Good morning,
Prime minister Rishi Sunak is set to meet with Cabinet ministers this morning, as doubts mount over his judgment in returning Suella Braverman to the post of home secretary.
Braverman is facing a new backlash today after she referred small boat channel crossings to an “invasion” and worries build about overcrowding at the Manston migrant processing centre.
This morning, immigration minister Robert Jenrick was doing the broadcast rounds in a bid to reassure the public that Braverman was the right fit for the job. He told Sky News that she had apologised for the emails sent from her personal device – which had led to her resignation under Liz Truss – and in any case they hadn’t been “top secret”.
He said:
You can’t say this was a serious breach of security. It was not the correct thing to do, she’s apologised for that and now she’s got a big job to do as home secretary.
He said instead she was focusing on developing a system “which welcomes best and brightest but clamps down on people coming here illegally”, because “that is not what British people want to see”, and argued that social housing shouldn’t be taken up by economic migrants, citing Albanians.
He argued that “root cause” of what is happening at the Manston migrant processing centre is not the fault of the government.
He said:
Conditions are poor. They are improving. We are trying to ensure that as many people as possible leave the site to better accommodation, mostly in hotels, as quickly as possible.
It is not designed to be somewhere where people stay for a prolonged period of time. It is, by necessity, relatively austere. The task now is to ensure it gets back to its normal working pattern.
He admitted that people had been staying there for over 24 hours and had been sleeping on the floor on mats.
He said:
This is not a satisfactory situation. I’m not here to defend that.
I would just say that the root cause of what we’re seeing at Manston is not the government. It’s certainly not the brilliant Border Force Staff who are managing the site, the contractors, the catering staff. The problem is that thousands of people are crossing the channel illegally every day.
9.00am: Cabinet meeting
10.30am: Judicial review over right of residence of “pre-settled” EU citizens in UK, brought by The Independent Monitoring Authority (IMA) against the Home Office over the treatment of EU citizens who have been awarded pre-settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme. The hearing is expected to last two days with judgment at a later date.
11.00am: The Northern Ireland Secretary will hold talks with Stormont leaders amid calls for an election in the region.
2.30pm: Defence Secretary Ben Wallace to appear before the Lords International Relations and Defence Committee on defence concepts and capabilities.
2.30pm: Former Russian political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky appears at the foreign affairs committee, which is into looking proxy private military companies.
If there’s anything you think we’ve missed, please do get in touch at rachel.hall@theguardian.com.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish