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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Politics

Former minister says 'quite a few' Tory MPs will now want Theresa May to resign – as it happened

Afternoon summary

That’s all from me for today.

Thanks for the comments.

Here is my colleague Jon Henley on how continental papers covered Theresa May’s speech.

Here is the sports minister Tracey Crouch on Theresa May.

Here is the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Theresa May’s plight.

Mark Serwotka, leader of the PCS civil service union, is to accuse Nicola Sturgeon of making vague promises to increase public sector pay, despite her repeated pledges to lift the 1% pay cap.

In a speech to trade unionists and political activists in the annual Jimmy Reid lecture in Glasgow on Thursday, Serwotka will say the first minister “cannot get off the hook” on public sector pay because Sturgeon has new tax powers and command over a significant public.

Held in honour of the Clydeside dockworkers leader, the lecture is organised by the pro-independence CommonWeal organisation, and Serwotka will urge pro-independence union members not to “end up inadvertently being soft on the Scottish National party” because that might damage the quest for a second referendum.

The PCS is launching its consultative ballot to test support for a UK-wide strike on public sector pay on Monday, during the SNP’s annual conference. The PCS is campaigning for a 5% pay rise across the public sector, a deal which the IFS think tank estimates will cost £7bn-£9bn a year.

It is campaigning on two fronts: the union has 8,000 members in devolved government jobs in Scotland whose pay is funded by the Scottish government, and another 16,000 in UK departments such as the MoD, HMRC and DFID whose pay will be agreed by the Treasury.

Serwotka told the Guardian:

If you see the national question and think that I don’t want to criticise the SNP because that is a step towards Scottish independence, but it stops you therefore realising that Nicola Sturgeon can’t get off the hook for all of this; she can’t just say it’s all Theresa May,.

She has tax raising powers; she has a huge budget; she could lift the Scottish pay cap and deliver real terms pay increases. She hasn’t yet. And she hasn’t actually committed to do that yet. She says we’ll scrap the cap but a scrapped cap in Scotland deriving pay rises from efficiency savings isn’t really use to anyone.

This is what some Tory MPs have been saying about Theresa May on Twitter.

From Nigel Evans, MP for Ribble Valley

From Michael Fabricant, MP for Lichfield

From Suella Fernandes, chair of the European research group, the Tory group backing a hard Brexit and a parliamentary private secretary to Treasury ministers

From Leo Docherty, MP for Aldershot

From Stephen Kerr, MP for Stirling

Here is Sky’s political editor Faisal Islam on the mood amongst Tory MPs.

Charles Walker, vice chair of the Conservative backbench 1922 committee, told BBC News a few minutes ago that Theresa May was doing “an outstanding job” and that most of his fellow Tory MPs thought the same. He said:

I’ve been a Conservative member of parliament since 2005 and there’s always been mutterings about the leader of the day or the prime minister of the day, so there’s nothing new in that. There’s always tension on the Conservative backbenches. So I don’t read too much into it at all.

He suggested that journalists have just been speaking to a handful of Tory MPs already known to be hostile to May.

The truth of the matter is, Theresa May as prime minister, I think she’s doing an excellent job, most of my colleagues think she’s doing an excellent job, and I know that because I’m vice chairman of the 1922 committee and I spend a long time in the company of colleagues. And most colleagues that I talk to are right behind the prime minister and think she’s doing an outstanding job in very, very difficult circumstances.

Charles Walker
Charles Walker Photograph: BBC

The pound has fallen in the light of Theresa May’s conference speech and the speculation about her leadership, Bloomberg reports.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the Conservative backbencher and treasurer of the backbench 1922 committee, told the World at One that Theresa May needs to improve her performance.

I think there is a mood of goodwill towards the prime minister urging her to succeed in promoting this vision for this country, promoting the new programme of government. But she needs to demonstrate leadership and she needs to demonstrate that vision for the country going forward ... She does need to do that.



