Ex-Tory minister defends Labour in Trump row and says he has also campaigned for Democrats – as it happened

• Kemi Badenoch, favourite in the Tory leadership contest, has said that she is a “net zero sceptic” and suggested that an adaption strategy might be a better solution to the climate crisis than just focusing on cutting carbon emissions. (See 3.58pm.)

Ben Wallace, the Conservative former defence secretary, has criticised the Trinity House Agreement, the defence pact agreed with Germany. (See 5.06pm.) He posted these on social media.

If the new UK/ German “Trinity House” agreement is to mean anything then Germany would have agreed with UK requests to send Taurus to Ukraine AND they would lift any export veto on potential Typhoon sales to Turkey – a Nato member. Otherwise it is pretty hollow 1/2

and made up of stuff we are already doing or had started. This has more to do with “SPD is our sister party” than real military mutual benefit. It does however confirm that Kier Starmer is the UK’s own Olaf Scholz ! -2/2

Labour is not the only party with members who have been out in the US actively campaigning to stop Donald Trump being elected. Robert Buckland, the Conservative former justice secretary, has been campaigning for Democrats in the US too.

In an interview with Radio 4’s PM programme, Buckland said that Trump was “not fit for office” and that he thought the Trump campaign’s complaint about Labour was just “a bit of electioneering” rather than a serious allegation about a breach of the rules.

Buckland said that he was in the US in September as part of a Havard fellowship, but while he was there he decided to visit friends in Connecticut who were standing as Democracts in various state, congressional and senate elections. “So I went out on the stump to see what it was all about and do a bit of campaigning.”

Explaining why he was opposed to Trump, he said:

I’m free to say what I like. I’m a member of the public now, and I’m not in a government …

I feel that the record of Donald Trump in the presidency is an affront to those who believe in traditional Republicanism. His behavior around 6 January [the attack on Capitol in 2021] makes it clear to me he’s not somebody who believes in the rule of law either and is not fit for office.

Asked about the complaint about Labour activists, Buckland said: “I do think that this is a bit of electioneering.” He said the LinkedIn message by a Labour staff encouraging people to volunteer “might have given a false impression there was an organised visit here being funded, which I don’t think is the case at all”.

But Buckland did accept that the perception that there was an organised Labour operation going on was “damaging”.

The UK and Germany failed to respond to the threat posed by Vladimir Putin for too long, Berlin’s defence minister said as the two countries signed a new co-operation agreement. As PA Media reports, the deal is a way of strengthening European security at a time when the potential return of Donald Trump to the White House could see US military resources diverted away from the Nato alliance.

Speaking at a press conference alongside John Healey, the defence secretary, the German defence minister Boris Pistorius said the allies had failed to respond to the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and were now being forced to catch up in the wake of the full-scale war in Ukraine.

I always stress that the Baltics and Scandinavian countries, they woke up (in) 2014 to the annexation of the Crimea.

We woke up, too: Germany, Britain, France and other countries in Europe; but what we did was we pushed the snooze button and turned around.

All the other countries stayed awake, and they did what was necessary to do. And so we lost almost eight years and have now to speed up.

Healey said European nations needed to take “more responsibility for the heavy lifting and the leadership within the Nato alliance”.

Commenting on the deal, known as the UK-Germany Trinity House Agreement, the said:

The Trinity House Agreement is a milestone moment in our relationship with Germany and a major strengthening of Europe’s security.

It secures unprecedented levels of new cooperation with the German Armed Forces and industry, bringing benefits to our shared security and prosperity, protecting our shared values and boosting our defence industrial bases.

As PA reports, under the deal, , German submarine-hunting planes will operate from RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland and arms giant Rheinmetall is set to open a factory producing artillery gun barrels using British steel. Defence AI firm Helsing will also make a £350 million investment in the UK.

The two countries will also collaborated on developing long-range, strike weapons that can travel further than the UK’s existing Storm Shadow missiles, and on new land-based and aerial drones.

The text of the agreement is here and the joint communique is here.

Kemi Badenoch has said lots of commentators “do not understand downward social mobility”.

She made the comment in her interview with Nick Robinson for his Political Thinking podcast, when she was asked about her claim that she was working class when she came to the UK as a teenager and had a job in McDonald’s while she was also attending school.

