No 10 implies Sunak previously declared wife’s childcare shares but declaration was not made public – UK politics live

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The UK and the EU “need each other more than ever”, Charles Michel, president of the European Council, told the conference at Queen’s University Belfast to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement. He explained:

The Belfast agreement also represents the product and the high point of another era, an era when the values of liberal democracies were pre-eminent in the world.

In the past 25 years, the world has changed dramatically. The September 11 attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, global economic crisis, the climate emergency, Covid-19, and now Russia’s war against Ukraine, where we see the tragic consequences of war.

In these troubling times, two great allies, like the United Kingdom and the European Union, we need each other more than ever, we stand today together. We stand together to tackle common challenges like climate change, we stand together to uphold human dignity and human rights.

In this increasingly dangerous world, Northern Ireland and the Belfast/Good Friday agreement are a powerful symbol of what our shared values can achieve.

Let’s continue to build on this unstoppable belief in the potential of peace. For more freedom, more prosperity, more democracy for the people of Northern Ireland, and for all people across the world.

At the post-PMQs lobby briefing No 10 implied that Rishi Sunak first declared his wife’s shareholding in Koru Kids many years ago.

Referring to his declaration for the list of ministers’ interests, the PM’s press secretary said:

We have been very clear that the prime minister has taken his obligation to declare everything very seriously. He has done that for a number of years.

Three independent advisers have reviewed those declarations so one would infer by that, that those declarations – including that of Koru Kids – have been made for a number of years.

But No 10 also insisted there was a difference between an interest being declared, and an interest being made public. The PM’s spokesperson said:

It has not been published. There is a difference between declaring something as a minister … and then what is then deemed in the public interest to be put in the public domain by the independent adviser.

When ministers are appointed, they have to make a full declaration of their interests to their officials. Those are then reviewed by their permanent secretary, who considers whether any interests create a conflict with ministerial duties. If there is a conflict, action is taken to resolve that (for example, by deciding that the minister is not involved in certain decisions).

Ministers’ interests are also published in the Cabinet Office’s list. But as Sir Laurie Magnus, the independent adviser on ministers’ interests explains in his foreword to the latest version, out today, those listings are not comprehensive. Magnus says:

The list is not a register of interests and does not therefore include every interest that a minister has declared in relation to themselves and their family members. To do so would represent an excessive degree of intrusion into the private affairs of ministers that would be unreasonable, particularly in respect of their family members. The list instead documents those interests, including of close family, which are, or may be perceived to be, directly relevant to a minister’s ministerial responsibilities.

Sunak’s entry in the list of ministers’ interests today (see below) is broadly similar to his entry when the list was last published, in May 2022, when Sunak was chancellor.

In the 2022 version Sunak said his wife “owns a venture capital investment company, Catamaran Ventures UK Ltd”. Today’s version also describes her as the owner of Catamaran Ventures UK, but it also says she has direct shareholdings, and a footnote says these include shares in Koru Kids. (See 11.50am.)

A former anti-slavery commissioner has described the failure to find someone to replace her as “deeply regrettable”, PA Media reports.

Dame Sara Thornton left the post – which she said is a key appointment – in April last year and it has been vacant since. Giving evidence to the Commons home affairs committee this morning, she was asked if she thought the failure to replace her was intentional. She replied:

I don’t know. I think it’s deeply regrettable. Whether it’s deliberate or whether it’s just poor administration and poor bureaucracy, I don’t know.

But, given the level of public discourse about modern slavery, given that we had the illegal migration bill and also lots of issues about implementation of the Nationality and Borders Act, it seems to me that this is a key appointment and parliament surely should be informed by the expert views of an independent slavery commissioner.

Passengers taking bus and coach trips to the continent stand to lose their right to compensation for delays in Dover under government plans to delete thousands of EU laws, Lisa O’Carroll reports.

Labour has accused the government of failing to stop the Chinese running so-called “police stations” for their own nationals in the UK.

In a Commons urgent question, Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, also accused the government of failing to tells MPs what it was doing for “fear of party political embarrassment”.

Cooper said:

Other countries have taken visible action. This week two men were arrested by the FBI in New York for suspected operations. And in the Netherlands, similar operations have been shut down. But here in the UK we have heard nothing, no reports of arrests, no reassurance that these operations have been closed down.

Cooper also asked about a report in the Times today claiming that “a Chinese businessman linked to a “secret police station” in London has organised Tory fundraising dinners and been photographed with party leaders”.

She asked Chris Philp, the policing minister:

Can he tell us the full extent of this individual’s involvement with the Conservative party and his contact with any government ministers, and what action ministers and the party have taken?

Can he tell us what they have done about the alleged secret police station in Croydon and elsewhere? Has its operations been closed down? Because the lack of answers will raise grave concerns that the government is not addressing the scale of this threat and is not updating parliament for fear of party political embarrassment because of the connections with the Conservative party.

Philp said there was “a live investigation by the law enforcement community” in relation to the reports of Chinese police stations operating in the UK. He would not give details, but he said that this activity was “unacceptable” and that “it must and will be stopped”.

