Rishi Sunak under fresh pressure over Gavin Williamson as new allegation emerges – UK politics live

Grant Shapps, the business secretary, was the No 10 voice on the airwaves this morning. In an interview with Sky News, he said Sir Gavin Williamson should not have sent aggressive messages to Wendy Morton. Shapps said:

I don’t think it was the right thing to do, to send messages like that. I see they must have been sent in a moment of frustration. I think, generally, it is the case that it’s much better to write things which you would not live to regret later.

And especially with colleagues, writing things which are polite, even if you have a point of view to express, I think is not unreasonable. So, I don’t think he was right to send them. The prime minister said the same. I know that the party is going through a process looking at them at the moment.

My colleague Peter Walker has the full story here.

Good morning. Rishi Sunak is in Egypt, attending the Cop27 climate summit, in his first overseas visit as prime minister. And, like all prime ministers, he is learning that, although you can take the prime minister out of Westminster, you can never leave it behind, because domestic political hassle continues to clog up your intray, even on a day when you want to focus on international issues and hobnobbing with world leaders. One such problem for Sunak is Sir Gavin Williamson.

On Friday and over the weekend it emerged that Sunak had appointed Williamson a Cabinet Office minister, with the right to attend cabinet, even though the Conservative party is considering a complaint about him from Wendy Morton. She says he sent her offensive, threatening messages when she was chief whip, because he was angry about not being invited to attend the Queen’s funeral.

As he flew to Egypt for the summit, Sunak told the Sun in an interview that the messages from Williamson were “not acceptable”. He said:

They were not acceptable or right. It was a difficult time for our party at the time, but regardless, people always should be treated with respect.

I am glad Gavin has expressed regret. There is an independent complaint process which is running, its right and reasonable we let that conclude.

Sunak says he did not read Williamson’s messages until yesterday. But he has not denied being aware of them when he appointed Williamson to his government. (No one seems quite sure what Williamson is doing as minister without portfolio at the Cabinet Office, and the appointment looked as if it might have more to do with rewarding an influential supporter than enhancing. the peformance of the government.)

Some would argue that, if the messages were unacceptable, having Williamson in government should not be acceptable either. That is not Sunak’s position as of now, but this morning the Times has made it harder for Sunak to keep Williamson by reporting a fresh allegation about Williamson’s conduct when he was chief whip. In their story, Steven Swinford and Gabriel Pogrund say a minister (who they have not named) has claimed that “Williamson raised details about her private life during a conversation in an attempt to silence her while she was on the back benches”. Swinford and Pogrund report:

The Tory MP, who told the Conservative party at the weekend that she was willing to discuss the matter, said that Williamson had called her into his office when he was chief whip in 2016.

At the time she was campaigning on an issue that was causing the government difficulty. During the meeting Williamson is said to have raised a sensitive issue about her private life, which she interpreted as a tacit threat.

Allies of Williamson denied that he had been trying to silence the MP and said that he had raised the issue in a “pastoral capacity”.

We are likely to hear more on this as the day goes on.

My colleage Bibi van der Zee will be covering Cop27 on a separate live blog.

I will cover some of the UK line from Cop27 here, but I will largely be focusing on non-Cop issues. Here is the agenda for the day.

8.10am (UK time): Rishi Sunak is due to hold a bilateral meeting with Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, at the Cop27 summit in Egypt. He also has bilaterals scheduled with Giorgia Meloni, the new Italian prime minister, at 9.15am, and with Emmanuel Macron, the French president, at 2pm.

8.45am: Boris Johnson, the former PM, is due to speak at a New York Times event at Cop27.

11.30am: Sunak speaks at a roundtable event at Cop27. He is also due to be taking part in an afternoon event.

Morning: Keir Starmer is on a visit this morning linked to Labour’s green prosperity plan.

2pm: Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, speaks at a Cop27 event.

2.30pm: Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

4pm: James Bowler, the new permanent secretary at the Treasury, gives evidence to the Commons public accounts committee, about the creation of the UK infrastructure bank.

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