Sunak defends not taking immediate action against Tories accused of suspect bets, saying inquiries must take their course Rishi Sunak is going first. Q: When you resigned as chancellor, you said government should be conducted competently. How has it turned out? Sunak says his first task was to bring down inflation. He has done that. Q: Your closest aid, your bodyguard, your campaign manager and your data chief are all being investigated for insider trading. Is that proper? Sunak says he was incredibly angry. The Gambling Commission is investigating. But the Tories are doing their own inquiry, he says. He says he won’t hestitate to act on that. Q: But that should not take long. You just ask everyone. Sunak seems to imply Cole is not taking it seriously. These are very serious matter. There are mutiple investigations. He cannot compromise the integrity of them, he says. He goes on: If anyone has broken the rules, they should face not just the full consequences of the law, but they will be booted out of the Conservative party. Cole says it looks like Tories were “stealing the candlesticks” on the way out of government. Sunak repeats the point about being incredibly angry. And if anyone has broken the rules, they will be kicked out. Q: Whoever they are? Whoever they are, Sunak confirms. UPDATE: Sunak said: I’m incredibly angry about this and the right thing to do, and again you talked about that letter, to do things properly, is to get to the bottom of what happened, to investigate things thoroughly. Now we have to do that separately to the Gambling Commission, who don’t report to me. I don’t have the details of their investigation. We have to do that sensitively and carefully so that we don’t compromise the integrity of a police and other investigations. But let me be clear, if we come across findings or information that warrants it, we will not hesitate to act, I have been crystal clear that I will hold people to account, whoever they are. A summary of today"s developments Rishi Sunak has defended not taking immediate action against the people accused of suspect bets around the date of the election. Sunak told The Sun he was incredibly angry and the party is doing their own inquiry. He added: “If anyone has broken the rules, they should face not just the full consequences of the law, but they will be booted out of the Conservative party.” Earlier, Keir Starmer said the data betting allegations were a “total failure of leadership”. The Conservatives are rerouting resources to defend at least three seats held by cabinet ministers with majorities of more than 20,000 as the party retreats to safer ground. Tory activists and candidates in nearby areas have been diverted to campaign for James Cleverly, the home secretary, Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, and Steve Barclay, the environment secretary. James Cracknell, the former Olympic rower standing to be a Conservative MP, has called the Tories a “shower of shit”, in a video he posted on Facebook. Keir Starmer said he would meet with JK Rowling after the author said at the weekend that Labour had “abandoned” her and others campaigning for women’s rights. Nigel Farage has accused Boris Johnson of betrayal as the Reform UK leader vented his anger at the former Tory leader for describing his comments about Vladimir Putin as repugnant. Farage mounted an unrepentant defence of his claims that Russia has been provoked into invading Ukraine as he addressed a couple of hundred Reform supporters from the top of a double decker bus. The number of migrants arriving in the UK after crossing the Channel has hit a new record for the first six months of a calendar year. Home Office figures show 257 people made the journey in four boats on Sunday, taking the provisional total for the year so far to 12,901. The previous record for arrivals in the six months from January to June was 12,747 in 2022. In the first half of 2023, arrivals stood at 11,433. Rishi Sunak said he understands voters’ hesitation to support the Tories, but urged them not to “sleepwalk” into a Labour government. Speaking at a campaign event in Chelsea, London, the PM said: “We can’t let Britain sleepwalk into this. It is our job, it is our duty over the next 10 days to wake people up to this danger. “So I say to all of you, I say to every Conservative, don’t surrender to Labour, fight for every vote, fight for our values, fight for our vision of Britain.” He added: “I understand people’s hesitation with giving us their support again. “I’m not blind to their frustrations with me, with our party, the last few years have not been easy for anyone with Covid, with Ukraine, we have not got everything right, we haven’t made as much progress as we would have liked in some areas. “But this election is not a byelection, it is not a referendum on me, or our party, it is a choice about the future of our country and the government you want to lead for five years.” And that brings the interview to a conclusion. Next up on is the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Sir Ed Davey, on Friday night. Ramsay adds: “I’m not going to get into talking about individual candidates, because if there are questions raised about candidates, then there is a process for them to be investigated, and there may well still be current investigations ongoing.” Robinson says the Greens dropped a candidate who “tweeted his hunch that Israel had paid Hamas to carry out the atrocities on October the 7th.” He added the party has candidates on ballot papers next to the words “the Green Party,” one liked a tweet that said, “Israel must be eliminated,” another likened Israel supporters to Nazis. Another claimed “the victims of the holocaust had turned into the predators, and finally, one likened Hamas to the resistance in France, in the Second World War.” Ramsay responds: “None of those comments you’ve quoted are one that I would make or in any way condone. And as you say, the