Sunak says Boris Johnson’s description of Treasury as ‘pro-death squad’ was wrong
Back at the Covid inquiry, Hugo Keith KC is now asking Rishi Sunak about claims that the Treasury was seen as the “pro-death” squad.
Sunak says he was not aware of that. And he says that is not a “fair characterisation”.
I do not think it is a fair characterisation on the incredibly hardworking people that I was lucky to be supported by at the Treasury.
Keith said officials in No 10 described the Treasury as the “pro-death squad”, but he did not mention the fact that Boris Johnson himself used the term. At an earlier hearing the inquiry was read an extract from Sir Patrick Vallance’s diary which said:
The PM is on record as saying that he wants tier 3, 1 March; tier 2, 1 April; tier 1, 1 May; and nothing by September, and he ends up by saying the team must bring in ‘the pro-death squad from HMT’.
Key events
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Rwanda will keep its £240m without taking single asylum seeker if UK abandons deal, MPs told
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Tory MPs given ‘outdated’ analysis in push for Rwanda bill
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Sunak’s evidence to Covid inquiry – snap verdict
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Treasury acted on behalf of England, not UK as whole, during Covid, Welsh first minister Mark Drakeford tells inquiry
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Yousaf accuses Cameron of being ‘petty’ after he threatens withdrawal of Foreign Office support for Scottish ministers
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Sunak says Boris Johnson’s description of Treasury as ‘pro-death squad’ was wrong
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ERG chair Mark Francois urges government to pull Rwanda bill and produce new version before second reading vote
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Sunak insists government’s science advisers had opportunity to raise concerns about ‘eat out to help out’ scheme
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Government publishes its legal assessment of Rwanda bill
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Sunak says many hospitality jobs would have been at risk ‘with devastating consequences’ without ‘eat out to help out’
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Extracts from ERG’s ‘star chamber’ legal assessment of Rwanda bill
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Rwanda bill ‘partial and incomplete solution’ to small boats problem, Tory MPs told by ERG’s ‘star chamber’
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Treasury was worried about its Covid economic advice to PM being ‘watered down’ by Cabinet Office, memo suggests
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Sunak says one government gilt auction failed ahead of full lockdown, causing Treasury concern about ability to borrow
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No 10 says it will publish summary of government’s legal advice about Rwanda bill
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Sunak claims he did not hear complaints at time about Johnson’s decision-making being chaotic
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Sunak defends Johnson against claims that he dithered too much over Covid decisions
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Sunak says government did consider disadvantages of lockdown, but more ahead of later ones than first one
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Sunak tells inquiry he does not think cabinet was sidelined when Covid decisions being taken
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Sunak says his main responsibility in making Covid policy was to put forward economic arguments
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Sunak confirms many of his Covid messages not available to inquiry, but says he was not ‘prolific’ WhatsApp user anyway
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Sunak starts Covid inquiry evidence saying how sorry he is to people who lost loved ones
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Cabinet Office minister Esther McVey say she hopes Covid inquiry will consider argument lockdown unnecessary
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Tories being touted in media as possible replacements for Sunak
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Farage says ‘never say never’ when asked about possible political comeback, saying Tories ‘in total shambles’
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Rishi Sunak to face Covid inquiry as Tory MPs meet to consider fate of Rwanda asylum bill
Andrew Sparrow
Two groups of Conservative MPs are meeting, separately, about now to discuss the Rwanda bill.
The rightwing European Research Group is holding a meeting with Robert Jenrick, who resigned as immigration minister over the bill. Jenrick has said he cannot support the bill as it is now, but he has not said he will vote against tomorrow, implying he will abstain. The chair of the ERG, Mark Francois, has said that he wants the bill pulled (see 2.50pm) and he has also said that the ERG may not give its collective view on how its members should vote until the last minute (see 12.56pm).
The centrist One Nation Caucus is also meeting, and we are expecting to hear how its members are likely to vote later.
The One Nation Caucus has more than 100 members and so, in theory, it ought to be a much more powerful body in the party than the ERG, whose members number a few dozen. But in practice it doesn’t work like that. The ERG are zealots and ideologues, while the One Nationers are pragmatists. The One Nation lot believe that willingess to compromise is virtue; on the ERG side, it’s seen as a vice, or selling out. The former Tory cabinet minister Rory Stewart described the difference perfectly in his brilliant memoir, Politics on the Edge. Referring to meetings of a One Nation group during the Brexit years, and how they measured up against their Brexiter opponents, he said: “We felt like a book club going to a Millwall game.”