On the link between the operator of one alleged Chinese police station in the UK and the Conservative party, Philp said: “All political parties need to be alert to the danger that representatives of hostile states seek to infiltrate or influence their activities.”

Michael Gove has been taking his smoking breaks in a special hut built for him on the roof of his departmental office, after he was stalked by a terrorist and heckled in the street, Aletha Adu reports.

The US economic envoy to Northern Ireland, Joe Kennedy, has warned that American investors need “clarity and certainty” in the country to help deliver Joe Biden’s promise to turbo-boost the local economy.

He received a standing ovation at the final day of a Belfast conference to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement but offered little in the way of detail on that investment to a region racked by continuing boycott of power-sharing by the DUP.

He said political stability had drawn almost $2bn into Northern Ireland from the US in the past decade, including companies such as Citi and Seagate.

He said his responsibility was to the “next set of global partners”, warning:

[They] want clarity and certainty. They want to have a good idea of what may change and how and when that might happen. The sooner they have those answers, the better for a Northern Ireland economy.

Earlier the former US envoy Mitch Reiss cited the former secretary of state Colin Powell’s adage that “capital is a coward that will run to where it feel safe”.

PMQs often sounds much the same, week in, week out, but there were two new elements in the mix today, and both of them help to explain why Conservative MPs sounded relatively pleased with the way Rishi Sunak performed. Any optimism they feel is probably unfounded, but Sunak won’t be flying off to Belfast worried that his MPs felt his PMQs performance was a dud.

The main development is that Sunak has, for the first time, started to attack Starmer over his record as director of public prosecutions. (Boris Johnson tried it once, regurgitating a Jimmy Saville smear from the internet, but that prompted one of his closest advisers to resign in disgust.) Being a former DPP, who can boast of his record fighting crime and jailing criminals, has been, and is, a major selling point for Starmer with voters, but the row about Labour’s anti-Sunak attack ads has encouraged the Tories to tear holes in his story (for example, Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s former co-chair of staff, called for this in the Telegraph this week) and today Sunak tried just that. His attack material wasn’t up to much (as DPP Starmer attended 21 sentencing council meetings where non-custodial sentences for sexual crimes were approved – research courtesy of the Daily Mail), but Tory MPs, who view Starmer as sanctimonious, seemed to love seeing him challenged on his own record.

The second novelty was “Sir Softy”, Sunak’s new insult for Starmer. This sounded as if it could have been coined by Boris Johnson, and rather neatly combines a jibe about Starmer’s knighthood (which leads some voters to think he is posh, even though he isn’t), with a reference to Labour not backing the Tories on some past votes toughening sentences. We’ll probably hear this again.

It is a jollier insult than the one in Labour’s controversial anti-Sunak attack, and easier to defend.

But it is also puerile (in the literal sense – it’s what you would expect from a schoolboy). And, much more importantly, anyone who has thought about criminal justice policy for more than about 30 seconds knows that lower sentences aren’t the problem; the problem is that criminals either aren’t getting caught in the first place, or when they are, cases are taking years to get to court because of the backlog. Starmer illustrated this point well with his question about the people smuggler who threw boiling water over a prison officer. Starmer said that he should have been given a jail sentence, but it ended up being suspended. He explained:

Well, the court judgment spelt it out, it’s because it took 16 months for the attacker to be charged – that’s ridiculous – and it took another two years before he was sentenced. Completely unacceptable.

Can’t the prime minister see because they have lost control of the court service because they have created the largest court backlog on record, he is letting violent criminals go free?

Starmer also said another factor was that judges have been told to send fewer people to jail because the prisons are full. The case study story was perhaps a bit too detailed to provide Starmer with a knock-out blow in the chamber, but ultimately winning the substance of the argument is more important than prevailing in the dispatch box skirmishing, and on that Starmer was easily ahead.

But his best moments were when he linked criminal justice to the public services more generally. This is what he said in his second question to Sunak.

He’s living in another world to the rest of us. People waiting more than two days for an ambulance because they broke the NHS. Only one in 100 rapists going to court because they broke the criminal justice system. A record number of small boats crossing the Channel because they broke the asylum system.

People can’t afford their bills, can’t get the police to investigate crimes, can’t get a doctor’s appointment. Does that really sound like pretty good shape?

And in his final question Starmer said:

The crisis in criminal justice is just a snapshot of public services collapsing under his watch. People can see it wherever they look. Our roads, our trains, the NHS, the asylum system, policing, mental health provision – the Tories have broken them all and all they have got left is excuses and blame.

It is hard to argue with this, which is probably why Sunak was more keen to talk about Starmer’s record as DPP. But it is obvious what matters most to voters.

Jack Elsom from the Sun has dug out the home affairs committee report mentioned by Keir Starmer as a glowing character reference.

Alistair Carmichael (Lib Dem) asks why the government is not offering a bespoke visa scheme for the fishing industry. Many fishing boats are tied up and cannot go to sea as a result. It is the only time the home secretary has been able to “stop the boats”.

Sunak says the government is a proud champion of the fishing industry. Because of Brexit, it is keen to deliver, he says.