Green Party has had situations where there were candidates who were originally selected, questions have been made about comments that they have made themselves or they’ve liked on social media, and in four cases, the party has taken action to – which has resulted in those candidates no longer going forward.” Robinson says the Greens’ manifesto mentions creating a legally regulated market for drugs. Does that mean legalising all drugs, and then regulating them? Ramsay says: “It says that we would introduce an independent commission on drugs, to address the fact that the war on drugs has failed, we have growing numbers of people who are addicted to drugs, often harmful substances, we have a huge amount of power in the hands of criminal gangs that are profiting from that, and we need to see drug addiction as a medical issue, not as a criminal issue, to support individuals who are addicted to regulate those drugs, which, as I say, are in the hands of criminal gangs. And let’s look through this independent commission at how other countries around the world have introduced more enlightened policies, that do actually support people who are addicted.” Ram say adds “And my second point I would make is that this whole discussion, as so many people have said, has become highly toxic, in a way that ignores the fact that we have very high levels of violence against women and girls, we have a gender pay gap in this country, we have…growing rates of hate crime against trans people.” Robinson says the Greens in Scotland launched a fight to change the law, so that men could declare themselves to be women without involving a doctor, so called gender ID. He asks have you learnt from the decision to send a rapist called Adam to a woman’s prison after he changed his name and changed his gender and asked to be called Isla. Ramsay says “First of all, to answer your question specifically, yes, I think there has to be learning for all of society on the way these changes are made, and ensuring that all spaces, whether they be prisons or any other public spaces, are run in a way that is safe for everybody involved, preserves people’s dignity, is absolutely paramount, and the government has been clear, male bodied people should not be put in female prisons…” Robinson said the IFS compared the Greens with Nigel Farage’s Reform Party because their ideas are “wholly unattainable”. Ramsay says: “I’ve quoted to you what other experts have said, welcoming our proposals, other economists, financial experts, who’ve said the Green Party is bringing in a different way of thinking, that by European standards is actually fairly normal, and we can’t expect to have the level of health services, the quality of education system that other countries have, if we don’t put the investment in that’s needed.” Robinson says 12 European countries introduced wealth tax. Nine of them, including France got rid of it. Ramsay replies: “There was a particular problem with the way France introduced it, which was that it set the starting point too low. We’re proposing a wealth tax starting at 10 million, so if someone has 10 million in wealth and assets, we’d ask them to pay 1%, just 1%, of that wealth and assets back into society.” On a proposal for more tax on the rich where £50 to £70 billion the Greens say could be raised, Ramsay says “Well, we’ve been working closely with academics and experts around a range of models for how a wealth tax could work, and we’ve been fairly cautious in the model and in the assumptions that we’ve chosen around that, and on the day our manifesto was released.” Ramsay adds: “So, the share of the economy that goes into tax at the moment is near the bottom of the European league table. What we’re proposing would move us up, but we would still be below where France and other countries are, so actually, it’s Labour and Conservatives that are way out of step with what other countries are doing. “The IFS, Institute for Fiscal Studies, has been very clear that the next government is either going to have to cut public services, or increase taxes, and so the Green Party is the only party being honest in this election, that says, actually, by European standards, we can make fairly modest changes to the tax system, asking those with the broadest shoulders to pay modestly more.” Robinson says the total cost of the Greens’ policies would be £145 billion a year on day to day spending. Labour say they’d spend £5 billion. This is what the Conservatives say they’d spend on tax cuts and they would spent £17 bn. Ramsay says: “Why is there such a difference? Because we have an NHS at breaking point that requires substantial investment and the Nuffield Trust has been clear that the Labour and Conservative proposals that you’ve outlined here would leave the NHS worse off than it was under David Cameron’s austerity. We need the transition to the green economy in a way that tackles the cost of living crisis. We need to invest in our schools that are crumbling and where teachers don’t have the money to spend on the things they need to provide our children with a good education.” Robinson continues to grill Ramsay about a carbon tax being a tax on meat, cars, deliveries which could raised £90 billion. The IFS thinktank said it would be impossible to raise that sort of money without the effect being felt by everyone. Ramsay replies: “What we‘re proposing in the carbon tax, is a tax that hits the big polluting companies that are causing the climate emergency, that has a huge impact on people on poorer incomes. So, a tax for example, on high polluting imports of goods, that undermine British manufacturing, we want to support low carbon British manufacturing. We also want to have a carbon tax on those big polluting companies, and actually, ordinary people are suffering from the fact that this government is not acting on these issues. We have escalating energy bills, escalating food bills, extortionate train prices.”