According to the Evening Standard, five former cabinet ministers have “joined a plot to force Theresa May to quit”. It says: “A 30-strong group plans to send a delegation to No 10 to ask the Prime Minister to resign before Christmas.” This is from the Standard’s Joe Murphy.

ConservativeHome is the leading website for Conservative party members, independent from CCHQ, yet widely read and respected by members. In a worrying sign for Theresa May, Paul Goodman, its editor, today says that he does not expect May to be challenged for the leadership but that Boris Johnson would be a better leader. Here’s an excerpt.

There is the inevitable talk this morning of a leadership challenge. Conservative MPs will be talking with their Associations this coming weekend (in some cases), and meet in the Commons when it returns next week. The best guess today is that it will have moved a few to favour one, but not many. The case against is formidable: in essence, that toppling a Prime Minister during the Brexit negotiations would paralyse them.

Furthermore, the Tories can surely lose only one leader during this Parliament. What if another is required after those negotiations end? Or if a challenge led to a general election? And May’s replacement now could well be Boris Johnson, if his name went before the membership. That is a disincentive to act for many Conservative MPs.

None the less, the week will have reminded them of an inconvenient truth – namely, that the Foreign Secretary stands out from his Cabinet colleagues in being able to make a mass Tory appeal with pizzazz, wit and gusto. The Conservative week has been an Aesop-type fable of the lion and the frog: Johnson with his leonine Churchillian appeal; May with the croaker that seized up her throat. We have our reservations about the foreign secretary, but concede that he alone, of those ministers who spoke this week, made the Tory message sing.

Progress, the centrist group within the Labour party, has announced that its funding is secure for the next three years. There was some doubt about its future because Lord David Sainsbury, the former science minister and philanthropist who until now has been the group’s main funder, announced in June that he will stop funding political causes.

In a statement Richard Angell, the Progress director, said the membership has increased and members are giving more.

There has been an increase in membership since the news that David Sainsbury will end his support for party political causes in December this year – a clear acknowledgment of the importance of Progress at this time. Over 50 per cent of existing members have increased their contribution – some quite substantially. Together they have put the organisation on a sustainable footing.

Progress now moves from being core funded by one generous individual to a living breathing movement of Labour party supporters committed to a centre-left progressive future for both the party and the country.

Angell also said he saw Progress’s role as “renewing the centre-left, stopping a hard-left takeover of local parties and fighting for the closest possible relationship with Europe will go on.”

This is from Sky’s Tamara Cohen.

Those odds seem improbably high, but perhaps Cohen’s unnamed source knows something the rest of us don’t ...

The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson says Ed Vaizey’s comments about the Conservative conference (see 12.10pm) would have more credibility if he had actually attended it.

According to the Financial Times’ Chris Giles (paywall) Philip Hammond, the chancellor, is “facing what officials describe as ‘a bloodbath’ in the public finances in his Budget next month as weak economic forecasts derail the government’s plans. Giles says:

As much as two-thirds of the £26bn of headroom in the public finances that the chancellor created last year as a buffer for the economy through the Brexit period is likely to be wiped out after the government’s fiscal watchdog concludes its forecasts for growth have been too optimistic.

The Office for Budget Responsibility will publish on Tuesday a new analysis suggesting it has persistently over-estimated Britain’s productivity over the past seven years and will give a broad hint that it will rectify the situation with a more pessimistic Budget forecast.

Hugo Dixon, who founded the anti-Brexit InFacts website, has posted an interesting thread on Twitter about the possible implications of Theresa May’s conference disaster for Brexit. It starts here.

Here are two interesting Brexit stories around today.

Since August, Britain and the EU have repeatedly insisted that they had reached an agreement on the terms under which Britain would buy in food from around the world after Brexit.

Brussels currently negotiates all these quotas and tariffs on behalf of Britain and the 27 other EU countries jointly, but London will need to take independent control of these policies from March 2019. That creates a dilemma over how to divide up the EU’s current quota arrangements with other countries — agreed at the World Trade Organisation — between the UK and the remaining 27. These tariff-rate quotas allow countries outside the EU to export certain goods into the bloc with reduced duties: but only up to a maximum limit.

The argument from Britain and the EU is that the rest of the world will be “no worse off” after Brexit — a key legal defense in trade disputes — if the EU’s quotas are simply reduced, and Britain takes a share of them. British Trade Minister Liam Fox told Politico in an interview that Britain had agreed to take a portion of the EU’s quotas based on the UK’s average consumption over the last three years.

America and the six other big food exporters, however, wrote an unusually sharply worded letter of complaint dated September 26 to the UK and EU representatives at the World Trade Organization over the terms of such an arrangement.

“We cannot accept such an agreement,” reads the letter, seen by Politico. The seven countries dispute the legal defense that the proposed post-Brexit arrangement would leave them “no worse off”.

“The British government is lacking a clear concept despite talking a lot,” BDI Managing Director Joachim Lang said.

“German companies with a presence in Britain and Northern Ireland must now make provisions for the serious case of a very hard exit. Anything else would be naive,” he said.

Thanks to those of you who flagged these up BTL.

Here is more from the Mail on Sunday’s Dan Hodges about the Tory leadership.

And this is from HuffPost’s Owen Bennett.

Here is the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on the Ed Vaizey interview. (See 12.10pm.)

Former minister Ed Vaizey says 'quite a few' MPs will now want May to resign

Here is the full quote from Ed Vaizey, the Conservative MP and former culture minister. Asked if Theresa May should resign, he said:

I’m finding it increasingly difficult to see a way forward, at the moment, and it worries me.

He also said “quite a few” MPs would now want her to resign.

I think there will be quite a few people who will now be pretty firmly of the view that she should resign ....

The Tory party conference was a great opportunity to reboot the party and therefore reboot the country to give a clear sense of direction and that did not happen, and so yes I am concerned.

This is from the BBC’s Peter Henley.

The Conservative MP Mark Pritchard tells me:

Better to have a prime minister who coughs during one speech than someone who wants to be prime minister who makes most audiences splutter in most of his speeches.

He’s not naming names - but I think we can guess who he is referring to.

Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leadership candidate, has proposed a higher child tax credit of £10 a week targeted at poor families in Scotland, using the country’s new welfare powers.

Sarwar has been buffeted by repeated attacks on his progressive credentials after it emerged he received £20,000 a year in share income from his family firm, which pays its staff the basic minimum wage, and he defended his family’s decision to educate his children privately.

These issues have boosted the campaign of his rival Richard Leonard, a pro-Corbyn former GMB political officer and follow MSP, who has traded heavily on his long-standing leftwing views. Leonard describes himself as a far more credible Labour “message carrier” in the Corbyn era. Sarwar is painted as a careerist by his critics.

Sarwar said the new policy, which doubles Scottish Labour’s manifesto proposal to increase child tax credit across the board by £5 a week, would give 493,000 children an extra £10 a week and would reduce Scotland’s child poverty rates by 20%.

Under Holyrood’s new welfare powers, ministers can top up existing social security benefits and new universal credit payments. Scottish National party ministers have been under pressure from anti-poverty charities to increase child benefits by £5 a week.

Sarwar’s policy would be means-tested, a controversial approach he insisted would allow the tax increase to be far better targeted, and funded from increasing some Scottish income tax rates. He claimed it was the most radical policy yet unveiled during his leadership contest, sparked by the surprise resignation of Kezia Dugdale in August.

Sarwar implied again that he was better able to reach out to ordinary voters than Leonard. “Unlike the SNP I am prepared to use Holyrood’s new powers to build a better future for the next generation of Scots,” he said. “But that can only happen if Labour stops talking to itself and starts talking to the country, so that we can win elections once again.”