That’s all from me for tonight. Tom Ambrose is taking over now.
Rwanda will keep its £240m without taking single asylum seeker if UK abandons deal, MPs told
Sir Matthew Rycroft, permanent secretary at the Home Office, has told MPs that in theory Rwanda could walk away from its deportation deal with the UK with £240m – the money it has received already – without having to accept a single asylum seeker.
Giving evidence to the public accounts committee, Rycroft said if the UK instigated the break clause in the deal, Rwanda would keep the money already paid.
But if Rwanda activated the break clause, the money would be repaid “proportionately”.
That prompted Meg Hillier, chair of the committee, to say:
So they could still have the money with having perhaps not had to receive a single asylum seeker.
Rycroft replied: “It would depend on the circumstances.”
Tory MPs given ‘outdated’ analysis in push for Rwanda bill
Ministers are using an “outdated and flawed” Home Office analysis which claims 99.5% of legal challenges to the Rwanda bill would fail (see 9.25am) to persuade Conservative MPs to vote for it, informed party sources have said. Rajeev Syal and Pippa Crerar have the story.
Christopher Hope from GB News says Tory whips are in a panic about tomorrow’s vote
Senior Tory MPs tell me the whips have a problem with their backbenchers ahead of tomorrow’s Rwanda vote.
One says trust was eroded in last week’s infected blood defeat, and colleagues are not being straight with the whips any more.
Another MP: “The whips are wetting themselves.”
Senior Tory MPs tell me the whips have a problem with their backbenchers ahead of tomorrow’s Rwanda vote.
One says trust was eroded in last week’s infected blood defeat, and colleagues are not being straight with the whips any more.
Another MP: “The whips are wetting themselves.”— Christopher Hope📝 (@christopherhope) December 11, 2023
In a thread on X, the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice campaign group says Rishi Sunak should resign. It starts here.
Rishi Sunak, or as the Chief Medical Officer called him, ‘Dr Death the Chancellor’ has a catalogue of failures to answer for, from the ‘Eat Out To Help Out the Virus’ policy to refusing financial support for care workers to stop the spread of Covid between care homes.
1/6
— Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK (@CovidJusticeUK) December 11, 2023
Rishi Sunak, or as the Chief Medical Officer called him, ‘Dr Death the Chancellor’ has a catalogue of failures to answer for, from the ‘Eat Out To Help Out the Virus’ policy to refusing financial support for care workers to stop the spread of Covid between care homes.
And it concludes:
In a pandemic, public health relies on public confidence in decision makers. Rishi Sunak was and continues to be a public health hazard, and for the sake of our safety, he must resign.
Sunak’s evidence to Covid inquiry – snap verdict
For much of this year it was assumed that Rishi Sunak’s evidence to the Covid inquiry would be a big, and difficult, moment for him. In the event, for the most part, he got through it fairly easily, on a day when what was happening elsewhere in London was much more relevant to the future of his premiership. The parallel is not exact, it was a bit like that afternoon Boris Johnson spent the afternoon answering questions about council funding at the liaison committee as cabinet ministers were queuing up in Downing Street waiting to tell him to quit.
Sunak was at his most tetchy when asked to defend “eat out to help out”, and for many people his biggest weakness will be his claim not to have access to his old WhatsApp messages. (See 10.42am.) There were times when, like other witnesses, he showed himself susceptible to Covid inquiry memory loss, but at other times he was remarkably well briefed on the issue at hand. If his main aim was to convince Lady Hallett that he was not a “let rip” opponent of all public health measures, then he probably succeeded. When Hugo Keith KC put it to him that he was “violently opposed to a lockdown”, Sunak replied: “I think that’s not a fair characterization of my position.”
Perhaps what was most surprising about Sunak’s evidence was his determination to defend Johnson against claims that his decision making in No 10 chaotic. The evidence to back this charge has been overwhelming. When Sunak resigned in the summer of 2022, he said it was because under Johnson the government was not being run “properly, competently and seriously”. At that point he made a virtue of being very different from Johnson. But today he claimed (not very convincingly) not to be aware that officials working in No 10 for Johnson thought it was all a shambles (see 11.46am) and he even endorsed the Johnson argument that what Dominic Cummings called trolleying was just a robust means of testing alternative propositions.
