Conservative leadership

Telegraph
Michael Gove has been accused of embarking on “manoeuvres” after it emerged that he courted dozens of Tory backbenchers at a dinner hosted by the MP who ran his last leadership bid.
The Levelling Up Secretary addressed up to 40 MPs at a pub near to the Central London home of Mel Stride, who held similar events with Mr Gove as guest speaker in the run-up to the 2019 leadership campaign.
An MP said the event, on November 24, was ostensibly organised under the auspices of Deep Blue, a dining club founded by Mr Stride – who chairs the Treasury select committee and was a member of the Cabinet for the last two months of Theresa May’s premiership.
A source close to Mr Gove said Boris Johnson even addressed the group at Mr Stride’s home, before leaving them to decamp to the pub for a speech by his former leadership rival.
The source said: “Any suggestion this was a leadership event are categorically untrue. The PM, ministers and PPSs [ministerial aides] were also in attendance.”

Sun
TORY hotshots Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have launched a “phoney war” in the race to seize the keys to No10.
The Cabinet rivals are discreetly sounding out MPs to assess the support they’ll get if Boris Johnson is toppled.
MPs have been invited to breakfast summits, brainstorming sessions and soirees as a test run for a leadership race.
But all other activity is “below the radar” as they try to portray themselves as loyal to their embattled PM.
Mr Sunak and Ms Truss are favourites to win if a contest is called and up to 14 others are expected to throw their hats in the ring.
But senior Tories have told how the jockeying for position has already begun.
A small group of MPs were invited to a breakfast event as part of a charm offensive hosted by Foreign Secretary Ms Truss.
She addressed them sitting in front of two Union flags in a show described as “full-on retail”.

iNews
Even as Boris Johnson fights for his political life, leadership rivals are quietly circling. Rishi Sunak has met more than 100 MPs this week, Liz Truss is seeking to burnish her credentials on the world stage and Priti Patel is pushing through divisive right-wing legislation which is cheered by the Tory grassroots.
Mr Johnson’s three most senior ministers have all used their high-profile Cabinet positions to push a particular vision of Britain’s future.
None of them yet has a formal leadership campaign, but all are busily building links with backbenchers – even if they insist they are only doing so as part of their day jobs.
This week has seen the Prime Minister’s career in more extreme danger than ever before. When proof emerged that Mr Johnson’s private secretary had invited 100 colleagues to a lockdown party in the Downing Street garden, attended by the Prime Minister himself, MPs came close to open revolt.
He bought time by admitting the facts and apologising in the Commons – even if not all backbenchers were convinced by his explanation that he only turned up because he assumed it was a “work event”.
Several MPs elected in 2019 from the so-called “red wall” have told colleagues they have already submitted letters to backbench chief Sir Graham Brady demanding a no-confidence vote in the Prime Minister, although Sir Graham keeps the exact number of letters he has received a tightly guarded secret.
One member of the intake held a drinks party in his office this week, jokingly dubbed a “letters party” by invitees because all those attending were critics of Mr Johnson.

Guardian
Tory MPs will be ready in sufficient numbers to force Boris Johnson out of Downing Street within weeks if he tries to dodge responsibility for rule-breaking parties at No 10, the Observer has been told.
While most Conservative MPs say they are waiting for a report into so-called “partygate” by the senior civil servant Sue Gray before deciding the prime minister’s fate, large numbers admit privately that their minds are effectively made up and that they are merely observing “due process”.
What has convinced many Tory MPs to act against Johnson if he or the Downing Street operation is criticised directly or indirectly by Gray – and he then tries to fight on – has been the furious reaction from their constituents to new revelations of partying, including two events late into the night at No 10, on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral last April when such gatherings were forbidden.
An Opinium poll for the Observer will spread further alarm in Conservative ranks.
It shows Labour taking a 10-point lead over the Tories, with Johnson’s personal ratings collapsing to levels equivalent to Theresa May at her lowest ebb. It also shows that 46% of Leave voters who backed the Conservatives at the 2019 election say Johnson should resign, suggesting the coalition he put together to win an 80-strong majority in parliament is fracturing.

Mail
Boris Johnson is plotting a major cull of his inner Downing Street circle amid fresh calls for his resignation as he hopes to relaunch his Premiership should he survive the fallout from the Partygate row.
Martin Reynolds, the Prime Minister’s principal private secretary who sent the email inviting staff to ‘bring your own booze’ drinks in the No 10 garden during the first coronavirus lockdown, and his deputy Stuart Glassborow are likely to be forced out of Downing Street, according to insiders.
Chief of Staff Dan Rosenfield is also facing the prospect of losing his role, but Whitehall officials neither confirmed nor denied reports of a significant shake-up of Mr Johnson’s senior staffers.
The PM is said to be devising a ‘policy blitz’ that will see him take charge of the migrant boat crisis and establish a post-Covid NHS ‘war room’ in a bid to forge a new future away from allegations of illicit parties being held by Downing Street officials.
Despite growing unrest in the Cabinet and the Tory backbenches over the damage inflicted on the Government by revelations about lockdown breaches in Downing Street, the Prime Minister’s allies still hope the official report into the saga will stop short of implicating Mr Johnson directly and allow him breathing space to cling on to power.

