Boris Johnson escalates criticism of Sunak over NI protocol, saying "best way foward" would be to pass bill shelving it Boris Johnson has escalated his criticism of Rishi Sunak’s approach to the Northern Ireland protocol, saying that the “best way forward” would be to carry on with the legislation drafted under his leadership that would allow the government to just ignore the protocol. In an interview with Sky News, the former PM refused to commit to definitely backing Rishi Sunak’s renegotiation of the protocol, saying that he wanted to see the deal first. But he described the Northern Ireland protocol bill as “the best way forward”. The bill would allow the UK government to ignore parts of the protocol disliked by traders with Northern Ireland, but critics say this would breach international law and that, if the UK government ever tried to use it, the EU could retaliate by imposing tariffs on imports from Britain. The bill is stuck in the House of Lords because, since Sunak became PM, no further debates on it have been scheduled. Sunak says his preference is for a negotiated solution to the protocol problem, and he has not denied that, if a deal is struck with the EU, the bill will be abandoned for good. Asked if he would support any deal Sunak struck on the protocol, Johnson replied: I think that it’s important that we wait to see what there may be. But I think the best way forward, as I said when I was running the government, is the Northern Ireland bill, which cleared the Commons very comfortably, I think unamended, when I was in office only a few months ago. So I think that’s the best way forward. Asked a second time if he could guarantee to support any deal that Sunak negotiated, Johnson replied: I think the best thing is to continue with the Northern Ireland bill that we agreed. It’s a very good bill. It fixes all the problems. It solves the problems that we have in the Irish Sea, it solves the problems of paperwork, VAT and so on. It’s an excellent bill and doesn’t set up any other problems in the economy of the whole island of Ireland. I’d go with that one. When it was put to him that many people did not think it was an excellent bill, Johnson said it passed the Commons unamended. A “source close to” Johnson told journalists at the weekend that Johnson did not want Sunak to drop the Northern Ireland protocol bill. The source suggested this was because Johnson thought the government needed it on the statute book to provide leverage over the EU in case Sunak’s deal turns out to be flawed. But in his interview today Johnson implied he did not favour renegotiating the protocol in the first place, and that he wants the government to press ahead with unilateral action. In other words, Johnson is no longer just arguing for the bill as a plan B insurance policy. He seems to be arguing for it as plan A. Early evening summary Boris Johnson has escalated his criticism of Rishi Sunak’s approach to the Northern Ireland protocol, saying that the “best way forward” would be to carry on with the legislation drafted under his leadership that would allow the government to just ignore the protocol. (See 5.38pm.) Keir Starmer has admitted he is already planning his second term in government, as he set out his five “national missions” which will form the building blocks of Labour’s next election manifesto. Keir Starmer has defended dropping key pledges made during his Labour leadership bid, saying they have been adapted in the face of unprecedented global events. Thérèse Coffey, the environment secretary, has caused a furore after she suggested people should “cherish” seasonal foods, such as turnips, as bad weather cleared supermarket shelves of tomatoes and other fresh produce. Here is my colleague John Crace’s sketch on Keir Starmer’s speech today. And here is an extract. When he first became leader, Starmer had a well-deserved reputation for being a wooden performer. Someone who wasn’t entirely sure he believed in what he was saying, being forced out of his natural habitat into a public arena. He looked sweaty. Nervous. As if he had something to hide. Now, though, Starmer seems to relish the TV cameras. Comes alive on the big occasions. He’s grown into the job. He’s seen off Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. And Sunak has given him no reason to believe he can’t see him off as well. Not that Keir will ever be a total natural as an orator. He will never have the evangelical power of a Gordon Brown. But he’s found the self-belief and the confidence. He’s more than good enough as he is. The country doesn’t want a snake oil salesman offering shares in a promised land. We’ve given up on the all-too-fallible Tory Messiahs. Our sights are lowered. We now want someone decent and competent. Someone who looks as if he knows what he’s doing and can be more or less trusted. And Starmer knows he can deliver that. Boris Johnson escalates criticism of Sunak over NI protocol, saying "best way foward" would be to pass bill shelving it Boris Johnson has escalated his criticism of Rishi Sunak’s approach to the Northern Ireland protocol, saying that the “best way forward” would be to carry on with the legislation drafted under his leadership that would allow the government to just ignore the protocol. In an interview with Sky News, the former PM refused to commit to definitely backing Rishi Sunak’s renegotiation of the protocol, saying that he wanted to see the deal first. But he described the Northern Ireland protocol bill as “the best way forward”. The bill would allow the UK government to ignore parts of the protocol disliked by traders with Northern Ireland, but critics say this would breach international law and that, if the UK government ever tried to use it, the EU could retaliate by imposing tariffs on imports from Britain. The bill is stuck in the House of Lords because, since Sunak became PM, no further debates on it have been scheduled. Sunak says his preference is for a negotiated solution to the protocol problem, and he has not denied that, if a deal is struck with the EU, the bill will be abandoned for good. Asked if he would support any deal Sunak struck on the protocol, Johnson replied: I think that it’s important that we wait to see what there may be. But I think the best way forward, as I said when I was running the government, is the Northern Ireland bill, which cleared the Commons very comfortably, I think unamended, when