UK Politics

Sign up to our free Brexit and beyond email for the latest headlines on what Brexit is meaning for the UKSign up to our Brexit email for the latest insightRishi Sunak has been handed a major boost after EU officials agreed to delay post-Brexit tariffs on electric vehicles (EVs) ahead of a looming “cliff edge” deadline.The UK government had been urging Brussels to push back the costly new tariff rules set to come into force in January 2024 as part of Boris Johnson’s Brexit trade deal.On Wednesday the European Commission said it wanted to delay the rules – set to hit the electric cars trade between the EU and Britain – by three years.The commission also said it was setting aside an additional €3bn (£2.6bn) to boost the EU’s battery manufacturing industry – a move designed to counter China’s dominance in batteries.Mr Johnson’s Brexit Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) agreed that, to qualify for zero tariffs, at least 45 per cent of the value of EVs need to be from the EU or Britain.Import tariffs of 10 per cent were set to apply on companies for falling short of those requirements in their cars and other vehicles.The Independent revealed in October that British industry bosses feared the changes could increase the price of electric vehicles in the UK by £6,000.Given batteries represent 30 to 40 per cent of a car’s value and that most are from China, carmakers argued they would not have been able to meet the content requirements.Rishi Sunak with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen agreeing deal on Northern Ireland earlier this year The new EU proposal is to extend the first transition period by three years to 2027 when the full local content requirements of the TCA will apply. A second planned transition period will not apply.Thierry Breton, the influential European commissioner, had said in September that it would be wrong to give in to pressure from one industry. “If something has been negotiated, it shouldn’t be changed,” he said on the Brexit deal.But European Commission vice-president Maros Sefcovic – who oversees EU relations with Britain – said on Wednesday that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and soaring energy prices meant that EU battery production had not scaled up as planned.Mr Sefcovic also cited the subsidy schemes offered by Europe’s rivals for the change in heart among top Brussels officials.Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak had been pushing for delay to car tariffs The EU had been warned of an “existential threat” posed by new rules of origin by carmakers. The UK’s Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) previously called for a delay until 2027.The VDA – the lobby group for Germany’s car industry – ramped up the pressure by saying “we must urgently make adjustments” to the Brexit deal.The breakthrough comes after Mr Sunak managed to clear up some of the post-Brexit mess by agreeing a deal for the UK to rejoin the EU’s £85bn Horizon science research scheme. It was formally agreed this week.Earlier this year, the Tory leader agreed the Windsor Framework with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen to ease post-Brexit trading problems in Northern Ireland.Ms Von der Leyen last week described it as “a new beginning for old friends”. She also suggested that young Britons could still reverse Brexit by deciding to rejoin the EU in the years ahead. More

Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inboxGet our free View from Westminster emailFormer British prime minister Boris Johnson appeared before the Covid inquiry on Wednesday morning for the first of two days of questioning about his leadership of the country through the pandemic from 2020 to 2022.Mr Johnson’s evidence had hardly begun when four protesters had to be ejected from the hearing room, saying his apologies for the mistakes of his administration were insufficient and had led to the loss of lives.The former PM insisted he had done his “level best” to respond to the needs of the nation but that errors were inevitable due to the constantly evolving nature of the threat posed by the respiratory virus.Mr Johnson faced tough questions on the stand and sometimes struggled to give credible answers under pressure from the inquiry’s counsel Hugo Keith KC.Here are 10 points on which he found himself on a sticky wicket during Wednesday’s evidence.Insists on commitment to transparencyAsked what his approach had been to the disclosure of his own Covid-related emails, WhatsApps and notes, Mr Johnson said: “I’ve done my best to give everything of any conceivable relevance.”He was asked about an exchange of messages from 20 December 2021 between cabinet secretary Simon Case and his former principal private secretary Martin Reynolds in which Mr Case wrote: “PM is mad if he doesn’t think his WhatsApps will become public via Covid inquiry – but he was clearly not in the mood for that discussion tonight!”Mr Johnson said: “I don’t remember that conversation to which the cabinet secretary is referring and I’ve handed over all the relevant WhatsApps.”Cannot account for lost WhatsApp messagesAbout 5,000 WhatsApp messages on Mr Johnson’s phone from 30 January 2020 to June 2020 were unavailable to the inquiry.Asked why, Mr Johnson answered: “I don’t know the exact reason, but it looks as though it’s something to do with the app going down and then coming up again, but somehow automatically erasing all the things between that date when it went down and the moment when it was last backed up.”Mr Keith said a technical report provided by Mr Johnson’s solicitors suggested there may have been a factory reset at the end of January 2020 followed by an attempt to reinstate the contents in June 2020, but the former prime minister denied knowledge of that.“I don’t remember any such thing,” he said.Mr Johnson confirmed he had made plain during the legal battle between the Cabinet Office and the inquiry that his messages should be disclosed.He added: “Can I, for the avoidance of doubt, make it absolutely clear I haven’t removed any WhatsApps from my phone and I’ve given you everything that I think you need.”Admits mistakes madeMr Johnson acknowledged that his government “may have made mistakes” in handling the pandemic.