No 10 says Johnson was "uncomfortable" about idea of Mail on Sunday editor being summoned to see Speaker At the post-PMQs lobby briefing, the prime minister’s spokesperson effectively said that Boris Johnson was siding with the Mail on Sunday, not the Speaker, on the issue of the summons to discuss the Angela Rayner article. (See 9.27am.) Asked for a reaction to the decision by David Dillon, the paper’s editor, not to attend a meeting requested by the Speaker, the PM’s spokesperson said: The prime minister is uncomfortable at the idea of our free press being summoned by politicians. We have a free press in this country and reporters must be free to report what they are told as they see fit. The spokesman said Johnson would not want “any perception of politicians seeking to in any way curb or control what a free press seeks to report”. As a journalist, Johnson was himself often criticised for writing sexist or inaccurate material. It is not hard to see why he might not approve of such reporting being challenged by an authority figure. Early evening summary An investigation has been launched by the government chief whip into reports that a Conservative frontbencher watched pornography on his phone in the Commons chamber. Boris Johnson has been branded the “Comical Ali of the cost-of-living crisis” by Keir Starmer, who accused the government of burying its head in the sand and standing by while inflation spirals and taxes rise for many. No 10 has said Johnson was “uncomfortable” about the attempt by Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons Speaker, to summon David Dillon, editor of the Mail on Sunday, to a meeting to discuss his concerns about the paper’s much-criticised article about Angela Rayner. (See 2.34pm.) Dillon said last night he was refusing to attend. (See 9.27am.) Rayner has hit out at claims that she viewed “sexist slurs” made against her as a joke. Lowering food tariffs will not solve the cost-of-living crisis and it would be “misleading” to suggest as much to consumers, the president of the farmers’ union said after reports ministers were considering slashing import taxes. Rishi Sunak has been cleared of breaching the ministerial code over his wife’s tax affairs, in a report by the cabinet’s ethics adviser, Lord Geidt. A £25m “fraud squad” is to be launched after MPs criticised the government’s failure to crack down on criminals who stole billions of pounds of taxpayers’ cash through Covid support schemes. MPs vote to reinsert provisions into elections bill seen by critics as threat to independence of Electoral Commission In the latest instalment of the end-of-session parliamentary ping pong, MPs have voted down changes to the elections bill favoured by the House of Lords. In two divisions, MPs have rejected an attempt by the Lords to remove a section of the bill giving ministers the power to issue directions to the Electoral Commission, the body that regulates elections, in the form of a “strategy and policy statement”. In a third division, MPs also rejected a Lords amendment that would have expanded the list of documentation accepted under the new rule in the bill requiring voters to have photo ID. The “strategy and policy statement” proposal has been strongly criticised by the Electoral Commission itself, the Commons public administration and constitutional affairs committee and the committee on standards in public life, which said it was “deeply troubled by the long-term risk to our democratic system that is inherent” in the plan. In the debate this afternoon Kemi Badenoch, the levelling-up minister, said these criticisms were misplaced. She said: It has been claimed by some parliamentarians that this duty to have regard to the strategy and policy statement will weaken the operational independence of the commission. That is not correct. This duty will not allow the government to direct the commission’s decision-making nor will it undermine the commission’s other statutory duties or displace the commission’s need to carry out those other duties. Geidt clears Sunak of breaking ministerial code - and says ministerial duties not compromised by holding US green card Lord Geidt, the independent adviser on ministers’ interests, has declared that Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, did not break the ministerial code in connection with his declarations of interest, his wife’s non-dom status, his US green card and government links with Infosys, the firm set up by his father-in-law. This is not particularly surprising. Sunak called for an investigation by Geidt himself, and at the time seemed confident he had followed the rules. Geidt also implies that there is no inherent conflict of interest in a government minister holding a US green card, which is likely to be a more controversial ruling because of the conditions attached to having a green card. Green cards give their holders the permanent right to work in the US, and are seen as one step away from citizenship. Geidt has set out his findings in a six-page letter. Here are the key points. Geidt says Sunak has been “assiduous” in fulfilling his obligations under the ministerial code and that he has not broken its rules. Interestingly, however, Geidt stresses that he has only looked at the narrow issue of whether Sunak followed the rules. “My role does not touch on any wider question of the merits of such interests or arrangements,” he says. The main problem with the non-dom story for Sunak has always been the political implications of the revelations about his green card and his wife’s non-dom status, rather than the issue of whether or not be broke the rules. Geidt says Sunak’s duties as a minister, including as chancellor, were not compromised by his having a US green card. He says: A US