Minister tries to defend Truss by saying cabinet failed to realise mini-budget would backfire – UK politics live

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The Liberal Democrats have been fined ?1,500 for the late reporting of donations and filing of the party’s spending return from the 2019 general election, the Electoral Commission has said. In a statement the commission’s director of regulation, Louise Edwards said:

Political finance laws are in place to make sure the system is transparent and accurate. The requirements for political parties are clear so it’s disappointing when they are not me.

In the case of the Liberal Democrats, our investigations found offences related to the late reporting of donations and its spending return from the 2019 UK general election.

Where we find offences, we do not automatically issue sanctions. We balance the evidence and take into consideration a range of factors before making our final decision.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the business secretary, gave a ringing endorsement of the prime minister when he arrived at Downing Street for cabinet this morning, PA Media reports. PA says:

While other colleagues were tight-lipped, Rees-Mogg appeared delighted to see the reporters opposite No 10, asking: “How are you? Very nice to see you.”

Rees-Mogg said that ministers were “fully” behind Liz Truss, before heading into a cabinet meeting.

Colleagues were more reticent, with a number ignoring shouted questions about the prime minister’s survival.

When asked if Truss would remain in office, work and pensions secretary Chloe Smith offered only a terse “yes” before entering No 10.

James Heappey, the defence minister, has suggested he would resign if the prime minister did not fulfil her leadership promise to raise defence spending, after the new chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, said no department would be immune to cuts. My colleague Jessica Elgot has the story here.

Here are some more lines from James Heappey’s morning interview round on the Tory leadership crisis.

Heappey, a defence minister, said Liz Truss could not afford to make any more mistakes. Asked how many more errors she could make, he told Sky News: “I suspect given how skittish our politics are at the moment, not very many,” he said. Pressed how many, he said: “I don’t think there’s the opportunity to make any more mistakes.”

He claimed he thought Truss was doing a good job. He said:

She’s very much our prime minister and for what it’s worth I think she’s doing a good job.

He claimed that the “vast majority” of Tory MPs did not want to see Truss replaced as leader. He said:

There are a few colleagues in parliament who are irreconcilable and the government needs to work to bring them back into the fold as best we can.

But the vast majority of colleagues recognise that after the last few months – indeed after the last year when we’ve been going through all of the angst over Boris Johnson, which has divided our party deeply – what we cannot do is reverse the decision of a leadership election that we’ve literally only just completed.

Most journalists who have spent time talking to Tory MPs in private in recent days say the opposite. They say Conservatives do want a new leader, although there is no consensus as to who is should be, how he or she should be installed, or when.

Liz Truss is now more unpopular than any British political leader has been in the past 20 years, according to the polling firm YouGov. It has released new figures that suggest her net favourability rating is -70.

The findings are good for Keir Starmer, whose net favourability score is much higher than those of four leading Tory rivals.

In his write-up of the findings, YouGov’s Peter Raven says both Truss and Starmer have lower net favourability ratings than their parties. But Truss is a lot more unpopular than her party, whereas Starmer is only marginally more unpopular than his. And the Labour party is viewed far, far more favourably than the Conservative party.

The prime minister is also less well-liked than the Conservative party as a whole, which has a net favourability score of -53, down from -44 in the previous poll. The party is considered favourable by 18% of the British public, down from 22% earlier in the month.

Labour leader Keir Starmer continues to be considerably less unpopular than his Conservative rivals, with 41% of people liking him and 46% disliking him, a net score of -5. Labour themselves are slightly more popular still, with 45% having a favourable opinion of the party compared to 44% who don’t, giving a net score of +1.

This point is important because it suggests that, although the Tory brand is deeply unpopular, having Truss as leader in election campaign would hold it back even more.

YouGov’s Patrick English says “by some distance” Truss is the most unpopular leader the company has tracked since it was set up in 2000.

