Speaker summons Mail on Sunday editor to meeting to discuss sexist article about Angela Rayner In the Commons Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker, has joined those criticsing the Mail on Sunday for its sexist report about Angela Rayner. He said coverage like this was demeaning and offensive to MPs. He said that he would be inviting the editor of the Mail on Sunday, David Dillon, as well as the chair of parliamentary lobby (the group representing lobby journalists), Bloomberg’s Kitty Donaldson, to discuss the matter further. Afternoon summary Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons Speaker, has summoned the editor of the Mail on Sunday, David Dillon, to a meeting to discuss a story published by the paper yesterday that was widely condemned as sexist. Hoyle said reporting like this discouraged women from standing for parliament. (See 2.54pm.) Earlier Boris Johnson described the article as “sexist, misogynist tripe” and said if the Tory source for the story were identified, they would be punished. No 10 has backed Jacob Rees-Mogg over Nadine Dorries amid a cabinet split over his drive to get civil servants to stop working from home, which Dorries had labelled “Dickensian”. British universities are facing a brain drain as the row over Brexit in Northern Ireland threatens £250m in research funding from the EU, it has emerged. As my colleague Lisa O’Carroll reports, the European Research Council (ERC) has written to 98 scientists and academics who were recently approved for €172m (£145m) in grants telling them that if the UK’s associate membership of the €80bn Horizon Europe programme is not ratified they will not be eligible to draw down the money. The Labour party has vowed to abolish the “non-dom” tax loophole used by Rishi Sunak’s wife to save paying up to £20m in UK tax. Labour says the move could raise up to £1bn for the exchequer, but tax experts have questioned this, on the grounds that the 76,000 non-doms in the UK contributed £7.9bn in tax in 2019-20 (the most recent year for which data is available), including £5.6bn in income tax. “If non-dom status is scrapped, there is a real risk that the net effect on the UK tax base will be negative, not positive,” said Josie Hills, a tax manager at the law firm Pinsent Masons. ITV’s political editor Robert Peston says in a blog that Boris Johnson has not even received a questionnaire from the Metropolitan police about his attendance at the party in the No 10 garden on 20 May 2020, even though some fines have already been issued in connection with the event. He says his brain is aching trying to comprehend the logic behind the Met’s approach. He says: I want to stress, for the avoidance of doubt, that I am not saying it is a scandal or miscarriage of justice or wrong that the PM hasn’t been fined for the event on May 20, 2020. The point is I don’t know. It is also theoretically possible that Boris Johnson will end up receiving a questionnaire and being fined, and that he is simply at the back of some weird bureaucratic queue. But this anomaly is not trivial. It matters, to the public reputation of the prime minister, how many times he is fined for breaching the Covid rules he wrote ... Even when there are bigger problems directly affecting our lives to solve - Vladimir Putin, the cost of living - a police investigation of a serving prime minister is a massive deal. The lack of clarity and transparency on it undermines confidence in our version of democracy. Public understanding of how the police conduct the probe and reach their decisions will be hugely important if the police themselves are to avoid the taint of incompetence or political partiality. Sir Stephen Lovegrove, the national security adviser, has been giving evidence to the Commons foreign affairs committee about the decision to approve the decision to evacuate staff and animals from the Nowzad charity from Kabul last summer, as part of the airlift of Britons and Afghans at risk from the Taliban. (SeeHe says Boris Johnson was not directly involved in the decision. Asked about evidence given to the committee at an earlier hearing by an official who said Lovegrove was asked to get guidance from No 10 about the Nowzad staff, Lovegrove said he had “no memory” of speaking to No 10 about that matter. He said that he could not remember much from what happened that morning. His call logs and his emails showed nothing to suggest he had been in contact with No 10 about this, he added. Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, has confirmed in a statement to MPs that the UK will be sending a small number of Stormer missile launching vehicles to Ukraine. These are from my colleague Dan Sabbagh. NLAWs are next-generation light anti-tank weapons, and Javelins are anti-tank missiles. In his opening statement Wallace also said Ukraine had been an inspiration. He said: At the start of this conflict Russia had committed over 120 battalion tactical groups, approximately 65% of its entire ground combat strength. As of now we assess around over 25% of these have been rendered not combat effective. Ukraine is an inspiration to us all. Their brave people have never stopped fighting for their lands. They have endured indiscriminate bombardment, war crimes and overwhelming military aggression but they have stood firm, galvanised the international community and beaten back the army of Russia in the north and the north east. We anticipate this next phase of the invasion will be an attempt by Russia to occupy further the Donbas and connect via Mariupol the Crimea so it’s urgent that we in the international community ensure Ukraine gets the aid and weapons it so much needs. