the age of 65...

Chris Philp says manufacturers found ploy to get around previous ban on previous ban on zombie knives Good morning. Labour and the Conservatives are in a bidding war over knife crime today, with Keir Starmer announcing or re-announcing various plans to deal with the problem on the day when the Home Office is laying legislation before parliament to ban zombie-style knives. Pippa Crerar has...