UK politics live: Boris Johnson backs call for P&O Ferries boss to resign over mass sackings | Politics

Downing Street has confirmed that Boris Johnson spoke with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, this morning to discuss the war in Ukraine.

The call lasted around 50 minutes, a spokesperson for the PM said, adding:

Obviously, the Prime Minister has been talking with a lot of world leaders and quite regularly throughout the course of what has happened in Ukraine.

This is part of the Prime Minister’s wider engagement with world leaders so he can set out our position on where we think the current situation is.

Paul Kissack, chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, writes for us today that the UK’s poorest people have been utterly abandoned by Rishi Sunak:

I can’t recall a worse fiscal event than Wednesday’s spring statement.

It had nothing meaningful to say on the big strategic challenges our economy faces. According to the prime minister, levelling up is the defining mission of this government. The chancellor couldn’t bring himself to even mention it. There was similarly nothing to learn about net zero or the UK’s productivity challenge.

It was fiscally incoherent. Even the mild-mannered Institute for Fiscal Studies was left shouting “Oh for goodness sake” at the news that Sunak is raising national insurance while cutting income tax, increasing taxes on people who work to protect the incomes of those who often don’t, including landlords and wealthy pensioners.

As a set-piece event, it unravelled within hours. Sunak woke on Thursday to a full spread of hostile front pages. During media interviews that morning, he became increasingly rattled and tetchy. He seemed taken aback that so many of the questions put to him focused on those who will struggle most to bear the cost of living crisis.

This should not have come as a surprise. The rising cost of essentials affects us all, but not equally. People on the lowest incomes are at greatest risk, because unavoidable spending on energy and food takes up a higher proportion of their budget than any other group. Already they have nothing to cut back on.

Faced with the greatest threat to living standards for generations, it is impossible to justify the decision to leave almost everyone at the sharp end of the crisis out in the cold. Rather than strengthen the support available, he chose to cut benefits in real terms, leaving households in poverty £445 out of pocket for the year ahead; 600,000 more people will be pulled into poverty by this decision. Around a quarter of them are children.

Read more here:

YouGov has published the latest results from its Westminster voting intention poll.

The latest figures show a two-point gap between Labour and the Conservatives, with Labour now holding 37% of the vote (+1 from their previous survey on 22 – 23 March) to the Conservatives’ 35% share.

Elsewhere, the Liberal Democrats have 10% of the vote (+1), while the Greens have 7% (-1) and Reform UK have 4% of the vote (-1).

The former head of the Civil Service and ex-national security adviser, Lord Sedwill, has called for the dismantling of Russia’s covert intelligence networks across Nato countries.

Lord Sedwill told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

Personally I would like to see the sanctions continue to toughen.

We’ve seen more action on economic sanctions announced over the past couple of days, but after the Salisbury attack here for example, we completely dismantled the Russian covert intelligence capability in the UK, others did diplomatic expulsions, but I think across the Alliance we could do that.

Countries should expel undeclared Russian intelligence officers “masquerading as diplomats or businesspeople” who were preparing cyber attacks, trying to “subvert our systems” or break the sanctions imposed on Russia, he added.

On BBC Question Time last night, an audience member expressed her “disappointment” in the government for knowing “the cost of everything and value of nothing”.

The audience member, who said she had voted for the government, said:

I can’t tell you how disappointed I am with your government. I just, I really can’t express in words, the mess you’ve made.

I sat through the pandemic and I watched money being haemorrhaged away. Money that we could well do with now.

The government was “out of touch”, she continued.

You’re dealing in millions and millions and trillions of pounds. You know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

I don’t know what to say to you other than just a lot of you, just go. Just go.

And this is from someone that voted for you. What a disappointment you are.

Boris Johnson has suggested Vladimir Putin could be defeated in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Speaking in a rare interview with BBC Newsnight, the PM praised Ukraine’s “Churchillian” leader, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and said: “I think Ukraine can certainly win.”

There’s a sense in which Putin has already failed or lost because I think that he had literally no idea that the Ukrainians were going to mount the resistance that they are, and he totally misunderstood what Ukraine is.

And far from extinguishing Ukraine as a nation, he is solidifying it.

Asked what it meant that his position had been saved by the invasion, Johnson said he “of course” welcomes tough questions over his involvement in the partygate saga as he said such probing would not be allowed in Putin’s Russia.

I think what it says is that we’re very lucky to live in a country where journalists can quite properly go hard on this sort of question, this sort of issue, because I can tell you, Nick, that is not what happens in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and it’s certainly something that we want to make sure continues to happen in Ukraine.

Asked if he would therefore welcome tough questions about partygate, where numerous parties were allegedly held across Whitehall during Covid restrictions, he replied:

Yes, of course. That is what it’s all about. And it’s about…and I mean it quite seriously.

Leaked emails suggest that the Conservative peer Michelle Mone lobbied a health minister on behalf of a company seeking Covid contracts – five months after the point at which her lawyers said she had stopped doing anything for the firm.

The documents add to questions surrounding Lady Mone’s account of her involvement in PPE Medpro, which was awarded government contracts worth more than £200m to supply personal protective equipment early in the pandemic.

Several months later, according to the leaked emails, Mone was trying to help PPE Medpro secure a lucrative contract to supply the government with Covid-19 antigen tests.