This was also an answer where the two stories of the day melded. At one point it was easier for Sunak to disown Johnson. But the Tory MPs – and the newspapers – causing him most trouble in the Commons over Rwanda are also those most enthusiastic about his predecessor bar one, and today probably wasn’t the day to wind them up.
At the Covid inquiry Sunak says he did not see any evidence that higher payments for people who had to isolate when they were sick would increase compliance with Covid rules.
But he said the Treasury set up a £500 support scheme anyway.
Q: The scheme had very low take-up.
Yes, says Sunak. Take-up was around a fifth.
Q: Was that because it was run by local authorities?
Sunak says there was no clear alternative. The only alternative was getting the Deparment of Work and Pensions to make those payments, but that would have required primary legislation, and DWP did not have a delivery mechanism, he says.
That is the end of Sunak’s evidence.
Lady Hallett says that is the end of the oral evidence for module two. But she stresses that oral evidence is only part of the evidence she considers.
The Society of Conservative Lawyers has issued its own briefing on the Rwanda bill. The 10-page paper by Lord Sandhurst KC and Harry Gillow and it comes down in favour of the bill. Here is the conclusion.
While the Rwanda bill does allow individual challenges and there is the possibility of delay by the courts, our view is that the objectives of the MEDP [migration and economic development partnership – the Rwanda deal] are met better by the Rwanda Bill as drafted than the proposed alternative approaches. In particular, so far as the MEDP’s objectives are concerned, the approach in the Rwanda Bill is far preferable to one that runs a serious risk of collapsing the scheme in its entirety ultimately a political question and the importance of clause 5 [allowing ministers to ignore European court of human rights’ injunctions] is to prevent interference by UK courts (notwithstanding that there would be no basis on which to do so in any case). As recently reported, France appears to have ignored an order from the European court of human rights not to deport an individual to Uzbekistan, an important development in respect of wider attitudes to the ECHR among signatory states.
Second, our view is that clause 5 in essence simply states the constitutional position, that the ECHR (including, therefore, Rule 39 orders) have no binding effect as a matter of domestic UK law, and it is for the executive (given prerogative powers to conduct foreign affairs) to decide how to respond. While there is nothing preventing parliament constraining the prerogative powers of the executive to act in this field, it would nevertheless be an unusual step, particularly where, as here, ministers are better placed to make a case-by-case assessment than parliament would be. Accordingly, we at present consider that imposing a duty to ignore Rule 39 orders would be inadvisable. We consider that insofar as there are concerns about whether ministers will comply with Rule 39 orders, this is best resolved through political pressure, rather than binding legislation.
The European Research Group, in its legal paper on the bill (see 1.22pm), said the bill should require ministers to ignore ECtHR injunctions – the proposal described by the Society of Conservative Laywers as “inadvisable”.
Leslie Thomas KC, counsel for the Federation of Ethnic Minority Healthcare Organisations (FEMHO), asked Sunak if he accepted that he exacerbated health inequalities by putting minority ethnic workers in a position where they had to work in environments where they were at risk of infection.
Sunak did not accept that. He said the “eat out to help out scheme” protected people’s jobs.
Rajiv Menon KC, who represents charities for children, is asking the questions now. He asks Sunak to accept the government was wrong to initially refuse to back Marcus Rashford’s call for poorer pupils to get free school meals during the holidays.
Sunak says the government did eventually fund the programme.
Q: Did you personally oppose this idea?
Sunak says that even when the pandemic supported ended, permanent programmes were put in place that were more generous than what had gone before.
Q: In his diary, Sir Patrick Vallance recalls someone saying: “Good working people pay for their children to eat and we don’t want freeloaders.”
Sunak says that was not him. And he says he did not hear anyone saying that.
Claire Mitchell KC, on behalf of Scottish Covid bereaved, shows the inquiry an excerpt from a letter from Nicola Sturgeon to the PM sent in September 2020 saying Scotland did not have enough financial autonomy to finance its own health measures.
Sunak repeats the point he made in relation to Wales about how as chancellor he gave the devolved administrations more flexibility.
Treasury acted on behalf of England, not UK as whole, during Covid, Welsh first minister Mark Drakeford tells inquiry
Gowman shows another extract from Drakeford’s statement, in which he claims that Treasury was acting on behalf of England, not the whole of the UK.
