Rishi Sunak faces Keir Starmer at PMQs – UK politics live | Politics

Starmer says new evidence today appears to endorse Staunton’s claim. He asks if Sunak will order an investigation into what happened.

Sunak focuses on the victims, saying they are being paid compensation, and that an inquiry is underway.

He says he will make sure “the truth comes to light”. But he seems to be referring to the inquiry process, not to the truth about the Badenoch/Staunton row.

Keir Starmer starts by welcoming the new Labour MPs for Wellingborough and Kingswood.

And he also pays tribute to Alexei Navalny.

He asks Sunak if he will repeat the claim made by Kemi Badenoch, that Henry Staunton was “lying’” when he said he was told to go slow on paying compensation.

Sunak says the government has taken unprecedented steps to make sure victims get compensation.

As many as 1,900 people have registered to come and lobby their MPs to support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, according to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC).

About 100 of them have turned up in the past hour or so but parliamentary authorities have been keeping them in the Westminster Hall area rather than allowing them to come through to lobby MPs in Central Lobby, which members pass through on the way into the Commons chamber.

Overspill tables have been set up in Westminister Hall with ‘green cards’ on top of them which members of the public can use to lobby their MP.

PMQs is starting soon.

New 20mph limits are helping cut speeds and will save lives, the Welsh government has insisted. PA Media says:

Drivers are travelling on average 4mph slower on main roads in Wales since the rollout of a new lower speed limit for built-up areas, data collected by Transport for Wales (TfW) shows.

The Welsh Labour government, which implemented the change in September last year, insists the lower speeds will lead to fewer collisions and people injured.

But the change has seen fierce opposition from the Conservatives in the Senedd, who have branded it a “waste of time and resources”.

The TfW data shows that average speeds have dropped from 28.9mph to 24.8mph since the measure was put in place.

Research undertaken by the Transport Research Laboratory, a transport consultancy, in 2000 suggested there is an average 6% reduction in collisions with each 1mph reduction in average speed on urban roads.

The main event in the Commons this afternoon is a debate on an SNP motion calling for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza. Yesterday Labour tabled its own, longer amendment, calling for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire”, and then the government tabled its version, calling for an “immediate humanitarian pause”.

You can read the SNP motion, the Labour and government amendments, and a Lib Dem amendment, on the Commons order paper.

The Labour amendment was welcomed by MPs in the party who rebelled in November last year, when Keir Starmer ordered his MPs not to vote for an SNP ceasefire amendment, and it was welcomed by the SNP. It was also more or less in line of the government’s position on Gaza (but more the David Cameron government stance than the Rish Sunak one – there are differences of emphasis).

But it looks likely that the Labour amendment won’t be put to a vote. That is because the rules say, with opposition day debates like this, if there is a government amendment, MPs vote first on the opposition motion, and then on the government amendment. Daniel Gover, an academic specialising in parliamentary procedure, has given the best explanation of why in a thread on X.

Commons procedure on opposition days is different to usual. This makes selection of amdts especially tricky.

If Speaker selects Labour amendment, SNP almost certainly denied chance to vote on own motion.

If selects govt amendment, Labour very likely can’t vote on theirs.

Usually, amendments to the motion are taken first, followed by a decision on the (possibly amended) motion.

On opposition days, *if there is govt amendment* the order is usually reversed: opposition motion first, followed by government amendment

Selecting the Labour amendment would mean that the SNP would not get the chance to vote on its own motion until after Labour has (likely) amended it. This does occasionally happen, but it’s a little harsh given limited opposition time (esp for smaller parties like SNP).

Selecting the government motion, however, is likely to mean that Labour cannot vote on its amendment.

The standing order above states that, once a government amendment (meeting certain criteria) has been moved, the order is: (a) main question, and if rejected (b) govt amdt.

In the past, this has been interpreted as meaning that, if a government amendment is moved, ‘it is not possible for a second amendment… to be put’.

This was from 2015, when a Labour backbencher attempted to amend a Labour opposition day motion.

My main doubt is whether something could be done to schedule when amendments are ‘moved’, and thus avoid these provisions. I’m not sure on that.

