Andrea Leadsom condemns Boris Johnson’s ‘unacceptable failings of leadership’ – UK politics live

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The former cabinet minister Andrea Leadsom has criticised Boris Johnson’s “failure of leadership” – the latest in a string of senior Tory figures to express doubts about the prime minister’s future.

The former business secretary, who has twice run for the party leadership, stopped short of calling for Johnson to resign but said individual MPs would decide on how best to restore confidence.

In a letter to her constituents, Leadsom said she believed it was “extremely unlikely that senior leaders were unaware of what was going on”.

“I therefore agree with Sue Gray’s conclusions that there have been significant failures of leadership, both political and official, in No 10 and the Cabinet Office,” she wrote.

The MP for South Northamptonshire added: “Each of my Conservative MP colleagues and I must now decide individually on what is the right course of action that will restore confidence in our government.”

On Monday, the first day of the parliamentary recess, four more MPs called on Johnson to resign, including Jeremy Wright, a former attorney general. Several Tory MPs told the Guardian they believed the threshold of 54 letters withdrawing support for Johnson was close to being crossed – or may have been already. This would trigger a secret ballot on whether they still have confidence in the prime minister.

At least 30 MPs have said the prime minister should resign but not all have confirmed they have submitted a letter of no confidence.

Elliot Colburn, a Tory MP with a small majority against the Lib Dems, said he had put in a letter “some time ago”, while Nickie Aiken, the Cities of London and Westminster MP whose council turned Labour this month, called on Johnson to bring an end to the situation by submitting for a vote of confidence. The Tory MP Andrew Bridgen also told constituents he had resubmitted his letter.

On Tuesday the former Tory leader William Hague said the prime minister was in “real trouble” and he believed a confidence vote in Johnson was imminent.

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The former foreign secretary William Hague has said the prime minister is “in real trouble” and that Tory MPs are “moving towards having a ballot” on his leadership.

Allies of Johnson had been hopeful he had escaped unscathed following a relatively muted initial response to Gray’s report last week, PA News reports, but Lord Hague said it was proving to be “one of those sort of slow-fuse explosions in politics”.

He told Times Radio:

It’s still going along. A lot of people misread it really, the events of last week as meaning the trouble is over, Boris is free and that’s actually not the mood in the Conservative party, which is very, very troubled about the contents of that report.

So I think the Conservative party will need to resolve this one way or another, obviously because to be an effective party they either need to rally behind the prime minister they’ve got, or they need to decide to force him out.

I think they’re moving towards either next week or around the end of June, they are moving towards having a ballot, it looks like that.

The former education secretary Justine Greening said the prime minister needed to “get a grip or get out”, adding there was a “real jitteriness” among Conservative MPs.

Greening, who was among 21 pro-Remain rebels thrown out of the party by Johnson and is now no longer an MP, likened Johnson’s position to that of Theresa May when she was under fire from Tory Brexiteers.

She told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme:

There is a real jitteriness around the parliamentary party of following a prime minister who isn’t really setting out a clear plan on necessarily where he wants to lead the country.

We have been here before with Theresa May. The reality is all prime ministers either have to get a grip or get out. That is a political rule that even Boris Johnson will need to follow.”

A steady stream of backbenchers have called on Johnson to go after Gray’s report laid bare a hard-drinking culture at the heart of government while raising renewed claims he misled Parliament.

Under party rules, the chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee, Sir Graham Brady, must call a vote of confidence in Johnson’s leadership if 54 Tory MPs – 15% of the parliamentary party – submit a letter calling for one.

So far, more than 25 MPs have publicly called on the prime minister to stand down – although not all of them have said whether they have written to Brady.

However, it is also widely believed in Westminster that a number of others have put in letters without declaring their intentions amid speculation the tally is approaching the total needed to trigger a vote.

Boris Johnson is back in negative figures in Conservative Home’s cabinet league table, which is a monthly poll of Tory members, that asks about satisfaction with members of the cabinet.

