Reform MP Lee Anderson who has revealed he will not be campaigning in certain Tory constituencies due to his friendships with the current MPs Photograph: Victoria Jones/PA
Reform MP Lee Anderson has said he will not campaign in certain Tory constituencies because of his friendships with current MPs, PA is reporting.
The selective non-aggression pact means Anderson will not campaign against four Tory MPs in the next general election because “friendship means more”.
The four chosen friends, who have not confirmed if the feeling is mutual, are Ben Bradley (Mansfield), Brendan Clarke-Smith (Bassetlaw), Marco Longhi (Dudley North) and Nick Fletcher (Don Valley). Anderson said they had all reached out to him following his defection.
At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry chair Wyn Williams has reiterated that former Post Office chief David Smith has a right not to answer questions if the answer might be self-incriminating.
He was then asked “whether you deliberately had your team produce a report for you, which would cover up the fact that you knew, and everyone in your senior leadership team knew, that Horizon’s integrity was very much in doubt, and that you wanted to cover that up?”
He replied “No, absolutely not.”
He is then confronted with evidence that the legal department received evidence of a bug a couple of days before a trial proceeded. “What sort of culture were you presiding over?” he was asked.
He has said he did not have this information, nor did he know that was the sequence of events. He says he is “shocked and appalled” if that was the culture.
Michelle Donelan used £34,000 of taxpayer funds to cover libel costs
Pippa Crerar
Our political editor Pippa Crerar has this exclusive:
UK taxpayers have paid out more than £34,000 to cover the cost of science secretary Michelle Donelan’s libel case, the Guardian can reveal, more than double the sum the government had previously admitted.
The legal fees racked up by the cabinet minister after wrongly accusing an academic of supporting or sympathising with Hamas cost the public an additional £19,000, on top of the £15,000 libel settlement.
The revelation last month that the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) would cover the cost of Donelan’s libel prompted political anger over the use of public money.
She faced calls to resign from opposition parties and criticism from Tory backbenchers as she was urged to cover the cost of settling the libel action herself after apologising and publicly retracting her remarks.
The department declined at the time to disclose Donelan’s legal costs. However a letter from the top official at the department, Sarah Mumby, to the shadow science secretary, Peter Kyle, has now revealed the overall bill.
The letter showed that in addition to the costs incurred by the government’s legal department of £7,785 for internal legal advice, Donelan sought external private legal counsel which cost a further £11,600.
The Post Office Horizon IT inquiry has had some slightly testy exchanges during the last session. Chair Wyn Williams intervened into the questioning at one point to demand “which is it?” of former Post Office boss David Smith about some apparent contradictions in evidence.
Smith has argued that he asked Rod Ismay to consolidate why the Post Office felt Horizon was robust into a single report. Ismay has previously told the hearing he was “only asked to present one side of the coin”.
Smith also said that it was “shocking” that queries about Horizon and calls for an investigation were being sent identical boilerplate responses. It was something that Alan Bates, who ran the justice campaign, had complained about. Smith said he was unaware of Bates’ complaints.
Dr Ian Walker, the executive director of policy at the Cancer Research UK charity has reacted to news that 78.1% of patients in England urgently referred for suspected cancer in February were diagnosed or had cancer ruled out within 28 days. It is the first time the target of 75% has been met.
Walker said:
While it’s promising that more people are finding out if they have cancer or not faster, thousands of people in England are still waiting longer than they should to begin treatment every single month. Behind missed targets are patients – friends, family and loved ones who are facing unacceptably long and anxious waits to find out if they have cancer and when they can begin treatment. NHS staff are doing their best, but our health service simply does not have enough equipment or staff to see, test and treat everyone in time.
With a general election on the horizon, there’s a real opportunity for political parties to turn things around. We urgently need more staff and equipment for the NHS, alongside reform to cancer services. Without this, cancer patients will continue to face even more fear and anxiety, during what is already a stressful time in their lives.
Streeting: 'Sunak has failed on the NHS' as waiting list figures in England remain near record levels
Here is what Labour’s health spokesperson Wes Streeting had to say about today’s NHS England figures:
Rishi Sunak has failed on the NHS. He’s missed his own targets to cut ambulance waits and A&E waits. Patients with suspected heart attacks or strokes are waiting almost double the safe amount of time, when every minute matters.
Waiting lists are still 320,000 longer than when he became prime minister, despite his promise to cut them. Doctors have said that patients in desperate need of care have been left waiting for 24 hours in A&E, while relatively healthy patients have been seen faster in order to hit this four-hour target. If only Rishi Sunak was as desperate to turn around the NHS for real as he is to spin the stats.
Only Labour has a plan for the investment and reform the NHS needs. To beat the backlog we will provide an extra two million operations and appointments at evenings and weekends, paid for by clamping down on tax dodgers.
Agricultural leaders have hit out at “major issues” with a fund aimed at farmers who suffered severe impacts from flooding at the beginning of the year.
The Government announced on Tuesday that grants of between £500 and £25,000 under the farm recovery fund would be paid to farmers hit by “uninsurable damage” from Storm Henk in early January.
The National Farmers’ Union initially welcomed the scheme but PA Media reports vice-president Rachel Hallos said on Thursday it had “very quickly become clear that there are major issues” with the fund.
“We are hearing from numerous members who have suffered catastrophic impacts who have been told they are not eligible for the fund because some of their affected areas are more than 150 metres from ‘main’ rivers. These include members with 90% of their land saturated or underwater, and huge damage to buildings and equipment.”
Here are a few of the other key moments from the testimony at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry this morning of former managing director of the Post Office, David Smith.
Smith said in his witness statement to the inquiry: “Although my time within the Post Office was brief, I have spent a lot of time reflecting on it and whether there is anything that I would have handled differently. I think that this is something that everybody has thought about and it is impossible not to feel a huge sense of regret and remorse, regardless of ones own involvement.”
Smith said he had consistently been given reassurances about the Horizon IT system by various people, including Paula Vennells and Susan Crichton.
Asked by counsel to the inquiry Sam Stevens: “To what extent did you consider that the Post Office was in an unusual position, in that it was the alleged victim of crimes that it was investigating, that it investigated those crimes itself, and then decided whether to prosecute them?”
Smith replied: “I’m sad to say at the time I didn’t really reflect on it in the way that I perhaps should have done.”
Smith told the inquiry: “I think that the passage of time has shown that conducting the case, gathering the data, acting as the prosecution can lead you to a position where you might not think as independently as you should do about the quality of information.
“Have you disclosed everything, have you presented the case in a balanced way? I think those kinds of risks are clearly there. I think the other danger is that potentially the balance of probability might be stretched too far in terms of whether to take a case through a legal process or not.”
Smith said he believed there was an “institutional bias” not to investigate further what subpostmasters were saying about the Horizon system.
Halving inflation remains the only one of Rishi Sunak’s five key pledges that his government has met, with NHS waiting lists and national debt higher than when he made the promises, channel boat crossings continuing, and the economy failing to grow.
In the wake of NHS England data being released today, PA Media have totted up a scorecard of Rishi Sunak’s five key pledges, which he made in January 2023.
Grow the economy – growth over 2023 was weak, with the UK falling into a recession in the second half of the year.
Reduce debt – the national debt rose over the course of 2023, and remains at levels not seen since the early 1960s.
Cut NHS waiting lists – waiting lists in England have fallen over the last five months, but remain higher than when Sunak made his pledge to cut them.
Stop the boats – channel crossings have reduced by 45,755 from 2022 levels, but remain happening, and Sunak has been unable to get his flagship Rwanda deportation plan on to the statue books.
Halve inflation – this is the only pledge to have been fully met, however economists suggest the fall in inflation was largely due to lower energy costs and rising interest rates from the independent Bank of England rather than from government action, and the rate of inflation is still higher than the bank’s target of 2%.
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