There are some precedents for the Speaker selecting an opposition party amendment instead of the government amendment. As far as I can tell, these are (almost?) always because the government amendment was in some was defective – for example this one from 2000.

However, this exchange from 2008 implies that – at least in principle – the Speaker might choose not select a government amendment for other reasons.

So, if Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the speaker, follows precedent – and, unlike John Bercow, he has been a speaker who does follow precedent, and who is not minded to creatively reinterpret the rules to accommodate new circumstances – he will just allow votes on the SNP motion and the government amendment.

But, as Gover points out, you can never be 100% sure, because it is sometimes possible to find some wriggle room in the rules if the will is there.

Normally when the opposition tables an amendment only about six fronbenchers sign it. Today Labour has got more than 140 of its MPs to sign the amendment, making the point to the speaker that there is strong demand in the house for a vote on this.

Kate Ferguson from the Sun on Sunday she has been told the speaker is considering whether he can allow votes on both the Labour and the government motion.

Rumours the Speaker is looking at changing standing orders so he can call Labour amendment as well as the government amendment on todays Palestine ceasefire vote

If there is a vote on the Labour motion, the government may decide not to put its own motion to a vote. There is nothing very objectionable to the government in the Labour text, and sometimes the government is happy for the house to pass opposition motions on the grounds that they are not binding on the government, and hence don’t matter much anyway.

We will find out at the start of the debate what amendment or amendments the speaker will put to a vote.

Boris Johnson has disputed Tucker Carlson’s claim that he demanded $1m (around £793,000) for agreeing to an interview with the former Fox News host, PA Media reports. PA says:

A spokesman for the former prime minister dismissed as “untrue” accusations levelled at him by Carlson in an extended attack during an appearance on right-wing news channel Blaze TV.

The US presenter said he had been “annoyed” after Johnson denounced him as a Kremlin stooge following his interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

He claimed he asked the former Tory MP for a talk and a member of Johnson’s team said “it’s going to cost you $1m” and “then he will explain his position on Ukraine”.

Carlson denied supporting Putin’s regime, but added: “I’m not defending Putin, but Putin didn’t ask for one million dollars… This whole thing is a freaking shakedown.”

He said: “If you’re making money money off a war, you know, you can deal with God on that, because that’s really immoral.”

A spokesman for Johnson said: “This account is untrue.”

The former prime minister’s team said Carlson, an influential voice in right-wing US media known for having launched scathing attacks against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, had offered one million dollars for an interview on his channel.

Johnson initially accepted, provided the money went solely to Ukrainian veteran charities, but decided not to go ahead with it after the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, which has been widely blamed on the Kremlin, they said.

It is the latest flare-up in a row between the pair after Johnson used his Daily Mail column to brand Mr Carlson “a traitor to journalism” for his interview with the Russian President.

Johnson said the presenter had betrayed “viewers and listeners around the world” for not taking Putin to task for “the torture, the rapes, the blowing up of kindergartens” in Ukraine.

Tories, Labour and Lib Dems make their case to NFU conference

Helena Horton

Mark Spencer, the Conservative farming minister, his opposite number Dan Zeichner and Liberal Democrat environment spokesperson Tim Farron have been setting out their stalls to farmers at the NFU conference.

Spencer mostly blamed the issues farmers have faced in recent years on the Ukraine war, rising inflation and extreme weather. Many farmers at the NFU conference have spoken of their heartbreak as their farms have been underwater for months. Spencer promised he would incentivise farmers to keep producing British meat, saying “lots of people try to frame this sector as the (environmental) problem” but that “we are the people who can deliver a lower carbon footprint and less methane by producing the great quality of meat we produce”.

He gave a swipe to Labour, who have sparked protests in Wales over their diktat to farmers making them put 10% of their land into habitat schemes and plant 10% more with trees.

Zeichner took a more mild mannered approach and promised Labour would stop trade deal with countries which undercut the standards of British farmers, as well as ending the checking hold-ups at Dover. He reiterated Labour promises to lower energy costs and reduce rural crime, as well as setting up a Cobra-style taskforce to tackle floods.