Labour says James Heappey’s admission that no one in the cabinet realised the mini-budget was flawed (see 9.30am) shows the Tories have lost all economic credibility. In a statement, Pat McFadden, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said:

The frank admission that they all approved the disastrous mini-budget shows the Conservatives have lost all economic credibility.

They couldn’t run a bath let alone a major G7 economy. They have put a Tory premium on people’s mortgages and reduced the UK to nervously watching its gilt yields day by day.

Labour will match the financial stability the country needs with a proper plan for growth based on the efforts of the whole country, not tired and failed trickle down economics.

Good morning. Liz Truss finally did something half-sensible last night and apologised for the problems caused by the mini-budget. It is not clear yet what, if anything, this will do to improve her survival prospects, and in her interview with the BBC’s Chris Mason she also said that she would “lead the Conservatives into the next general election”.

In normal circumstances, this would be a mistake, because fighting an election with her as leader is the last thing that Tory MPs want, and unpopular prime ministers who insist that they want to “go on and on” normally only incentivise those plotting to get rid of them. Boris Johnson did not do himself any favours by musing about serving a third term in the summer, only weeks before he was forced out. But when Mason asked Truss if she would “definitely” still be leader at the time of the next election, she paused and then laughed, before saying something about not wanting to focus on internal Tory debates. It was a rare moment of self-awareness that signalled to viewers – and Tory MPs – that her answer was a formality, and that she did not actually believe it.

James Heappey, the defence minister, has been giving interviews this morning, and he has followed the interview with lines that were intended to be helpful to Truss but that could turn out to be counterproductive. There were two that stood out.

Heappey claimed that Truss deserved credit for admitting that she made a mistake with the mini-budget. He told Sky News that her apology to the public was “a contrast to a year ago when the previous prime minister’s woes began” and Boris Johnson refused to apologise for Partygate. Heappey went on:

She has fronted up to her mistake very quickly and there are people in the parliamentary party who don’t want that to be the end of it. But for an awful lot of us we recognise this is a moment when this country needs its government to knuckle down and get back on with the day job.

But Truss did not accept that she had made a mistake quickly. At the Conservative party conference two weeks ago, when it was already clear that the mini-budget had alarmed the financial markets, Truss used her interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg to say that it was the presentation of the mini-budget that was at fault, not the substance, and she implied the market turmoil was mostly a result of global factors. And even on Friday last week, at the press conference following the sacking of Kwasi Kwarteng, when Truss was specifically asked if she would apologise for what happened, she refused.

Heappey said that no one in the cabinet realised the mini-budget would backfire in the way that it did. Heappey, who attends cabinet even though he is not a full member, told Times Radio:

It’d be completely disingenuous to claim that on that morning, when the cabinet was presented with the mini-budget, that there was anybody sat around the table who said that it was a bad idea. Each and every one of the measures within it were coherent with a desire to drive growth.

I think what the cabinet failed collectively to recognise is that it was an awful lot of measures being unleashed simultaneously on unsuspecting markets. And the reaction from the markets is clear.

This may be true. But it does not reflect well on the cabinet as a whole, and it highlights the fact that Truss’s cabinet did not include her leadership rival, Rishi Sunak, who predicted exactly what would happen if Truss introduced policies like this. He told Tories in the summer:

The lights on the economy are flashing red, and the root cause is inflation. I’m worried that Liz Truss’s plans will make the situation worse. If we just put fuel on the fire of this inflation spiral, all of us, all of you, are going to just end up with higher mortgage rates, savings and pensions that are eaten away, and misery for millions.

I will post more from Heappey’s interviews shortly.

Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: Liz Truss chairs cabinet.

11am: Frances O’Grady, the outgoing TUC general secretary, addresses the rescheduled TUC conference.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

11.30am: Brandon Lewis, the justice secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

After 12.30pm: MPs debate the remaining stages of the public order bill.

2.30pm: Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland secretary, gives evidence to the Commons Northern Ireland affairs committee.

5pm: Truss is due to hold a private meeting with Tory MPs from the European Research Group.

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