Badenoch was mocked for the claim when she first made it because she had a middle-class upbringing in Nigeria, where her father was a doctor and her mother a professor of physiology. But at the Tory conference she doubled down, saying that it was not working at McDonald’s that made her working class, but that because she was working class at that stage in her life she ended up doing that job. (Badenoch implied it was like a main job, and that she was so poor she had to work; another account, in a biography of Badenoch published by Lord Ashcroft, says it was a part-time job, and that Badenoch did not need to work because her food and rent were being paid for.)

Badenoch told Robinson that the controversy generated by her remarks showed how some journalists did not understand downward social mobility. She explained:

A lot of people in the commentariat classes do not understand downward social mobility, and they think that where you are is what you are and that’s that, and people don’t move between them.

But my understanding of class as it is today is that it is different from what it was during Downton Abbey. People actually do move in between them and, given the level of migration that we’ve had into the country, the old class system doesn’t work and people like me don’t fit into it.

How many people have you met who are doctors in their country who are driving cabs here, for example, what class are they?

And if you are trying to shoehorn people into an outdated class system, you’re going to run into trouble.

Describing her situation now, Badenoch, who is married to a banker, said that she would describe herself as “comfortable”, but added: “I wouldn’t say we’re rich.”

Kemi Badenoch, the favourite in the Conservative leadership contest, may wait up to two years before coming up with detailed policies, it has been reported. In his Daily Mail interview with her, Jason Groves writes:

If she wins … Mrs Badenoch plans to spend up to two years ‘renewing’ the party before coming forward with a detailed policy platform.

In her Political Thinking podcast interview, Badenoch said she would use policy commissions to decide where the party will go next.

I have said that we are going to set up just like David Cameron did, and just like Margaret Thatcher did, policy commissions where we’re going to pick each of these issues through. We’re going to have an internal debate within the party and then we’re going to come to a conclusion and unite behind it.

She also said that she would not force shadow cabinet ministers to agree with her on policy from the start. She said:

What I’m not doing is what my opponent [Robert Jenrick] has done and said, ‘I have these ideas and people are going to need to sign up to them if they’re in this, if they go into the shadow cabinet.’ I don’t think that you can get a party together that way.

Politics is not like other businesses. It is something that requires consensus. You can’t sack the people who are there. They’re still going to be there. So you need to bring people together.

Badenoch herself first got properly involved with the Conservative party contributing to a policy commission on globalisation and global poverty, chaired by Peter Lilley.

Kemi Badenoch, the favourite in the Tory leadership contest, has repeatedly been accused of avoiding the media by her opponent, Robert Jenrick. But in the last 24 hours or so she has done two biggish interviews – with Nick Robinson, for his BBC Political Thinking podcast, and with Jason Groves, political editor of the Daily Mail.

In the interviews Badenoch said that she is a “net zero sceptic” and suggested that an adaption strategy might be a better solution to the climate crisis than just focusing on cutting carbon emissions.

In the write-up of his interview, Groves also said Badenoch “does not completely rule out revisiting the 2050 net target [the UK government’s legal pledge to get net carbons emissions down to zero by 2050]”, but Groves did not include a direct quote from Badenoch on this.

Speaking to Robinson, Badenoch said she was a net zero sceptic, but not a climate change sceptic. She said she accepted there was a problem to be addressed, but that she was not convinced net zero was the solution.

What I’m saying is that climate change is a serious issue that needs work. But what strategy should we pick? We could pick an adaptation strategy, that this is going to happen. How do we build lives that will work within that?

We’ve chosen the strategy, which is to reduce carbon emissions. There is no guarantee that that will work. I want to see something, if we are going down that path, something that has other benefits. So energy security.

Badenoch said that, for her, the question was: “Is net zero a solution or is it a slogan?” She implied she thought it was more of the latter.

If you have a target and you can’t meet it, it’s not real. Just putting something in law doesn’t make it real.

And she also said that her experience of growing up in Nigeria, when there were regular power cuts even though the country was energy rich, helped to explain why she was a net zero sceptic.

I am a net zero sceptic … because I grew up somewhere where the lights didn’t come on, where we ran out of fuel frequently, despite being an oil producing country, there was often petrol scarcity. That is when a system is broken and I see us making similar decisions here. Let’s do something because it looks good, before we figured out how to do it, let’s make an announcement and I don’t want us doing that.

I will post more lines from Badenoch’s interviews shortly.

The Department for Work and Pensions has published a document explaining how it will go about drawing up a child poverty strategy. The plan will shape the work of its child poverty taskforce.

According to the document, the work will focus on four themes.

1) Increasing incomes: Examining how government and business can work together to support parents into secure employment, and support progression in the labour market, building on our plans to Make Work Pay and to Get Britain Working. This will include childcare as a key enabler of parental employment. We will consider how social security reforms could support people into work and help alleviate poverty.

2) Reducing essential costs: Working with business and organisations to understand and tackle the key cost drivers for low-income families (such as housing, energy, food). Looking at where these costs are a barrier to education and employment (like childcare and transport), including addressing the poverty premium and where increased costs of disability exacerbates poverty.

3) Increasing financial resilience: Working with a range of stakeholders, including financial institutions, charities, and consumer representatives to find solutions to problem debt and enabling families to build savings …

4) Better local support, focussed especially on children’s early years: Our society, through our local institutions and our local communities, is at the heart of tackling the impacts of poverty.

The document also gives some details of how employers, unions, thinktanks and other experts will be consulted by the taskforce over the coming months.

In their legal complaint about Labour activists campaigning for the Democrats, Donald Trump’s lawyers quote newspaper reports saying Morgan McSweeney, who is now Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, and Matthew Doyle, Starmer’s communications chief, went to the Democrats’ convention to advise Kamala Harris’s team.

As Steven Swinford from the Times reports, Labour says McSweeney and Doyle were not there as advisers.

Labour denies Morgan McSweeney, Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, and Matthew Doyle, his director of communications, advised the Harris campaign team when they attended the DNC convention in August

They confirm that McSweeney’s costs were paid for by the Labour Party and that Doyle’s costs were met by the Progressive Policy Institute, a Democrat thinktank.

Donald Trump’s six-page filing directly accuses them of trying to ‘exercise direction and control over elements of Harris’s campaign’, in breach of US federal law

John Lamont, shadow Scottish secretary, told Radio 4’s the World at One that the Trump team complaint about Labour activists campaigning in the US was “a diplomatic car crash” for the government. He said:

It’s a diplomatic car crash by this Labour government. There’s now somebody who could potentially be the next president of the United States who’s lodged an official complaint with the American authorities about the Labour party, the Labour government, and their involvement in their election …

If Donald Trump were to win for the election in a few weeks, how on earth is the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, going to rebuild that relationship with one of the most important countries in the world, not least from a diplomatic perspective, but also from a trading perspective.

The culture minister Chris Bryant, who was being interviewed alongside Lamont, responded:

What a load of hyperbole and exaggeration. I think the Conservative party in opposition is going to have to learn how to not sound so shrill.

Bryant said that there was nothing unusual about activists volunteering in foreign election campaigns. And he said in this case people were going to the America in their own time, at their own expense, without Labour funding.

He said the story was “a massive fuss about nothing”. Pointing out that Liz Truss went to the Republican convention to support Donald Trump, he told Lamont the Tories were guilty of “arrant hypocrisy”.

Lamont said there was no complaint about Truss going to the Republican convention, but that in this case there was a complaint about the party in government.

Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has told MPs that the identities of armed police officers charged after opening fire at suspects are likely to stay secret in future unless they are convicted. Vikram Dodd has the story.

Daniel Knowles, an Economist correspondent in the US, agrees with the Alastair Campbell analysis. (See 1.35pm.) He has posted these on Bluesky.

Sorry but nobody in America gives a shit about a few Labour activists door-knocking or whatever. The Trump complaint is entirely cynical, and one of dozens of random speculative press releases I was sent yesterday. I’m not surprised British media is as ever just fucking delighted for a local angle

The story here isn’t “is door knocking actually an illegal contribution,”, etc. The legitimate UK angle to cover is, “Donald Trump will pick massive fights with the British government over nothing if it wins him a nice headline.” Which we know, from his conduct in office

This is the same Donald Trump who is currently doing private diplomacy with Benjamin Netanyahu and (he didn’t deny when asked by Bloomberg last week) Vladimir Putin. He also isn’t being transparent at all about who is buying & what money he getting from his random commercial licensing deals atm

Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former communications chief who now co-hosts the Rest is Politics podcast, told Radio 4’s the World at One that the Trump allegations about the Labour party were just an attempt to distract attention from other campaign stories, like Trump’s former chief of staff calling him a fascist. It was a “non-story”, Campbell told the programme:

I think it’s one of the biggest non-stories of this campaign. And I’ll tell you why. Because the one thing I will give to the Trump campaign, they are very good at divert and distract, and the media tend to fall for their diversions and distractions all the time.