permanent resident card allows the holder to live and work permanently in the United States. It imposes a number of obligations on the holder, including a requirement to comply with US law and to file tax returns in the United States. The obligation to pay tax in other jurisdictions does not provide an inherent conflict with the duties of a minister of the Crown … Considering the card against the specific responsibilities of the chancellor’s ministerial offices subsequent to his first role, I do not consider that its possession would constitute an inherent conflict of interest. Being subject to the obligations imposed by the card in his personal life could not reasonably be said to be in tension with the faithful discharge of his duties as chief secretary to the Treasury or as chancellor of the exchequer. But Geidt says it is not for him to rule on whether Sunak was complying with his obligations to the US as a holder of the card. That is not relevant to the ministerial interests process he was looking at, he says. He says that the non-dom status of Akshata Murty, Sunak’s wife, did not create an “inherent conflict” of interest with Sunak’s role as chancellor. He says he looked at two cases where the Treasury considered non-dom status under Sunak. In the first, when it was looking at policy for incentivising inward investment, Sunak reminded the permanent secretary of his wife’s situation, offered to step aside from the decision-making process, but the proposal was dropped anyway. And in the second case, the Treasury minister John Glen decided a change to non-dom policy for a narrow group of people, and Murty was not affected. Geidt says that, although Sunak declared his wife’s non-dom status, it was not necessary to declare this publicly in the register of ministers’ interests “taking into account Ms Murty’s rights to privacy”. Geidt says although Infosys, the company set up by Murty’s father, in which she holds shares, has had meetings with the government, it has not contracted with the Treasury while Sunak has been a minister there, and so no conflict of interest has arisen. A reader has been in touch in the comments to say that, if you use the OECD definition of “paid employment”, Boris Johnson was right to say paid employment is up by 500,000 since before the pandemic. The OECD definition equates to payroll employment, and does not include the self-employed. However Johnson did not mention the OECD at PMQs (see 3.19pm) and, when he talked about more people being in paid employment now, people will have assumed that he was talking about the self-employed too. Hacked Off, the group set up representing the victims of phone hacking, which campaigns for higher press standards, says the Independent Press Standards Organisations has never upheld a complaint about sexism in its eight years of existence. Ipso was set up with the support of many national newspapers when the coalition government was in power, as an alternative to the more powerful regulator proposed by the Leveson inquiry. Hacked Off has consistently argued that Ipso is too weak. Commenting on the Mail on Sunday’s refusal to attend a meeting with the Speaker to discuss the Angela Rayner article, Emma Jones, a Hacked Off board member, said: Thousands of complaints have been made about the Mail on Sunday’s misogynistic article about Angela Rayner MP, but on the basis of Ipso’s track record, the likelihood of any of them being upheld is vanishingly small. The Mail on Sunday editor’s subsequent refusal to meet with the Speaker of the House of Commons illustrates the contempt in which editors hold any person or organisation who would seek to hold them to account. They think they are above accountability and, so long as Ipso remains in place, they are. Until the government act to complete the Leveson reforms, and compel all national newspapers to be members of an independent regulator, misogyny, racism and other forms of discrimination in the press will persist. According to ITV’s Anushka Asthana, the female Conservative MP who said at a meeting on Monday night that a member of the government had once been seen watching pornography on his phone in the Commons chamber declined to say who the person was when asked by Chris Heaton-Harris, the chief whip. Pippa Crerar from the Daily Mirror has more from the meeting. Johnson accused of lying to parliament for 10th time about employment being higher now than pre-pandemic At PMQs Boris Johnson said that there were “500,000 more people in paid employment now than when the pandemic began”. Not only is this untrue, according to Full Fact, the fact checking website, Johnson has now stated this falsehold 10 times in parliament. According to ONS figures, there were 33,073,000 people in work between December 2019 and February 2020 - before the pandemic. The most recent figures, covering Decmber 2021 to February 2022, show 32,485,000 people in paid employment - almost 600,000 people than before the pandemic. Here is the last Full Fact article on this. At the liaison committee last month, when Johnson was asked about this error, he said that he accepted that it was only payroll employment that was up (the big fall has been in the number of self-employed workers) and he claimed he had corrected the record. That was also untrue; he hasn’t - at least not formally, to parliament. Commenting on the latest falsehood, Will Moy, the Full Fact CEO, said: The prime minister has made the same false claim in parliament 10 times now. And nothing has happened. We’ve fact checked this employment claim and written to Number 10 on multiple occasions. Boris Johnson has acknowledged his mistake and said he’ll correct the record, but we’ve seen no such thing. This is inexcusable and we deserve better. MPs