Times
Boris Johnson is planning a mass clearout of No 10 and a series of populist announcements to save his tottering premiership.
Despite issuing a humiliating apology to MPs over the Downing Street parties on Wednesday, the prime minister is refusing to take responsibility for the crisis and in meetings last week questioned why his team had not protected him.
He complained to aides: “How has all this been allowed to happen? How has it come to this? How haven’t you sorted this out?”
A senior government source said: “He made it clear he thought they had let him down. Boris’s view is that he is not to blame. That everyone else is to blame.”
Johnson’s view is supported by members of the cabinet.

Breitbart
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and several Tory MPs have demanded that Boris Johnson resign over the litany of apparent boozy breaches of lockdown by the government.
The leader of Britain’s left-wing Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer, has called for Prime Minister Boris Johnson to resign after reports of regular “wine-time Friday” gatherings at the Prime Minister’s Downing Street residence during lockdown.
In a speech delivered to the Fabian Society in London on Saturday, Starmer called the prime minister’s position “untenable” and demanded Johnson “do the honourable thing and call it a day for the good of the country,” Sky News reported.
Johnson’s government has been accused of multiple lockdown breaches throughout the pandemic and even held two Downing Street parties on the 16th of April 2021, the night before Prince Philip’s funeral. The UK government apologised to Queen Elizabeth II  this week after the gatherings were revealed in the press.
Despite having been embroiled in his own alleged rule-breaking scandal, Starmer branded Johnson as a “broken spectacle” who is “mired in deceit and deception”, and therefore is “unable to lead”.
The Labour leader — who previously served in radical socialist Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet — called for Conservative MPs to dethrone Johnson if he is unwilling to step down by his own accord.

Single market

Express
FOREIGN Secretary Liz Truss has been urged to follow the example of Margaret Thatcher as she prepares for the latest round of negotiations with Brussels and works to prevent a crisis in Northern Ireland.
Ms Truss is expected to travel to Brussels next week to try and thrash out a deal on problems with the Northern Ireland Protocol which she fears are a threat to peace.
She wants to get a deal done before the Stormont elections in May – in which Sinn Fein is widely expected to be the biggest party – and is urging the European Union to show greater “pragmatism”.
Brexiteers are pushing Ms Truss to demand sweeping changes to the protocol and not to settle for changes to customs checks arrangements.
Sammy Wilson, one of the DUP’s most ardent eurosceptics, urged Ms Truss, who is considered a leading contender to succeed Boris Johnson in any future leadership election, to follow the example of Lady Thatcher.

Energy

Telegraph
Energy tariffs that were supposed to save homeowners hundreds of pounds a year on their bills now cost three times more than traditional gas and electricity deals.
The gas crisis has rendered specialist smart meter tariffs, once lauded as the future of energy pricing, effectively redundant as prices have risen across the board. So-called “time of use” smart meter tariffs, which lower the price of electricity when demand is low and increase the cost in times of high usage, were sold as one of the key benefits of the smart meter rollout.
In normal times these deals would save the typical family £210 a year compared with the average variable tariff from one of the big six energy firms, according to supplier Octopus.
Customers could even get paid to use electricity when energy prices dropped so low they became negative.
However, following the spike in wholesale energy costs, these deals now mostly charge customers close to the maximum rate possible, whatever time of day they use their appliances.

Face coverings

Telegraph
The Government is facing a legal fight over face masks in the classroom as more than a dozen Tory MPs and peers backed a court challenge against the measure.
Boris Johnson has been warned that there is “insufficient evidence” to support the policy and that it must be withdrawn with “immediate effect”.
The Government was sent Letter before Action by lawyers acting for the parent campaign group UsForThem which claims the current guidance is disproportionate, irrational and discriminatory.
The legal challenge is supported by several Tory politicians, including Sir Graham Brady, chair of the powerful 1922 committee of backbenchers, Robert Halfon, chair of the education select committee, and Marcus Fysh, chair of the all party parliamentary group on education.
It is exceptionally rare for MPs to back a legal challenge against their own Government, and the move will ramp up pressure on ministers to axe the policy.

BBC

Mail
The BBC was last night on the brink of a war with the Government after Culture Secretary  Nadine Dorries hit the Corporation with a two-year licence fee freeze – as her allies warned that ‘the days of state-run television are over’.
Tense negotiations between the Government and the BBC over the cost of the annual fee until the end of 2027 have concluded, with Ms Dorries deciding to hold the licence at £159 for the next two years.
Officials calculate that – due to inflation currently running at 5.1 per cent – the Corporation will have to find savings of more than £2 billion over the next six years.
However, Ms Dorries is also considering pegging future fee increases below inflation between 2024 and the end of the current Royal Charter on December 31, 2027 – meaning the savings the BBC must make could end up being even higher.
At that point, if the Conservatives are still in power, the licence fee is likely to be replaced by a new funding model which reflects the growing domination of subscription services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime.
The move comes after a series of rows with Ministers over the Corporation’s alleged Left-wing bias.