“So many people suffered, so many people lost their lives,” he said.“Inevitably in the course of trying to handle a very, very difficult pandemic in which we had to balance appalling harms on either side of the decision, we may have made mistakes.”He continued: “Inevitably we got some things wrong [but] I think we were doing our best at the time, given what we knew, given the information I had available to me at the time, I think we did our level best.”“Were there things that we should have done differently? Unquestionably.”Declines to take blame for excess deathsMr Johnson said he was “not sure” whether government decision-making had led to “materially” a larger number of excess deaths as a result of the pandemic.The former PM told Mr Keith: “I can’t give you the answer to that question, I’m not sure.”He questioned the lead counsel’s statement that the UK was among the worst performers in Europe, insisting Britain was “well down the European table and well down the world table”.Mr Keith responded that in “western Europe, we were one of the worst off, if not the second worst off”.Mr Johnson, pressed again on why the UK had such a rate of excess deaths, said: “Irrespective of government action, we have an elderly population, extremely elderly population. We do suffer, sadly, from lots of Covid-related comorbidities and we are a very, very densely populated country. That did not help.”Denies Dominic Cummings too powerfulMr Johnson rejected suggestions that his government was designed to place Dominic Cummings, along with himself, as “decision-makers” while ministers were “largely irrelevant” to policy or execution.“[Sajid] Javid has said in his witness statement that the Cabinet was designed, in his view, to place Dominic Cummings and the prime minister as the decision-makers, to centralise power in Number 10 and, in his own witness statement, Mr Cummings has said that the cabinet was largely irrelevant to policy or execution on account of the leaks, your inability to chair it and because it was seen by No 10 as not being a serious place for serious discussion,” Mr Keith said.Mr Johnson replied: “I don’t think that’s true. I think there were some really excellent cabinet discussions about the trade-offs.”But he claimed that the cabinet as a whole was “more reluctant” to impose non-pharmaceutical interventions than he was.“That wasn’t true for every member of the cabinet but that would be a general comment,” he added.Admits Sage guidance rarely readMr Johnson told the inquiry he may have only read Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) minutes “once or twice”.Asked whether he ever read the minutes, the former prime minister said: “I think I did once or twice look at the – maybe more than that – looked at what Sage had actually said and Sage certainly produced a lot of documentation.“But I think that the CSA [chief scientific adviser] and CMO [chief medical officer] did an outstanding job of leading Sage and distilling their views and conveying them to me.”He added: “in retrospect it may have been valuable to hear the Sage conversation unpasteurised itself, but I was more than content with the very clear summaries that I was getting from the CSA and the CMO.”Mr Keith countered: “Did you not think of looking at the scientific horse in the mouth and seeing what was actually said by the government’s primary scientific advisory committee on these issues when you, as now appears to be the case, you became engaged particularly in the debate of behavioural fatigue? Why didn’t you call for the primary material?”Mr Johnson replied: “I think that’s a good question. I was very, very much impressed by and dependent on the CMO and the CSA, both of whom are outstanding experts in their field and it felt to me that I couldn’t do better than that.”Admits meetings too male-dominatedMr Johnson conceded that the gender balance of his top team should have been “better”.He said he had a gender balance in his staff while mayor of London, describing his office as “very harmonious”.“I think that the gender balance of my team should have been better,” he told the inquiry of his time as prime minister during the pandemic.“I think sometimes during the pandemic, too many meetings were too male-dominated if I’m absolutely honest with you.”Defends retaining Matt HancockMr Johnson defended keeping former health secretary Matt Hancock in his post, despite calls from his aide Dominic Cummings that he should have been sacked.Mr Johnson said: “If you’re prime minister, you are constantly being lobbied by somebody to sack somebody else. It’s just what, I’m afraid, happens and it’s part of life.”He acknowledged Mr Cummings had a “low opinion” of Mr Hancock but “I thought he was wrong”.“I stuck by the health secretary. I thought the health secretary worked very hard.”He said Mr Hancock “may have had defects [but] I thought that he was doing his best in very difficult circumstances and I thought he was a good communicator”.Dismisses criticism of senior officialsMr Johnson dismissed the exasperated messages exchanged between senior officials Mark Sedwill and Mr Case.In July 2020, Mr Case, the then-head official in Downing Street and now the cabinet secretary, said. “I’ve never seen a bunch of people less well-equipped to run a country”, in a message to Sir Mark, who was cabinet secretary at the time.But Mr Johnson said Whitehall mandarins would have said similar “pretty fruity” things about the Thatcher administration if their “unexpurgated” messages had been available in the same way as WhatsApp exchanges now.He said WhatsApp messages tended to be “ephemeral, it tends to the pejorative and the hyperbolical”.“I think that the worst vice, in my view, would have been to have had an operation where everybody was so deferential and so reluctant to make waves that they never expressed their opinion, they never challenged and they never doubted.“It was much more important to have a group of people who are willing to doubt themselves and to doubt each other. And I think that that was creatively useful rather than the reverse.”Admits Covid threat underestimatedMr Johnson conceded that the wider government had “underestimated” the threat posed by Covid-19.He told the inquiry: “I think that it would certainly be fair to say of me, the entire Whitehall establishment, scientific community included, our advisers included, that we underestimated the scale and the pace of the challenge. You can see that very clearly in those early days in March.“We were all collectively underestimating how fast it had already spread in the UK. We put the first peak too late, we thought it would be May/June – that was totally wrong. I don’t blame the scientists for that at all. That was the feeling and it just turned out to be wrong.”Additional reporting by agencies More

Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inboxGet our free View from Westminster emailBoris Johnson has been given an hour for lunch after two and a half hours of grilling at the Covid inquiry.The former prime minister has appeared remarkably composed, and has refused to criticise those working alongside him during the pandemic, insisting he takes “personal responsibility for all the decisions” his government made.But, while his evidence session so far has seen less mud-slinging than others’, notably Dominic Cummings, there have still been several striking revelations.Here are the key things we have learned from Mr Johnson so far:Mr Johnson’s 5,000 missing WhatsAppsAbout 5,000 WhatsApp messages on Boris Johnson’s phone from January 30, 2020 to June 2020 were unavailable to the inquiry.Mr Johnson, somewhat remarkably, said: “I don’t know the exact reason, but it looks as though it’s something to do with the app going down and then coming up again, but somehow automatically erasing all the things between that date when it went down and the moment when it was last backed up.”He was asked by inquiry counsel Hugo Keith KC about a factory reset that was carried out on the phone, but appeared not to know what one was, replying: “A factory reset?”The ex-PM accepts he “unquestionably made mistakes”Boris Johnson opened his evidence with an apology to those who lost loved ones during the pandemic, admitting he “unquestionably” made mistakes.But, as Mr Johnson was saying sorry “for the loss, pain and suffering”, he was interrupted by four protesters who had to be booted out of the hearing room.The protesters were unconvinced by Mr Johnson, saying they “didn’t want his apology”.They said they stood up as he began apologising to hold up signs that read: “The Dead can’t hear your apologies.’Prime minister was not keen on reading Sage minutesBoris Johnson admitted that he had only read the minutes of Sage meetings “once or twice” during the pandemic.He said he instead asked Sir Patrick Vallance and Sir Chris Whitty to sum them up.His cabinet pushed back on lockdown measuresBoris Johnson claimed his cabinet was more reluctant “on the whole” to impose measures to curtail the pandemic than he was.“There were some really excellent and candid discussions about the trade offs,” Mr Johnson said.But he added: “I think it would be fair to say that the cabinet was on the whole more reluctant to impose NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) than I was.”Pandemic meetings were ‘too male dominated’Boris Johnson admitted that meetings held during the pandemic were “too male dominated”, a criticism which has been heard frequently during the inquiry.He said he tried to rectify the problem by recruiting women, including a former colleague from City Hall when he was London mayor.He has apologised to Helen MacNamaraBoris Johnson revealed that he had personally apologised to the former deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara, who was referred to as a “c***” by his top aide Dominic Cummings.The inquiry previously saw WhatsApp messages from Mr Cummings in which he talked about “dodging stilettos from that c**t”, referring to Ms MacNamara.“I’ve apologised to one particular person who suffered abuse in one of those publicised WhatsApp exchanges,” Mr Johnson revealed.But he said some of the vulgar language used in government WhatsApp groups seen by the inquiry was “completely unknown” to him.Boris Johnson thought Matt Hancock had ‘defects’, but backed him overallBoris Johnson said Matt Hancock had “defects” as health secretary, but that Dominic Cummings’s summary of him as useless was “wrong”.Mr Johnson defended his former health secretary, saying: “I thought that he was doing his best in very difficult circumstances and I thought he was a good communicator.”The government was focused on comms, not actionA WhatsApp exchange seen by the inquiry revealed Boris Johnson and his two top advisers were focused on “comms” as Covid struck in February 2020.Mr Keith pressed the former PM on why their focus was communications, and not “steps to deal with infection control”.Mr Johnson was ‘rattled’ by scenes in Italy, but thought the biggest damage of Covid would be overreactingBoris Johnson said he was “rattled” by the scenes unfolding in Italy in the early stages of the pandemic, and admitted he should have “twigged” what was happening sooner.But a set of notes seen by the inquiry shortly after showed that Mr Johnson was concerned the “biggest damage” of Covid would be “done by overreacting”.Mr Johnson was not on holiday in February 2020The inquiry accepted Mr Johnson’s defence that he was not in fact on holiday in February 2020, an accusation levelled by Dominic Cummings.The former PM said he was “working throughout the period and the tempo did increase”.Inquiry counsel Hugo Keith KC said “nobody is suggesting you put your feet up at Chevening”.One person has been impressed by Mr Johnson’s testimony so far.Perhaps unsurprisingly Nadine Dorries, the former PM’s most staunch backer, said it is now “clear who was the grown up in the room”.The scores of bereaved family members gathered outside the inquiry building clearly take a different view. 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