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, was once seen as Boris Johnson’s most likely successor as Tory leader and prime minister. But his reputation in the party has collapsed in the light of the spring statement and the controversy about his wife’s non-dom status, and he is now the cabinet minister least rated by Conservative members, according to ConservativeHome’s regular survey of Tory members. Boris Johnson is third from bottom in the league table. In their write-up, Paul Goodman and Henry Hill says: Ukraine will have pushed him up last month; Partygate will have pulled him down this. But the driver of his low scores is that the government is too left-wing, at least in the view of many activists. Priti Patel, the home secretary, was in bottom place last month, but her approval rating has soared following the announcement of her plan to effectively deport some asylum seekers to Rwanda. This is from the Independent Press Standards Organisation, a media regulator, on the Mail on Sunday article about Angela Rayner. Lisa O"Carroll A row over the legality of the Brexit deal is set to go to the supreme court. Senior judges in Belfast agreed to allow a group of unionists challenge an appeal court ruling over the Northern Ireland protocol, which mandates customs and physical checks on goods crossing the Irish Sea from Great Britain. It will be asked to decide whether the protocol had illegally trumped the Acts of Union 1800 or elements of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 which followed the Good Friday peace accord in the same year. Three legal points of public importance were identified for consideration in the ongoing campaign being mounted by the Traditional Unionist Voice leader, Jim Allister, and other representatives. Lady chief justice Dame Siobhan Keegan confirmed: “We have considered the papers, and in the circumstances of this case we are going to grant leave to appeal to the supreme court.” A judicial review challenge was originally brought last year by a group of unionist politicians and supporters including Allister, former Brexit party MEP Ben Habib, former Labour MP Kate Hoey, former DUP leader Arlene Foster, former UUP leader Steve Aiken and one of the architects of the Belfast Good Friday agreement, Lord Trimble. An adjoined case was taken by Belfast loyalist pastor Clifford Peebles. You can read why the court of appeal dismissed the earlier appeals here. This is what Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons Speaker, said told the Commons a few minutes ago about the Mail on Sunday article. At the start of today’s business I want to say something about the article in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday about [Angela Rayner]. I said to the house last week, in response to a point of order about a different article, that I took the issue of media freedom very seriously. It is one of the building blocks of our democracy. However, I share the views expressed by a wide range of members, including I believe the prime minister, that yesterday’s article was reporting unsubstantial claims [that were] misogynistic and offensive. Those are what we believe. I express my sympathy to [Rayner], subject to this type of comment. In being demeaning, offensive to women in parliament, it can only deter women who might considering standing for election to the detriment of us all. That is why I have arranged a meeting with the chair of the press lobby [and] the editor of the Mail on Sunday to discuss the issue affecting our parliamentary community. As my colleague Jessica Elgot points out, Hoyle’s final comment will cause some confusion because at Westminster there is a press gallery chair as well as a lobby chair. Presumably they can both go to the meeting. Speaker summons Mail on Sunday editor to meeting to discuss sexist article about Angela Rayner In the Commons Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker, has joined those criticsing the Mail on Sunday for its sexist report about Angela Rayner. He said coverage like this was demeaning and offensive to MPs. He said that he would be inviting the editor of the Mail on Sunday, David Dillon, as well as the chair of parliamentary lobby (the group representing lobby journalists), Bloomberg’s Kitty Donaldson, to discuss the matter further. Johnson rejects claims he is liability to Tories in local elections And here is a full summary of what Boris Johnson said in his pooled TV interview. He was speaking to the BBC’s Nick Eardley. Johnson said that the Tory source behind the sexist briefing to the Mail on Sunday about Angela Rayner will be punished if they are