Child sex exploitation

Mirror
A child sex exploitation probe has found police and a council covered up “serious” failings in their treatment of a 12-year-old rape victim.
It follows a Sunday Mirror investigation last year that told how authorities turned a blind eye as the girl was attacked by a string of men.
They included two who assaulted her after picking her up outside a police station, where she had gone to report an earlier sex assault – only to be dismissed as a time-waster by a desk clerk.
It sparked a devastating chain of events in which she suffered more than 20 sex attacks by eight men that night in October 2006, including 15 rapes.
Just one of those men, Shakil Chowdhury, now 55, was brought to justice.
He got a six-year jail sentence but refused to name any accomplices.
Adding to the horror, the victim had told professionals earlier that year she was being groomed by teacher Paul Waites but was dismissed as “attention seeking”.
Waites, 49, was jailed in 2015 for raping her, and is now serving life for similar attacks on another girl.
The victim said: “An apology will never be enough. They have destroyed my life.”
Her case has been examined by independent investigators as part of a wider probe into exploitation in Oldham ordered by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, which is due to be published later this month.
A leaked passage from the report reads: “The responses of both [Oldham] council and Greater Manchester Police in replying to complaints made by [the victim] are disappointing.

Covid

Sky News
Coronavirus cases are “plateauing” in areas first hit by Omicron, with hospital admissions “slowing” in other parts of the country, experts have said.
Dr Susan Hopkins, chief medical adviser at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), said infection levels in London, the South East and East of England are flattening off.
She said that while case numbers are still rising in more northern parts of the country, the growth rate there is slowing.
“We see that infections are plateauing in the community, which is good, in London and the South East and the East of England,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday.
“There are still risings, but much slower in the northern parts of the country.”
On Friday, the UK’s R (reproduction) number was estimated to be between 1.1 and 1.5, which means the epidemic is still growing.

BBC News
The UK has reported another 81,713 coronavirus cases, the lowest daily level seen since 15 December.
The apparent ebbing of the Omicron wave comes as some experts claim the end of the pandemic is in sight for the UK.
However, the number of deaths within 28 days of a test remains high, with 1,843 over the past seven days – a 45% rise from the previous week.
The number of hospital patients with Covid has dropped – though the most recent figures date from Monday.
The 15,698 admitted in the seven days to 10 January represented a slight week-on-week fall.
Prof Julian Hiscox, chairman in infection and global health at the University of Liverpool, told the BBC that we are heading towards a new phase of the pandemic where the virus has a lesser impact on daily life.
“We’re almost there, it is now the beginning of the end, at least in the UK. I think life in 2022 will be almost back to before the pandemic,” he said.
Reported infections have been falling steadily since the new year. However, confirmed cases are still significantly higher than the peaks of previous waves during the pandemic, following the arrival in November of the highly transmissible Omicron variant.
And data released on Friday from the ONS said that, in the week ending 6 January, one in 15 people in England had Covid, with one in 20 infected in the rest of the UK.

Bercow

Times
John Bercow has branded a parliamentary inquiry into his conduct a “kangaroo court”, revealing that it is to conclude that he bullied three House of Commons staff when he was Speaker.
He originally faced accusations of bullying from four Commons staff under rules introduced in 2019 that allowed historic claims against MPs and ex-MPs. Two claims brought by Lieutenant-General David Leakey, a former Black Rod, were rejected by the 18-month inquiry.
Kathryn Stone, the parliamentary commissioner for standards, has judged Bercow guilty on 21 counts out of another 35 brought by Lord Lisvane, the former clerk of the Commons, and private secretaries Kate Emms and Angus Sinclair.

Telegraph
John Bercow has denounced a parliamentary inquiry into his conduct a “kangaroo court”, as he reveals it will conclude that he bullied three House of Commons staff.
The former Speaker has been found culpable on 21 counts of 35 brought by Lord Lisvane, the former clerk of the Commons, and private secretaries Kate Emms and Angus Sinclair, The Sunday Times reports.
Accusations against him include throwing a mobile phone, swearing at an employee and making a racially and sexually discriminatory remark, he said.
The 58-year-old, who stepped down as Speaker in 2019, said he would appeal the reported ruling of Kathryn Stone, the parliamentary commissioner for standards. If his appeal fails, he could be banned from Parliament for life.
He told The Sunday Times that the process was “unjust” and “amateurish”, adding: “To call it a kangaroo court is unfair to kangaroos.
“I’m appealing on the basis that the investigations are materially flawed and that the decisions are unsound.

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