I was in office only a few months ago. So I think that’s the best way forward. Asked a second time if he could guarantee to support any deal that Sunak negotiated, Johnson replied: I think the best thing is to continue with the Northern Ireland bill that we agreed. It’s a very good bill. It fixes all the problems. It solves the problems that we have in the Irish Sea, it solves the problems of paperwork, VAT and so on. It’s an excellent bill and doesn’t set up any other problems in the economy of the whole island of Ireland. I’d go with that one. When it was put to him that many people did not think it was an excellent bill, Johnson said it passed the Commons unamended. A “source close to” Johnson told journalists at the weekend that Johnson did not want Sunak to drop the Northern Ireland protocol bill. The source suggested this was because Johnson thought the government needed it on the statute book to provide leverage over the EU in case Sunak’s deal turns out to be flawed. But in his interview today Johnson implied he did not favour renegotiating the protocol in the first place, and that he wants the government to press ahead with unilateral action. In other words, Johnson is no longer just arguing for the bill as a plan B insurance policy. He seems to be arguing for it as plan A. Public services not likely to improve noticeably before next election, IfG thinktank says Public services are not likely to improve noticeably before the next election, a report from the Institute for Government thinktank says. In its latest peformance tracker for 2022-23, the IfG says funding increases announced in the autumn statement will not be enough to return public service performance to pre-pandemic levels before the next election. Health is a particular problem, it says, but it argues that there are problems across the board. The report says: Public concern about healthcare is particularly high at the moment and [Rishi] Sunak identified tackling NHS waiting lists as one of his top five priorities in a speech in January 2023. The analysis in this report outlines the scale of the challenge in nine public services – general practice, hospitals, adult social care, children’s social care, neighbourhood services, schools, police, criminal courts and prisons. To date, the new government’s decisions have done little to shift the dial and it will need to do much better if it wishes to campaign on its public services track record. Nick Davies, the programme director at the IfG, said: Public services, and particularly the NHS, have had a very difficult winter, but public discontent about performance is likely to last years. Despite additional funding in the autumn statement, progress in tackling backlogs and waiting times will continue to be painfully slow. Covid recovery has been hampered by the government’s counterproductive strikes strategy, with substantially below inflation pay offers exacerbating the serous workforce problems. Humza Yousaf hints he would give Kate Forbes cabinet job if he becomes SNP leader and first minister Humza Yousaf, the Scottish health secretary and favourite in the contest to replace Nicola Sturgeon as SNP leader and Scotland’s first minister, has hinted he would give Kate Forbes a cabinet position in any future administration he leads. Speaking to journalists at Holyrood, he praised Forbes, the finance secretary, despite the fact that has stressed that he disagrees with her opposition, for faith reasons, to same-sex marriage. He said: I think Kate’s extremely talented, extremely able, I think anybody would want to see her at the heart of Scottish politics. As long as we agree – and I think we do collectively – that collective responsibility is important for any government to function, and Kate has shown she is willing, and has been in her time in government, to abide by collective responsibility, I think that’s going to be an important question for all the candidates – myself included. He also said Forbes had “a lot to give to Scottish public life, including in government”. Nominations for the SNP leadership close tomorrow. Yousaf, Forbes and Ash Regan are all expected to have enough support to progress to the members’ vote. The new SNP leader will be announced on 27 March. Two former Labour staffers have written interesting articles on Keir Starmer’s speech today. Here are extracts. Ben Nunn, Starmer’s former director of communications, says in an article for the i that today’s speech is “arguably the most significant the Labour leader has made when it comes to helping us understand what he would do as prime minister”. He says: As one shadow cabinet minister told me the other night, Starmer has been “heavily invested” in these missions. For weeks, shadow ministers have been holding meetings with Starmer and his close team of advisers to agree the themes, targets and potential policies. But talk of “national missions”, “long-term plans” and “a decade of national renewal” signal more than Starmer’s thirst for power or a plan for government – it signals his determination to be more than a one-term prime minister … If Starmer is to achieve his 10-year programme for government then it must be hard-wired in a 10-year strategy for winning. That starts with defining his purpose for government. Blair had modernisation, Cameron had the deficit, Johnson had Brexit. One of Sunak’s many weaknesses is an absence of purpose. I am still unsure why he is prime minister. At best he is there to repair his own party’s damage, at worst he is managing the country’s decline. And Tom Hamilton, who was Labour’s head of research when Ed Miliband was leader, says in a LinkedIn post that more policy will have to follow. He says: Nothing about the existence of missions precludes the announcement of granular policies – quite the opposite. It is perfectly possible, even likely, that Labour will still go into the election with some kind of pledge card, separate from these five missions, with concrete and costed policies with stronger consumer appeal. It is absolutely certain that Labour will have no political choice but to say things about taxation, for example, which do not feature in the missions at all except by implication. And the important policy areas which are left out of the missions – notably housing – will still need to be fleshed out, even if their absence today tells us something important about Labour’s priorities. In the short term, the