We have just had a situation where the former chief of staff, who worked with Donald Trump more than any other chief of staff, has warned the American people that if they vote for Trump, they’re electing a fascist. Now is that more or less significant?

Is this situation more or less significant than the Russian interference that we had last time around? Is it more or less significant than the Musk millions that are being poured into this?

What Angela Rayner said [at PMQs – see 12.17pm] is right. Since time immemorial, people on the right have gone to America to support Republican candidates. People on the left and the centre-left have gone to support Democrats. There is no evidence whatsoever of the Labour party using resources or money [to campaign for the Democrats].

Campbell was referring to John Kelly, a former general who was Trump’s chief of staff between 2017 and 2019.

Kelly made his comments in an interview with the New York Times. Asked if Trump was a fascist, Kelly told the paper:

Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy …

So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America …

Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure … He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.

Kelly also told the New York Times he had heard Trump praise Hitler. Kelly said:

[Trump] commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too.’

As Chris Stein reports on this blog’s US equivalent, the Trump campaign are dismissing Kelly’s comments.

John Healey, the defence secretary, has said the Labour government is determined to have a good relationship with the next US administration, whichever party is in power.

Speaking at a press conference this morning, he defended the right of activists to volunteer in the US election, and argued that having Labour people campaigning for Kamala Harris should not affect relations with a possible Donald Trump administration.

Healey said:

Any individual Labour supporters that are over in the US, being part of the Democratic election campaign, are there as individuals. They’re there at their own time. They’re there at their own expense, and if they’ve got accommodation out there that will be also provided by volunteers. This happens in every election. It’s commonplace.

It is very different to the determination and the way the government will work with whoever the American people elect next month as their president.

And just as the UK and the US have a special, deep relationship, and have had for decades, that’s a relationship that has withstood the political ups and downs on both sides of the Atlantic, and we’re determined to make that work in the future.

In an interview this morning Healey suggested that the Republican legal complaint was just an election gimmick. (See 10.33am.) Asked if it was still his view that the Republicans were just “creating controversy”, Healey replied:

This is in the middle of an election campaign. That’s the way that politics works. You’ve been around almost as long as I have. These are volunteers doing their bit, gaining a bit of experience out there, but doing so as individuals.

It is nice to see politicians from opposing parties being nice about each other for a change, but maybe Angela Rayner and Oliver Dowden were taking the bonhomie just a little too far. John Crace, who as the Guardian’s sketch writer is paid to take the mick, sounds a bit discombulated by it all.

This PMQs between Angela Rayner and Oliver Dowden was almost tender

And Tom Harwood from GB News was pitched into ‘get a room’ mode watching.

This flirting is getting out of hand.

They were set off by this exchange in particular.

Dowden, a diehard monarchist (even by Conservative party standards), ended his questions sucking up to the king, but he started with the budget, and the charge that raising employers’ national insurance (something Rachel Reeves has not ruled out) would clobber small business owners. On another day, he might have made some progress with this. But Dowden is expecting to be out of the shadow cabinet by the end of next week, and Rayner’s not chancellor or PM, and somehow it felt that he was not really trying. And, even if he had been, Rayner’s opening joke about Dowden’s pushing for an early election – “if his own side hasn’t offered him a peerage, I certainly will” – was so good it would have knocked him off course anyway.

Otherwise, it was all rather unremarkable. The best question came from the SNP’s Stephen Flynn. (See 12.17pm.) And the worst questions? Hard to say, but it was not just King Charles getting the sycophancy treatment, and the number of ‘Isn’t the government brilliant?’ questions asked by Labour MPs seemed a bit higher than usual. It is hard to know if that is just an impression, or whether No 10 is tightening up on message discipline under the new Morgan McSweeney regime.

John Hayes (Con) says onshore windfarms are a threat to farmland in his Lincolnshire constituency. He says energy security should not compromise food security.

Rayner says the government is committed to energy security.

Kim Johnson (Lab) asks about a hospice threatened with closure in her constituency. Does Rayner agree they should get statutory funding, not just charity funding?

Rayner says the government is aware of the importance of hospices. She promises a ministerial meeting on this.

Rachel Blake (Lab) asks if Rayner agrees that the renters’ rights bill will transform opportunities for renters.

Rayner does agree with that.