Again, Sunak says he does not accept this. He repeats the point about how allowed devolved adminstrations to get Barnett money earlier than normal. (See 3.45pm.)
Gowman shows an extract from the witness statement from Mark Drakeford, the Welsh first minister. He said Wales could have implemented its circuit breaker lockdown earlier if it had been guaranteed financial support.
Sunak does not accept this point. He says the UK government set up a special procedure during Covid to allow devolved adminstrations to access Barnett money (their equivalent for money going to England) early.
At the Covid inquiry, Rishi Sunak is now beinq questioned by Nia Gowman, counsel for Covid Bereaved Families for Justice Cymru.
She asks if the Welsh government had the option of opting out of the “eat out to help out” scheme.
Sunak says the Welsh government never asked to opt out of scheme.
Q: Doesn’t that show that they weren’t consulted?
Sunak says it was a matter for Westminster; he says there was no reason to consult the Welsh government about it. But they did not object, he says.
Yousaf accuses Cameron of being ‘petty’ after he threatens withdrawal of Foreign Office support for Scottish ministers
Libby Brooks
Scotland’s first minister, Humza Yousaf, has accused the new foreign secretary, David Cameron, of being “really petty and frankly misguided” after he threatened to withdraw Foreign Office support for Scottish ministers in an ongoing row about the SNP government’s international outreach.
Cameron wrote to the Scottish government warning it was a breach of protocol after Yousaf discussed the Gaza conflict and other matters with the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, at the Cop28 summit without UK officials.
Yousaf’s response on Monday morning came after briefings that Cameron wanted to take a “harder line” with the Scottish government than his predecessor, James Cleverly, who issued a similar threat after Yousaf met the Icelandic prime minister in August in New York, also without UK diplomats present.
Dismissing the intervention from an “unelected lord”, Yousaf said:
Scotland is the part of the UK, outside of London, that has attracted the most foreign direct investment for eight years in a row. That happens because the Scottish government’s international engagement is valued [and] has impact.
To threaten to curtail that, to stop that international engagement – the international engagement from the elected Scottish government from an unelected lord – I think is misguided and petty.
Yousaf has of course been outspoken in his calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, making often emotional pleas when his own in-laws were trapped under blockade for several weeks. But Cameron’s letter is understood to evidence ongoing disquiet about Yousaf’s position in contrast to current UK government policy.
Sunak says Boris Johnson’s description of Treasury as ‘pro-death squad’ was wrong
Back at the Covid inquiry, Hugo Keith KC is now asking Rishi Sunak about claims that the Treasury was seen as the “pro-death” squad.
Sunak says he was not aware of that. And he says that is not a “fair characterisation”.
I do not think it is a fair characterisation on the incredibly hardworking people that I was lucky to be supported by at the Treasury.
Keith said officials in No 10 described the Treasury as the “pro-death squad”, but he did not mention the fact that Boris Johnson himself used the term. At an earlier hearing the inquiry was read an extract from Sir Patrick Vallance’s diary which said:
The PM is on record as saying that he wants tier 3, 1 March; tier 2, 1 April; tier 1, 1 May; and nothing by September, and he ends up by saying the team must bring in ‘the pro-death squad from HMT’.
ERG chair Mark Francois urges government to pull Rwanda bill and produce new version before second reading vote
Mark Francois, the chair of the European Research Group, has suggested the government should pull its Rwanda bill and produce a new version before the second reading vote. (See 2.11pm.) He told GB News:
This bill means that individuals can keep tying the government up in legal knots. That’s why it needs to be redrafted.
The bill, because of the shape of it, because of its style, its legal structure would be quite difficult to amend.
I very much hope that, rather than plough on and damn the torpedoes, the government will listen, exercise common sense, pull the legislation and come back with something that is fit for purpose.
We’ve had two previous legislative attempts at this. The nationalities and borders bill that didn’t quite work, the illegal immigration bill that didn’t quite work.
This really is the last chance so the government would be well advised to get it right.
Keith asks Sunak about a line in the Spectator interview where Sunak said, referring to Sage: “If you empower all these independent people, you’re screwed.”
Sunak says he was referring to the need for policy decisions to be taken by politicians. And he suggests there may be a case for an economic counterpoint to Sage.
