Iain Duncan Smith tells Sunak he would be ‘completely wrong’ to soften stance on China – UK politics live

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Rishi Sunak has said that he and fellow world leaders highlighted “the illegality and barbaric nature of Russia’s war” at the opening session of the G20 summit. He told broadcasters:

This morning at the G20 we saw international condemnation of Russia’s war in Ukraine. And, with Russia’s foreign minister sitting there, we highlighted both the illegality and barbaric nature of Russia’s war.

And also the devastating impact it’s having on people around the world through higher food and energy prices.

We have a responsibility to work with our G20 allies to fix the global economy, to grip inflation, but also to safeguard and preserve the international order, and that’s what we’re going to do.

According to Downing Street, Rishi Sunak is “confident” there is growing opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine among G20 countries. As my colleague Jessica Elgot reports, in his speech at the opening session of the summit Sunak said that Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine had “profound implications” for the world and that Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, should have been willing to come to the G20 to face other world leaders.

The PM’s spokesperson told journalists this morning (UK time) that Sunak is is “confident that there is a growing number of countries who oppose” Russia’s actions in Ukraine. The spokesperson went on:

It wouldn’t be right for me to speak on behalf of other world leaders but there was certainly very strong condemnation from a number of quarters.

I think that the prime minister, as you saw it, was very forthright and frank in his assessment of the problems that we are currently seeing.

Downing Street released a picture of Sunak glowering at the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in the opening session of the summit. The photograph seems routine (although it does inadvertently highlight the fact that Sunak is someone who is never going to win a menacing stare competition – he should take lessons from Theresa May). But the Labour MP Chris Bryant does not approve.

Rishi Sunak had a meeting at the G20 summit with Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. According to No 10, Sunak did not bring up the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, which Prince Mohammed is thought to have ordered, but he did raise women’s rights, and freedom in Saudi Arabi generally.

After the meeting, the PM’s spokesperson said:

They had a fairly lengthy discussion on some of the work by Saudi Arabia in recent years to improve on social reforms. They talked about issues like women’s rights and the need for more progress on freedoms in the kingdom.

Asked if Sunak raised the 2018 killing, the spokesperson said: “He didn’t raise specific individual cases. That’s not normally the norm in these sorts of things.” The spokesperson went on:

They had a good discussion. I think it was an honest discussion about the importance of the relationship between the UK and Saudi Arabia.

Good morning. Rishi Sunak is in Bali, and this morning (or this afternoon Bali-time – they are eight hours ahead) he will record a round of TV interviews, which should start playing out before lunch. Sunak had a lengthy huddle (journospeak for an informal, standup press briefing) on his flight to Indonesia, and one line that emerged was that he is backing away from Liz Truss’s plan to recategorise China as a threat. My colleague Jessica Elgot has the story here.

Ten years ago, when the Conservative party was prioritising trade with China above human rights concerns, this would not have been controversial. But now those MPs most critical of China in the House of Commons tend to be Tories, and there is a significant faction in the party who view China primarily, not as a commercial partner, but as a hostile state and a national security threat.

Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former party leader, is one of the leading figures in this group and this morning he told TalkTV that he was worried that Sunak’s position amounted to “appeasement” of China. He said:

[Sunak] said in the summer, categorically, that he considered China to be a systemic threat. So what we’re seeing here at the moment, I think, is the beginnings of a step away from his original position …

Everything in government flows, the way we treat the Chinese diplomats over here, the ones that were beating up the peaceful protesters in Manchester, the way that we deal with the Confucius Institutes spying on Chinese students, or even these bogus Chinese police stations threatening Chinese expatriates and trying to get them back to China, [from the government’s stance]. All of those are aggressive moves, and it’s time to call them out as what they are, a threat, but I hope he’s not about to do a U-turn, it would be completely wrong.

And it would become really appeasement of China, which is what’s happening in government at the moment.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9am (UK time): Rishi Sunak is recording a series of broadcast interviews at the G20 summit in Bali. They should start appearing on TV or digital media from around 10am.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

11.30am: Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, takes questions in the Commons.

After 12.30pm: MPs begin debating a Labour motion censuring Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng “for their mismanagement of the economy while in office, which has resulted in an average increase of ?500 per month in mortgage payments for families across the UK”, and saying they should forfeit their ministerial severance payments. The vote will be at around 4pm.

2pm: James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, gives evidence to the European scrutiny committee about the UK’s new relationship with Europe.

3pm: Kathryn Stone, the parliamentary commissioner for standards, gives evidence to Commons standards committee.

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