The results show the members are most satisfied with Ben Wallace and least satisfied with the prime minister.

This won’t be good news for Johnson who hopes the grassroots members of the party are still behind him.

The former minister Andrea Leadsom has criticised Boris Johnson‘s “unacceptable failings of leadership” following the publication of the Sue Gray report.

In a letter to her constituents, published on social media, Leadsom said she believed it was “extremely unlikely that senior leaders were unaware of what was going on”.

She wrote:

I therefore agree with Sue Gray’s conclusions that there have been significant failures of leadership, both political and official, in No 10 and the Cabinet Office.

The Tory MP for South Northamptonshire added:

Each of my Conservative MP colleagues and I must now decide individually on what the right course of action that will restore confidence in our government.

Leadsom did not call for Johnson to resign in her letter.

Her intervention is a further blow to Johnson as a steady stream of Tory MPs have been calling on the prime minister to stand down in the wake of Gray’s report last week.

A committed Brexiteer, Leadsom backed Johnson for the leadership in 2019 after pulling out of the contest herself, underlining the fact that discontent with the prime minister extends across the party.

The travel industry should have been better prepared for a surge in post-pandemic holidays, a government minister has said, after scenes of travel chaos in airports before the half-term break.

The arts minister, Stephen Parkinson, a former adviser to Theresa May, said the disruption was causing “a lot of distress” for people who had not been able to get away for several years because of the pandemic.

Flight cancellations have led to many passengers facing long delays to their half-term breaks. EasyJet has cancelled more than 200 flights to and from Gatwick between 28 May and 6 June. The airline’s Twitter feed has been referring dozens of stranded Gatwick passengers to its disruption help webpage.

Tui also made several last-minute cancellations including from Gatwick, Birmingham and Bristol, blaming “operational and supply chain issues”.

Airports are under particular pressure because of the widespread use of travel vouchers from previously cancelled holidays, and this week will be the first school holidays in England and Wales since the lifting of all UK Covid travel restrictions.

The chief executive of the Airline Management Group, Peter Davies, said the industry was likely to be reluctant to spend money to tackle the bottlenecks faced by passengers.

He said:

When you’ve got thousands of people arriving at Heathrow at seven o’clock in the morning, and that’s been happening for years, where you’ve got a lot of people arriving on overnight flights, then you should gear yourself up to make sure you can handle those people.

But of course that costs money and it costs space, and people are reluctant often to do that.

Lord Parkinson said that airlines and airports had been urged by the government to hire more staff to cope with demand.

He told Sky News:

Colleagues in the Department for Transport are working with the industry, we have been for months urging them to make sure they’ve got enough staff so that thanks to the success of the vaccine rollout, as people are able to travel again, people can take the holidays that they’ve missed and that they’ve deserved,” he told Sky News.

Of course it’s causing a lot of distress for people, particularly in half-term, people with family and children with them.

It’s very distressing if you turn up at the airport and your flight isn’t ready, so we’ve been saying to the industry that they need to prepare for this: they need to have the staff that they need to make sure people can get away and enjoy holidays.

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Billions of pounds given away in a tax break for UK oil and gas exploitation could have permanently cut the energy bills of 2m homes by ?342 a year if invested in insulation measures, according to a green thinktank.

Rishi Sunak announced the 91% tax break alongside a windfall tax on the huge profits of oil and gas companies last week. The E3G thinktank calculated that the tax break would hand between ?2.5bn and ?5.7bn back to the oil companies over three years, while an energy efficiency programme of ?3bn over the same period would upgrade 2.1m homes making them less reliant on gas.

Soaring international gas prices are expected to more than double energy bills in a year by October, pushing a third of households into fuel poverty. Proponents of energy efficiency, including loft and wall insulation, say it is a no-regrets investment that cuts bills for good, slashes the carbon emissions driving the climate crisis and boosts jobs. Green groups said the chancellor’s grants to households partly funded by the windfall tax were only a “sticking plaster”.