most important thing about Labour’s five missions is that they do the heavy lifting to give Keir Starmer a morning at the top of the news bulletins setting out a positive story. But in the longer term, they have a real chance of shaping the way the next Labour government works, how it defines itself and whether it succeeds or fails. Here is the five-page document published by Labour this morning explaining its new commitment to “mission-driven government”. This is the one that Amol Rajan complained about on the Today programme this morning, saying: “Hemingway, it ain’t.” He complained in particular about the passage promising “new structures and ways of working to facilitate collaboration, including replacing some of the cabinet committees with new delivery-focused cross-cutting mission boards”. Keir Starmer told him that what mattered was not the language, but the ideas, and that different parts of government had to work together to solve problems. Lawyers advising Tory Eurosceptics submit fresh post-Brexit plan to Sunak Lawyers advising Eurosceptics in the Conservative party have submitted fresh proposals to Rishi Sunak to end the rule of EU law in Northern Ireland, one of the major sticking points in the UK-EU negotiations over the protocol, my colleague Lisa O’Carroll reports. NHS should consider charging people for missed appointment, says Matt Hancock Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, has said the NHS should consider charging people who miss appointments. Speaking during a general debate on the future of the NHS, Hancock said Rishi Sunak was right to float the idea of charging for missed GP appointments during the Tory leadership contest in the summer. He told MPs: I thought that the prime minister was right to float in the summer the idea that if you miss too many appointments without a good reason then you should be charged for them. One of the other problems of efficiency is that many, many appointments are missed, and this wastes the time of clinicians too. I think it was right to float it, it’s right to consider it, but I would be totally against having to pay for the very first. Hancock says charging people who abused the system would not undermine the principle of the NHS being free at the point of delivery. He said: Of course people miss appointments for good reasons, but often, too often, don’t have a reason, and we should be thoughtful about how we address that. Labour’s Margaret Greenwood told Hancock she completely disagreed with the idea, which might discriminate against the 7 million adults in the country who are functionally illiterate. “It would be much better to put resources into understanding why people don’t come to appointments,” she said. In the summer Sunak proposed charging patients £10 for second and subsequent missed GP appointments. For the first missed appointment, they would receive the benefit of the doubt. But after Sunak became PM, Downing Street said he would not be implementing the idea because “now is not the right time to take this policy forward”. SNP’s Kate Forbes issues apology in bid to reset leadership campaign Kate Forbes has apologised for hurt caused and promised to protect the rights of everybody in Scotland, “particularly minorities”, as she endeavours to reset her campaign for the leadership of the SNP, my colleague Libby Brooks reports. Ambulance handover delays outside hospitals in England have jumped to their highest level since early January in a sign the NHS is still struggling with winter pressures, PA Media reports. PA says: One in four (25%) ambulance patients waited at least 30 minutes last week to be transferred to A&E teams, up from one in five (20%) the previous week. It is the highest percentage since the first week of January, when the figure stood at just over a third of patients (36%). Ben Wallace slaps down veterans minister Johnny Mercer over MoD budget comments In an interview with LBC yesterday Johnny Mercer, the veterans’ minister, implied that Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, was overstating the funding problems he faces at the Ministry of Defence. Asked about recent comments by Wallace complaining about the MoD being “hollowed out and underfunded”, Mercer said: He’s advocating for his department, when a spend is coming up. But this prime minister, this chancellor, only 18 months ago gave the biggest defence settlement to defence since the end of the cold war. So it’s then not credible to go forward and say that we haven’t put money into defence. This morning, Wallace was on LBC himself, and he retaliated. Asked about what Mercer said, Wallace replied: Johnny is a junior minister. And Johnny luckily doesn’t have to run the budget. Asked if he thought Mercer was being naive, Wallace went on: No. I just think his experience is … he’s not the secretary of state. He hasn’t run … I run a department of 224,000 people, I think it is, or something like that … He’s got 12 people in the office. In the past, veterans’ ministers have been based in the MoD. But Mercer is based in the Cabinet Office which, given relations with Wallace, is probably just as well. Labour says asylum backlog figures show "shameful levels of incompetence" from government Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said the asylum figures out today (see 1.51pm) showed “shameful levels of incompetence” from the government. She said: Despite all Rishi Sunak’s grand promises, fewer than 1% of last year’s small boat cases have been decided. These are truly shameful levels of incompetence from a government that has completely lost any grip. After 13 years of failure, today’s figures underline the shocking mess the Conservatives have made of the asylum system. The Home Office is still taking a third fewer decisions each year than it was seven years ago and they have let the backlog rise by another 60% to a record-breaking high of 160,000, with the taxpayer fronting the cost through ​spending on hotels. Cooper said Labour has a five-point plan to tackle the problem: “1) Crack down on the criminal gangs through the [National Crime Agency] and in partnership with France, Belgium and Europol; 2) Speed up asylum decisions; 3) Reform resettlement schemes to better target those most at risk of exploitation by trafficking and smuggler gangs; 4) Replace the Dublin agreement; and 5) Work internationally to address crises leading people to flee their homes.”