May loyalist MP George Freeman says her sense of duty is like the Queen's

This is what the Conservative MP George Freeman told the Victoria Derbyshire Show earlier (see 10.37am) about Theresa May. Asked if it was time for a leadership contest, he replied:

Absolutely not. Politics is a brutal game but losing your voice, getting heckled and having a set failure is not a reason to trigger a leadership debate. Personally I was in the hall yesterday and there were a lot of doubts before the prime minister spoke, a lot of people wanting to hear some really important messages. And I think we heard them.

There were three things yesterday. The party needed to hear a sorry, and we heard it. And I think people also saw something, the woman who has led this party apologising for that appalling campaign and doing the opposite to what she did during it; we heard a woman with humour, with wit, with warmth, a woman who showed her frailties and personal vulnerabilities, a woman who is at the age of life where many would put their feet up, with diabetes, battling through because she believes in public service. And a woman revealing the core, personal motive for that, the unhappiness of her childlessness. And she is driven by a need to put something back.

Later Freeman compared May’s sense of duty to the Queen’s.

I’m sure if the Conservative party asked her to go, she would, but I don’t hear that happening this morning at all. And I think the prime minister has a very strong sense of commitment to duty, to public service. In the same way that Her Majesty the Queen puts public service at the heart of everything she does, the prime minister is driven by a very deep sense of public service to country.

George Freeman.
George Freeman. Photograph: BBC

On Sky’s All Out Politics the Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen told Adam Boluton that he thought Theresa May should stay as prime minister and party leader - at least until Brexit was over. He told the programme:

It was a difficult day yesterday. The most important thing is that we hold the Conservative party together because the real tragedy would be if we end up with Jerem Corbyn getting into Number 10 Downing Street. That would be a tragedy for the whole country. We need to hold the Conservative party and the government together and move forward.

Asked if May should stay, he said:

I think we are going to carry on with Theresa May, certainly until we get through the Brexit process.

In his Telegraph column (paywall) Nick Timothy, who was Theresa May’s co chief of staff until he resigned after the election, says that the Conservative conference failed to do what it should have done. Here’s an excerpt.

The facts after the party conference season are these: Brexit remains the most pressing priority for the country; the demand for change at home is getting greater, not weaker; and Labour are proving themselves to be more and more extreme.

Confronted with these challenges, the Conservatives failed to rise to the occasion at their conference, just as they have failed to do since the election result sparked their crisis of confidence ...

[May’s] speech also contained several important policies, such as the cap on rip-off energy tariffs and the plan to build more housing. True, some could have been bolder. It is odd, for example, that the Treasury supported putting £10 billion into helping people to buy existing homes but only £2 billion into building new ones. But at least it was a start.

But where was the policy earlier in the week? Where was the plan to make our economy truly dynamic? What is the future for school reform? What should we expect from the review of higher education? What about the cost of living? Several policies felt like they had been watered down due to disagreements between ministers.

George Freeman, the Conservative MP and chair of Theresa May’s policy board, has defended her on the Victoria Derbyshire show.

Ed Vaizey, the Conservative MP and former culture minister, has told the BBC that “quite a few” of his colleagues think Theresa May should resign, the BBC’s Iain Watson reports.

In his Today interview Greg Clark, the business secretary, said Ofgem already had the power to force energy companies to impose a price cap on customers on standard variable tariffs (STVs). But he said the legislation announced by Theresa May in her speech yesterday was intended to provide “legal back-up” in case the energy companies tried to fight Ofgem in the courts. He said:

Ofgem have been concerned that if they were to exercise their powers without legislation that they would suffer an appeal from the energy companies and that it would be locked down in legal battles.

My view is that I would be surprised if energy companies did want to battle this through the courts. So what we have said is that it would be better, because it would happen much quicker, if they used these powers straight away.