Another report published on Tuesday by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) found that a ?4bn annual investment in energy efficiency could permanently halve heating bills for households by 2035. Its author said Sunak was handing out “raincoats” but “failing to fix the roof”.

The tax reduction meets official definitions of a fossil fuel subsidy, which the UK and other countries had pledged to phase out. It incentivises new oil and gas production, despite a recent Guardian investigation finding that the fossil fuel industry is already planning projects that would blow the world’s chances of maintaining a liveable climate.

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The aviation sector is reluctant to “gear up” for thousands of people arriving because of the increased costs, the chief executive of the Airline Management Group has said.

Asked what the industry can do to cope with demand, Peter Davies told LBC:

Well, they have to gear up as quickly as possible in terms of staff, particularly through the airports with security.

However, he said they is a reluctance to increase staff numbers.

When you’ve got thousands of people arriving at Heathrow at seven o’clock in the morning, and that’s been happening for years, where you got a lot of people arriving on overnight flights, then you should gear yourself up to make sure you can handle those people.

But of course that costs money and it costs space, and people are reluctant often to do that.

The arts minister, Stephen Parkinson, said the “industry should have been recruiting people ready” for the increased demand for travel.

Asked if government could have done more to help the aviation sector during the pandemic, Lord Parkinson told Sky News that the government had helped but put the blame squarely on the travel sector not recruiting enough people ready for its busiest season now restrictions have lifted.

He said:

We’ve been helping people across the whole economy with support for jobs, but of course the pandemic hit lots of sectors in lots of different ways.

There was a period when people just simply weren’t able to travel for obvious reasons, but there’s been many months where we’ve been back on track, particularly since the vaccination to this moment and the industry should have been recruiting people ready.

The companies should have had the people in place and we’re working with colleagues in the department for transport to make sure that they can get people in as swiftly as possible.

He added: “We need clear communication from the companies to the people that are travelling, and colleagues at the Department for Transport are working with the industry to make sure they’re getting people in as swiftly as they can.”

Shadow financial secretary to the Treasury James Murray said that the “government hasn’t prepared” for the rise in demand for travel.

The Labour MP told Sky News said Labour had been warning there would be problems after the travel sector cut staff during the pandemic and are now struggling to cope with the increased demand.

He said:

We’ve been warning for months throughout the Covid pandemic that you can’t just let the airline industry and airports fall over, let them shed all of their staff, and then expect to get back on track when demand comes back after the pandemic.

We were warning about this, trade unions were warning about this, employee representatives were saying throughout the Covid pandemic ‘You need a sector-specific package to support the aviation sector’, and now we’re seeing what’s happened because the government hasn’t prepared for what would obviously come next.

He added: “The government was not working with the airlines to get that sector-specific package in place during the pandemic.”

Murray argued that the government “didn’t step up” and now people are seeing the impact of that as people’s holidays are impacted.

He said:

It felt fairly obvious what was happening during the pandemic in that people were not travelling, were not flying throughout the pandemic, but then, once the pandemic starts to recede, air travel would start to pick up again and the government simply didn’t do what was necessary during the pandemic to get ready for what’s happening now, and now we’re seeing the impact of it.

He added that there had been added chaos because of the problems people are facing trying to apply for passports or renew their passports, which Murray says was also something that should have been predicted ahead of time and planned for.

He said:

The other aspect of this as well, and not to forget, is all of the chaos in terms of passports and the fact that that was predictable as well… It’s something where a bit of common sense, a bit of planning… if the government had had their mind focused on what was coming they could have prepared for this.

Welcome to today’s liveblog. I’ll be updating you throughout the day. Do drop me an email on nicola.slawson@theguardian.com or send me a tweet @Nicola_Slawson if you think I’m missing something or if you have a question.