must stop putting up with their peers misleading the House of Commons and in turn the public. The system is broken and in order to rebuild trust in our political system, change is needed. Moy does not accuse Johnson of lying in his statement (perhaps he is charitably assuming that Johnson keep forgetting what the truth actually is?), but Peter Stefanovic, the campaigner whose video about Johnson’s lies to parliament has been viewed 40m times, is more direct. UPDATE: A reader has been in touch in the comments to say that, if you use the OECD definition of “paid employment”, Boris Johnson was right to say paid employment is up by 500,000 since before the pandemic. The OECD definition equates to payroll employment, and does not include the self-employed. However Johnson did not mention the OECD at PMQs (see 3.19pm) and, when he talked about more people being in paid employment now than before Covid, people will have assumed that he was talking about the self-employed too. And here is a full summary of the lines from the post-PMQs lobby briefing. The PM’s spokesperson said Boris Johnson was “uncomfortable” with the idea of the Mail on Sunday editor being summoned to see the Commons Speaker over the Angela Rayner article. (See 2.34pm.) The PM’s press secretary rejected claims that the Conservative party had a problem with sexism. She said: You will have heard the PM address this explicitly in parliament today and over the last few days, saying there is absolutely no place for such behaviour and this cannot be tolerated in any workplace. Asked about the reports about a Tory frontbencher watching pornography on his phone in the Commons chamber, she replied: “Obviously, it is wholly unacceptable behaviour and it is being looked into.” Asked about the Sunday Times report that three cabinet ministers are among the 56 MPs who have been referred to the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme (ICGS) over alleged sexual misconduct, the press secretary said she could not comment because an independent process was underway. The spokesperson did not rule out today’s high court judgement about the government’s hospital discharge policy at the start of the pandemic leading to compensation being paid to relatives of care home residents who died. Asked if this could happen, the spokesperson said: I’m not going to get into speculating on what further action people may or may not take. The Department of Health is considering the judgment carefully ... The court itself recognised the difficult and unique circumstances the government faced in the early part of the pandemic. The prime minister talked about the lack of evidence on asymptomatic transmission at the time, or certainly the uncertainty around it during that period, balanced against the need to act quickly. No 10 says Johnson was "uncomfortable" about idea of Mail on Sunday editor being summoned to see Speaker At the post-PMQs lobby briefing, the prime minister’s spokesperson effectively said that Boris Johnson was siding with the Mail on Sunday, not the Speaker, on the issue of the summons to discuss the Angela Rayner article. (See 9.27am.) Asked for a reaction to the decision by David Dillon, the paper’s editor, not to attend a meeting requested by the Speaker, the PM’s spokesperson said: The prime minister is uncomfortable at the idea of our free press being summoned by politicians. We have a free press in this country and reporters must be free to report what they are told as they see fit. The spokesman said Johnson would not want “any perception of politicians seeking to in any way curb or control what a free press seeks to report”. As a journalist, Johnson was himself often criticised for writing sexist or inaccurate material. It is not hard to see why he might not approve of such reporting being challenged by an authority figure. Starmer accuses "ostrich" Johnson of having his "head in sand" over cost of living crisis And here is the PA Media write-up of PMQs. Boris Johnson was branded an “ostrich” with his head in the sand as Keir Starmer raised cost-of-living concerns at prime minister’s questions. A tax rise in people’s latest payslips has the prime minister’s “fingerprints all over it”, Labour leader Starmer said before he labelled the Conservatives the “party of excess oil and gas profits” due to their rejection of a windfall tax to cut energy bills. But Johnson repeatedly claimed Labour has “no plan” and defended his government’s economic record, saying of Sir Keir: “This guy is doomed to be a permanent spectator.” At one stage during PMQs the Labour Party press office shared on Twitter a mocked-up image of Mr Johnson as the former Iraqi propaganda chief known as Comical Ali. In response to Johnson arguing global inflation was behind slower growth for the UK, Starmer told the Commons: “He sounds like the Comical Ali of the cost-of-living crisis. He pretends the economy is booming ... but in the real world our growth is set to be slower than every G20 country except one – Russia. And our inflation is going to be double the rest of the G7. Does he think that denying the facts staring him in the face makes things better or worse for working people?” Johnson replied: “The facts are, as the IMF has said, that the UK came out of Covid faster than anybody else, that’s why we had the fastest growth in the G7 last year. That would not have happened if we’d listened to captain hindsight. And if he studies their forecasts we will return to being the fastest by 2024 and the fastest in 2025. That’s what the IMF’s forecasts say ... this is the government, this is the party that supports working people.” But Starmer countered: “He’s an ostrich – perfectly happy keeping his head in the sand. Working people are worried about paying their