Mone has repeatedly sought to distance herself from PPE Medpro, whose business she first recommended to the government in early May 2020. When Mone’s referral of May 2020 became public, she said her involvement in the company went no further than a single recommendation to the then Cabinet Office minister Theodore Agnew.

However, emails seen by the Guardian from October 2020 suggest that Mone was by that point still promoting the company, which was selling Covid tests.

My colleague David Conn has the story.

On the subject of Ukraine, the latest Ministry of Defence intelligence update says Ukrainian forces have reoccupied towns and defensive positions up to 35 kilometres east of the capital, Kyiv.

The intelligence update, published this morning, continues:

Ukrainian Forces are likely to continue to attempt to push Russian Forces back along the north-western axis from Kyiv towards Hostomel Airfield.

In the south of Ukraine Russian Forces are still attempting to circumvent Mykolaiv as they look to drive west towards Odesa with their progress being slowed by logistic issues and Ukrainian resistance.

The Home Office says 20,100 visas have been issued under the Ukraine family scheme as of 5pm on Thursday.

So far 35,500 applications have been submitted, according to provisional data published on the department’s website, PA news agency reports.

The UK’s resettlement scheme for those fleeing Ukraine has been branded a “disgrace” by one Briton working in Lviv helping applicants through the process.

Andrew Murray, a technology worker from north-east Scotland, said ministers’ claims about the success of the visa programme that is meant to allow charities, businesses or companies to sponsor a refugee “does not match the reality on the ground”.

Murray said:

The rhetoric stops at the border of Ukraine and does not penetrate where it’s needed.

Speaking from Lviv, Murray said Ukrainians were “very grateful” for all the military equipment supplied by Britain to help fend off Russian forces.

But he added:

They’re under no illusion that the UK has made it artificially difficult to seek sanctuary there.

My colleague Aubrey Allegretti has the story.

Here’s more from the former Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, speaking to BBC Breakfast about Wednesday’s spring statement.

Brown accused Rishi Sunak of missing out millions of people who are “facing real hardship” in his budget statement.

He said:

Any comparing and compassionate chancellor would want to do something about this level of fuel poverty.

There was a blank page in his budget statement this week and it missed out millions of people who are facing real hardship.

The former PM said parents in Fife are battling to keep their children warm at night.

I’ve seen poverty when we’ve had unemployment and I’ve seen poverty when I was growing up in a mining town, and I haven’t seen anything as bad as this, and therefore there’s an urgency about the chancellor acting.

This is something that he cannot turn his back away from.

The former Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, has warned that families will face a cost of living crisis that “no chancellor, no government should be prepared to accept”.

Speaking to BBC Breakfast, Brown said:

This is an emergency. It’s a cost of living crisis. You cannot ignore the needs of people who are having to choose between putting the heating up and feeding the meter and feeding the children.

That is simply not an acceptable situation.

He added:

We cannot allow this. We’ve got food banks, we’ve now got baby banks, we got clothes banks, and now what we’ve got in Fife here is effectively a bedding bank.

The government has failed to get a handle on excessive salaries paid to academy trust leaders, according to parliament’s spending watchdog.

According to a report by the Commons public accounts committee, the number of academy trusts paying at least one senior staff member more than £100,000 went up from 1,875 in 2019-20 to 2,245 the following year.

The committee criticised the use of tens of millions of pounds in public money to “prop up” poorly managed trusts in its report on the sector, which was published on Friday just days before the DfE is expected to unveil plans to extend its academies programme to eventually include all schools in England.

MPs on the committee said the sector’s lack of financial transparency undermined parents’ capacity to hold school leaders and the DfE to account, both for their use of public funds and the education they provide.

They also accused the DfE of not yet having a sufficient handle on excessive pay within the sector, which meant the department could not assess whether public funds were being well spent. The committee said using public money to prop up academy trusts in difficulty failed to address poor financial management within trusts.

The report said:

We are concerned that there is a risk that a trust becomes too big to fail and could therefore see large sums of public funds being pumped into it to keep it afloat.

At the other end of the scale, there were fears that small schools in rural areas – which may be less attractive to trusts – could become “orphaned”.

My colleague Sally Weale has the story.

Good morning. The transport secretary, Grant Shapps, has called for the chief executive of P&O Ferries to resign over the sacking of 800 workers and pledged to force the ferry company to reverse the move and pay its crew the minimum wage.

On Thursday, Peter Hebblethwaite admitted to MPs that his company broke the law by sacking the 800 workers without consultation, a performance Shapps described as “brazen, breathtaking, and showed incredible arrogance”.

Speaking to Sky News, Shapps said:

I cannot believe that he can stay in that role having admitted to deliberately going out and using a loophole – well, break the law – but also use a loophole.

They flagged their ships through Cyprus [which meant they] avoided having to tell anybody about this, or they felt they did. And even though they know they’ve broken the law, what they’ve done is to pay people off in such a way to try and buy their silence. It’s unacceptable.

My colleague Matthew Weaver has the story here.

Shapps also accused P&O Ferries of attempting to “buy silence” from its staff over the mass sackings, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

What they’ve done is paid off – or attempted to pay off – their staff with higher redundancy payments… and therefore buy their silence.

We cannot have a situation where laws are being creatively used, or abused in this case, in order to get around what Parliament has very clearly intended to do. We have a (National) Minimum Wage Act.

Shapps pledged new legislation next week that will force the company to pay workers minimum wage, adding that he had spoken to shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh and believed there was “very, very broad parliamentary agreement” that new legislation was needed.