caught. (See 1.16pm.) He sidestepped a question about whether he would resign if the Sue Gray report is as damning about him as some reports claim it might be. (See 10.50am.) Asked if there were any circumstances in which he might read the report and resign, he said there were no circumstances in which he would comment on the report before it was out. He said people should vote Conservative in the local elections because Conservative councils provided value for money. He said: I think the case is very, very clear. It is Conservative councils that charge you less, it is Labour councils that have record council taxes. We’re the party that does more to empty your bins, does more to fix potholes - I think I’m right in saying that Conservative councils fill in four times as many potholes as Labour councils. What we believe in fundamentally is delivering value for money and getting over the job. That is what Conservative councils do. He did not comment on a suggestion that the Conservatives might lose 800 council seats in the elections. Eardley mentioned this figure when he asked how bad the results might be for the party. In response, Johnson just stressed reasons why people should vote for the Tories. He rejected suggestions he was a liability to the Conservatives in the local elections. Asked if he was an asset to the party, he said that the asset that party had was “the dynamism, energy and effort that Conservative councillors put in up and down the land to delivering better services, based on the sound Conservative principle of taxpayer value”. Pressed a second time on whether he was an asset to the party, he said “I’m not denying that”, before repeating the point about councillors. He welcomed Emmanuel Macron’s re-election as French president. He said: I think it’s very important that we have in Paris, a president of the French Republic who can be relied upon when it comes to some of the most important international issues, and particularly when you look at what’s been going on in Ukraine. It’s not right for friendly governments to comment on elections in neighbouring countries but what I can certainly say is that it is very, very important that Emmanuel and I have been able to work closely together on Ukraine over the last few weeks and months. We share a very common, very similar perspective and the unity of the west, the unity of Nato, has been absolutely vital for the stance we’ve taken against Putin, and that will now continue and I’m very, very reassured by that. He highlighted government plans to create an independent regulator for football, saying the new figure would “help fans to stick up for their interests, and stick up for the interests of historic clubs”. But he sidestepped a question about when a new regulator might be appointed. Asked if the new system could be in place within months, he just said that the government wanted to make “rapid legislative progress” and that it was going “as fast as we possibly can”. Here is my colleague Paul MacInnes’s story about the new regulator. The Conservative party could lose more than 1.3 million voters if the government scraps its net zero target, research suggests. My colleague Helena Horton has the story here. In his TV clip talking about what he might do to the Tory source behind the Mail on Sunday story about Angela Rayner, Boris Johnson referenced a quote from King Lear: I will do such things,— What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be The terrors of the earth. At this point Lear is ranting about the disloyalty of his daughters. He is also starting to go mad. It is not a comparison that Johnson ought to welcome. Perhaps he has been re-reading his Shakespeare with a mind to getting on with the biography of the bard that he has been commissioned to write. It has been claimed that he was working on it in early 2020 when he should have been focusing on Covid. Johnson says source behind sexist story against Angela Rayner will be punished if caught Boris Johnson has recorded a TV interview on a campaign trip, and he has used it to claim that if he identifies the Tory source who gave a sexist briefing to the Mail on Sunday about Angela Rayner, they face punishment. Johnson said: I have to say I thought it was the most appalling load of sexist, misogynist tripe. I immediately got in touch with Angela and we had a very friendly exchange. As PA Media reports, in a King Lear reference, he threatened to unleash “the terrors of the earth” on the source behind the comments if they were ever identified. If we ever find who is responsible for it, I don’t know what we will do, but they will be the terrors of the earth. It’s totally intolerable, that kind of thing. Sky News has just broadcast the clip now. As he talks about the “terrors of the earth”, Johnson frowns, and looks serious, but hyperbole like this normally implies Johnson is exaggerating for comic effect. There is a risk that a quote intended to show he is taking this seriously could have the opposite effect. As the Lib Dems have argued in the past, if Johnson is keen to root out people in the Conservative party who have expressed sexist views, other culprits are available.