If they need legal back-up I think there is strong consensus in Parliament for that. So we will publish legislation and we will invite the whole House to endorse this so that they have that legal certainty.

But Iain Conn, chief executive of Centrica, told the programme that a price cap would be a mistake. He said:

We don’t support price caps. There is clear evidence that they don’t work. They tend to limit choice, reduce competition and prices tend to bunch around the cap.

We have seen it in many markets where the cheap deals go because the mechanism for people to make money out of the market is changed.

At HuffPost Paul Waugh says there is talk of Tory MPs trying to get Theresa May to stand down by sending in the “men in grey suits” instead of using party rules to trigger a no confidence vote (the mechanism used to remove Iain Duncan Smith). Waugh says:

[One former cabinet minster] has a list of MPs (triple checked to make sure none are flaky) who are ready to tell May that it’s time to go. I’m told there were 26 names on Tuesday and the Telegraph says that figure has gone up overnight to 30. The sharks scent blood in the water.

To trigger any formal leadership confidence vote, 48 letters need to be sent to the backbench 1922 committee chairman Graham Brady. But the plot against May is not about the formal route, it’s more a group of MPs who want to adopt the ‘men in grey suits’ approach of the 1950s, offering May the political equivalent of a pearl handled revolver and glass of whisky (and perhaps a cough sweet).

On Twitter the Conservative MP Mark Pritchard has just denounced this proposal as “cowardly”.

These are from the Mail on Sunday’s Dan Hodges.

Theresa May’s conference speech has also generated some dreadful headlines abroad. This thread, from Nina Schick, showing how the speech was covered in Germany, is worth reading.

Theresa May’s party conference speech was intended to shore up her leadership. But after yesterday’s nightmare it has had the opposite effect, with rumours circulating that some MPs have again reverted to their ancient, long-standing preoccupation, plotting for a leadership contests.

It may well come to nothing because there is no obvious replacement. And colleagues have been rallying round. Cabinet minsters apparently called May last night to offer their support. And on the Today programme this morning Greg Clark, the business secretary played down talk of any threat to her position, saying people would admire “the guts and grace” she showed yesterday.

After the conference a lot of people who were there in the hall, and watching it on TV, will have admired frankly the guts and grace that the PM showed in the face of some pretty difficult and unexpected developments ...

If you look at the performance, both in terms of the personal character that Theresa May showed yesterday and what she was saying, then I think the respect that those in the hall - and, frankly, talking to people who saw it on TV, many of whom may not be Conservatives and fans of the prime minister - I think there was a respect there.

Not all the papers have written the speech up as a total disaster. Paul Dacre, the Daily Mail editor, is May’s most supportive Fleet Street ally, and the Mail has this gloss on events on its front page.

The Labour-supporting Daily Mirror has also splashed on a positive headline - because May in her speech announced the introduction of an opt-out organ donation scheme that the paper has been campaigning for.

And the Daily Express has declared the speech a triumph.

But the rest of the papers have a much more negative assessment of the speech, and May’s predicament.

And the best headline (which they nicked from Twitter yesterday) is in the Metro.

There is not much due to happen in Westminster today, and so I will be covering all the further reaction to the speech.

As usual, I will be covering breaking political news as it happens, as well as bringing you the best reaction, comment and analysis from the web. I plan to post a summary at lunchtime and another in the afternoon.

You can read all today’s Guardian politics stories here.

Here is the Politico Europe round-up of this morning’s political news from Jack Blanchard’s Playbook. Here is Paul Waugh’s daily summary from HuffPost UK. Here is the ConservativeHome round-up of today’s politics stories in the papers. And here is the PoliticsHome list of today’s top 10 must reads.

If you want to follow me or contact me on Twitter, I’m on @AndrewSparrow.

I try to monitor the comments BTL but normally I find it impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer direct questions, although sometimes I miss them or don’t have time.

If you want to attract my attention quickly, it is probably better to use Twitter.

Updated

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