bills, they’re spending less and cutting back – that’s bad for business and bad for growth. Working people are looking for help but this week millions will look at their payslip and see a tax rise with his fingerprints all over it. Does he think his 15th tax rise has made things better or worse for working people?” Johnson replied: “What we’re doing for working people is not only lifting the living wage by a record amount, helping people on universal credit with a £1,000 tax cut, but also cutting national insurance contributions, lifting the threshold so that on average people pay £330 less.” PMQs - snap verdict Last week Keir Starmer was reportedly criticised by a shadow cabinet colleague for focusing too much on Partygate, instead of on the cost of living. The charge was probably unfair, but the fact that it was said may have struck a chord. Today Starmer did not mention Partygate at all, and another story of particular interest to the Westminster (Raynergate) only got a cursory mention. Instead Starmer devoted all his questions to the economy and the cost of living. A week tomorrow people will be voting in the local elections, and as a result PMQs sounded, even more than usual, like shouty party political broadcasts being broadcast in tandem. Boris Johnson seemed reliant on a random and dog-eared list of CCHQ talking points, regurgitated without much reference to what he was being asked, and one of Starmer’s best moments came when he mocked his technique, referencing a line in the Mail on Sunday story about Angela Rayner. This must be the Oxford Union debating skills we’ve been hearing so much about. Failing to answer the question. Rambling incoherently. Throwing in garbled metaphors. Powerful stuff, Prime Minister. Starmer has always been good at detail and argument at PMQs, but more recently he has learned to do scorn and insult as well, and that was on display today as he delivered a solid drubbing. Johnson was the “Comical Ali of the cost-of-living crisis”, he said. The PM was like an ostrich, with his “head in the sand”, Starmer said. The cabinet’s MOT cost of living wheeze was like John Major’s cones hotline. This is how Starmer wound up, with his peroration. So they’re the party of excess oil and gas profits and we’re the party of working people. This government’s had its head in the sand throughout the cost of living crisis. First they let prices got out of control. Then they denied it was happening. They failed to do anything about it. And then they made it worse with higher taxes. Because of his choices, we are set to have the slowest growth and the highest inflation in the G7. A vote for Labour next week is a vote for a very different set of choices. We would ask oil and gas companies to pay their fair share of reduced energy costs. We would not hammer working people with the worst possible tax at the worst possible time. We would insulate homes to get bills down. And we’d close the tax avoidance schemes that have helped his chancellor - where is he? - reduce his family’s tax bill while putting everyone else’s up. That’s proper plan for the economy. So why doesn’t he get on with it and finally make choices that make things better not worse for working people. Johnson was prepared for the final question too. On the cost of living specifics, he was unpersuasive, but he resorted to last-ditch defence, the gist of which was that at least his government was doing something, unlike the “permanent spectator” Starmer who did not offer a proper alternative. Opposition leaders can always been accused of not actually doing much (a feature of not being in office), but in many areas Labour’s plans are vague or insubstantial, and Tory-inclined voters will probably feel that on this Johnson had a point. Johnson said: I can tell [Starmer], I’ve been listening to him for many weeks, for many years, this guy is doomed to be a permanent spectator. We have a plan to fix the NHS and fix social care. They have no plan. We have a plan to fix our borders with our deal with Rwanda. They have no plan. We have a plan to take our economy forward. They have no plan. Johnson ended up by summoning up the age-old Tory scare about Labour administrations ruining the economy. It is mostly nonsense (Johnson included a reference to a Labour council spending £27,000 on EU flags, suggesting the CCHQ list of Labour financial misfeasance is rather a short one), but the notion that “everywhere you look, a Labour administration is a bankrupt shambles” (as Johnson put it) is a smear that has has a powerful impact in British politics for most of the last century. And the fact that Labour has only just pulled level with the Tories in polling on managing the economy suggests it may still have some life in it yet. Chief whip investigates reports Tory MP watched porn in House of Commons Chris Heaton-Harris, the Conservative chief whip, is investigating reports that a Tory frontbencher watched pornography on his phone in the Commons chamber, a statement from his office has said. My colleague Rowena Mason has the story here. This is from my colleague Patrick Wintour on the list of MPs being sanctioned by Russia. Mike Amesbury (Lab) says the PM was wrong to say that council taxes are higher under Labour than under Conservative councils. He reads out figures showing Tory councils have higher average council tax rates. (These figures are notoriously susceptible to interpretation on a party political basis. Because council tax is based on property values, and homes tend to be worth more in Tory council areas than in Labour ones, in general overall council tax rates tend to be higher in Tory areas, but average band D rates tend to be higher in Labour areas. For a more detailed analysis, see this blog from Full Fact.)