He said:

Jacob Rees Mogg’s comments welcoming hormone injected beef and chlorine-washed chicken were rightly called out by Minette (Batters, the NFU president), but they represent a strand of thinking that runs deep through parts of the Conservative party, parts that were in government all too recently, and could be again.

Farron slammed the Tories’ “botched transition” and said hill farmers in his constituency have been losing 41% of their income under the new environment schemes. He said the “lakeland clearances” have been going on, by which he means large landlords are turfing tenant farmers off the hills to enter into lucrative government nature schemes.

Farron also highlighted a Guardian story about how Defra officials have buried evidence showing the dire situaiton for hill farmers and promised £1bn extra a year in farming schemes under a Lib Dem government.

Spencer promised he would stop people “taking the mickey” by “taking action to stop” landowners turfing off tenants and planting large parts of their farm as wild bird food to receive payments of £800 an acre. However, this only appears to be in the form of “issuing very strong guidance”.

Keir Starmer was beaten up in a nightclub in Cornwall as a teenager after trying to defend one of his friends who was attacked for being gay, a new book reveals. Pippa Crerar has the story.

Libby Brooks

Shadow Scottish secretary Ian Murray issued a plea to SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn to accept their “more balanced” amendment to the Gaza motion this morning, warning that without this all attempts to gather cross-party support for a ceasefire were “doomed to fail” because of the government majority.

Otherwise, he warned:

We will sit here tonight after all the votes have been counted and everything will have failed but the government’s (amendment) because it’s a question of mathematics.

My plea to the SNP all of last week was if you truly want parliament to speak with one voice let’s have a balanced motion that allows everyone to get behind it.

He said that if the SNP accepted the Labour amendment to their motion, which Murray argued takes a broader, recognising Israel’s position and making proposals for a pathway forward from the conflict, “then we can spend our time this morning trying to persuade government members to get behind it and perhaps there’s a better chance of something being passed rather than us just being defeated by the government”.

Lisa Nandy, the shadow international development secretary, has said Labour’s amendment to the Scottish National party’s motion calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza is a moment to “lift our debate up” away from party politics and “speak with one voice”. Geneva Abdul has the story here.

The Liberal Democrats have written to Sir Laurie Magnus, the prime minister’s ethics adviser, asking for an investigation into whether Kemi Badenoch has broken the ministerial code by knowingly misleading parliament.

In her letter, Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dem deputy leader, said that Badenoch described Henry Staunton’s claims as “completely false” in the Commons on Monday. Referring to the new evidence published by the Times today (see 9.21am), Cooper says:

Given that Mr Staunton continues to stand by his allegations, there is a clear question as to who is telling the truth and whether Kemi Badenoch has knowingly misled parliament. It is clearly in the public interest for the facts of this important matter to be determined. In your role as ethics adviser, I urge you to open an investigation into this matter and accordingly determine whether or not a breach of the code has been committed by the secretary of state.

Subpostmasters who are at the heart of this whole scandal deserve justice, financial redress and the truth.

Normally the ethics advisers (technically known as the independent adviser on ministers’ interests) only launches an inquiry into a minister at the request of the PM. And yesterday Rishi Sunak defended Badenoch’s response to the Staunton allegations.

But under revised terms of reference published two years ago, the adviser can initiate an investigation himself. If that happens, the PM has the right to veto it, but in those circumstances the adviser can insist on reasons for this being made public (unless there is a good reason for keeping that decision private, such as national security).

UPDATE: Here is the text of Cooper’s letter.

Good morning. After the former Post Office chair, Henry Staunton, gave an interview at the weekend making various allegations about the government’s response to the Horizon scandal, including claiming that he was told by a senior official to delay compensation payments, Kemi Badenoch, the businesss secretary, hit back. Whereas politicians in these circumstances normally only contest the parts of the negative story they can confidently refute, Badenoch went nuclear, and more or less dismissed everything Staunton was saying as a complete pack of lies.

Today that is not looking like such a wise strategy. Henry Staunton has now found a copy of the contemporaneous note he made of his conversation with the person he described to the Sunday Times as a senior civil servant and he has shown it to the Times. The official was Sarah Munby, who at the time was permanent secretary at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and the memo does a lot to substantiate Staunton’s original claim.

In his story for the Times, Oliver Shah reports:

Staunton’s first meeting with Munby came a month after he took over from Tim Parker in December 2022. His memo says that he told Munby that he “had been on over a dozen public company boards and not seen one with so many challenges”. It says that the board had identified a financial shortfall of £160 million as of September 2022 and that “there was a likelihood of a significant reduction in post offices if funding (from the government) was not (requested)”.

“Sarah was sympathetic to all of the above,” the memo says. “She understood the ‘huge commercial challenge’ and the ‘seriousness’ of the financial position. She described ‘all the options as unattractive’. However, ‘politicians do not necessarily like to confront reality’. This particularly applied when there was no obvious ‘route to profitability’.

“She said we needed to know that in the run-up to the election there was no appetite to ‘rip off the band aid’. ‘Now was not the time for dealing with long-term issues.’ We needed a plan to ‘hobble’ up to the election.”

In his interview at the weekend Staunton said he was told to hold up spending so the Post Office could “limp” into the election. In one respect his memory was faulty, because the word he recorded in his contemporaneous record was “hobble”. But that is a minor detail. On the substance of what was said, the written evidence backs up what was claimed in the interview.

In response, a government source has told the Times that Staunton is misrepresenting what he was told, either deliberately or because he was confused. Munby was not talking about compensation payments, the source suggested. They said:

The long-standing issues around Post Offices finances are a matter of public record and do not include postmaster compensation, which is being fully funded by the government. Henry Staunton is either confused or deliberately mixing up the two issues.

On the record, the government is also denying that Staunton was told to delay the payment of compensation. “The government has sped up compensation to victims, and consistently encouraged postmasters to come forward with their claims. To suggest any actions or conversations happened to the contrary is incorrect,” a spokesperson said.

But, although his memo implies Munby was was talking about overall Post Office finances, Staunton told the Times that by far the two biggest items where the Post Office was able to vary its spending were compensation payments and replacement of the Horizon system.

When it is hard to reconcile two conflicting accounts of a story, one reliable fallback is to consider which source is more reliable. And that is why it is particularly unfortunate for Badenoch that the new revelation coincides with the publication of a story in the Financial Times implying she has not been telling the truth about trade talks with Canada. In their story, George Parker, Lucy Fisher and Peter Campbell report:

Badenoch told MPs “explicitly” on January 29 that talks with Canada were “ongoing” to avoid a March 31 tariff cliff-edge for UK carmakers, even though she had earlier unilaterally paused wider trade talks with the Ottawa government

But the Canadian high commissioner to the UK, Ralph Goodale, has written to the House of Commons business select committee to insist Badenoch’s claimed talks, which also cover cheesemakers, have not happened.

With PMQs starting within the next three hours, both stories are likely to get referenced later in the Commons today. And that is before we even get started on the Gaza debate.

And at some point MPs will also want to address the story suggesting the UK no longer has a working nuclear deterrent. So it is going to be a busy day.

Here is the agenda for the day.

10am: Sir Mark Rowley, commissioner of the Metropolitan police, gives evidence to the London assembly’s police and crime committee.

12pm: Rishi Sunak faces Keir Starmer at PMQs.

After 12.45pm: MPs begin their debate on the SNP motion calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Voting should take place at around 4pm.

Afternoon: The Palestine Solidarity Campaign holds a rally outside parliament.

Also, in Wales, junior doctors have started a three-day strike.

If you want to contact me, do try the “send us a message” feature. You’ll see it just below the byline – on the left of the screen, if you are reading on a laptop or a desktop. This is for people who want to message me directly. I find it very useful when people message to point out errors (even typos – no mistake is too small to correct). Often I find your questions very interesting, too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either in the comments below the line; privately (if you leave an email address and that seems more appropriate); or in the main blog, if I think it is a topic of wide interest.