Tory leadership hustings: Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak vie for members’ support in Birmingham – live | Politics

Afternoon summary

Andrew Sparrow

• A leading thinktank has criticised a plan from Scottish Power for the government to back a £100bn plan to freeze energy bills for two years. According to the BBC, Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary and probable chancellor in a Truss government, expressed some support for the idea at a private meeting last week. (See 2.35pm.) But Torsten Bell, head of the Resolution Foundation thinktank, has dismissed the proposal, which would involve energy companies borrowing the money, but the government underwriting the loans.

That is all from me for today.

A colleague will be picking up the blog later to cover the Tory leadership hustings in Birmingham at 7pm.

Liz Truss has not won the Tory leadership contest yet, but already her team have been thinking hard about who would serve in her cabinet and there has been considerable speculation that she will appoint Suella Braverman, the attorney general, as her home secretary. (No one has spent much time wondering who would serve as home secretary under Rishi Sunak.) It it thought that Braverman will get the job as a reward for endorsing Truss when she was knocked out of the leadership contest herself, at a time when if Braverman had endorsed Kemi Badenoch instead, perhaps that might have given Badenoch the boost she needed to overtake Truss and become the lead candidate for the Tory right instead, going up against Sunak in the final ballot.

But Priti Patel, the current home secretary, wants to remain in her post, and in an interview with Sky’s Jason Farrell she has made her case to stay. Asked if she wanted to keep her job, she replied:

That’s the choice of the next leader. But the fact of the matter is this party was elected with a very clear manifesto commitment to beat crime, cut crime, but also deliver 20,000 more police officers. I think my record in that time speaks volumes.

Patel has not endorsed publicly endorsed a candidate in the contest. Asked who she wanted to lead the party, she replied:

I’m just not getting involved. I mean I’ve got a job to do. That’s what I’m focused on.

Liz Truss, the frontrunner in the Tory leadership contest, has faced criticism today over her record as environment secretary from 2014 to 2016. As Pippa Crerar and Helena Horton report, she cut the grant for the surveillance mechanisms in place to stop water companies polluting rivers.

After serving as environment secretary, Truss spent a year as justice secretary and lord chancellor. Her performance in that job has also come under fire. In an interview with the House magazine to mark his retirement from the House of Lords at the age of 95, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, a very distinguished former Conservative lord chancellor, said that non-lawyers such as Truss and Chris Grayling were not suited to the role. He went on:

I don’t know that Liz Truss had any idea of how legal aid was done either, when she was lord chancellor and justice secretary. You really need to know something about it.

The Labour MP Mary Foy has claimed a reporter broke into her office to find material about Beergate. She was speaking in an interview with my colleague Jessica Elgot in which she also described how the false accusation that she and other Labour figures had broken lockdown rules (the police ultimately concluded there was no case to answer) had been devastating to her in her first years as an MP. The full article is here.

Boris Johnson has delivered a speech to the International Crimea Platform, a virtual conference organised by the Ukrainian government. Supporting Ukraine following the Russian invasion this year is one of his achievements as prime minister of which he is most proud, and No 10 said yesterday he would be focusing on Ukraine in his final fortnight in office. Here are the main points he made.

It has never been more important for all of us to stand together in defence of the foundational principle of international law, which is that, no territory, no country, can acquire territory or change borders by force of arms, and it so follows that we will never recognise Russia’s annexation of Crimea or any other Ukrainian territory.

• He said Crimea had been turned into an “armed camp” following its annexation by Russia in 2014 and he said the same thing would happen to other parts of Ukraine under Russian control now. He said:

Ever since the annexation, the people of Crimea have endured a brutal and systematic campaign of human rights abuses by the Russian authorities, including the persecution of the Tatars, arbitrary arrests, with a tenfold increase in detentions in the last year, and the restriction of land ownership to Russian citizens.

Once he had grabbed Crimea, Putin deployed more and more Russian forces in the peninsula, turning the territory into an armed camp from which to threaten the rest of Ukraine, and Crimea duly became the launch pad for the invasion on 24th February. Or one of the launch pads. And I’m afraid that all this has even greater salience today because Putin is planning to do to parts of Ukraine, in fact all of Ukraine, what he has done to Crimea, and he is preparing more annexations and more sham referendums.

That land grab in 2014 was the direct precursor to today’s war, and we should have the humility to acknowledge that not everyone realised the sheer enormity of what was happening at the time.

All of our countries however reacted with strength and unity after Putin escalated his onslaught against Ukraine on the 24 February this year, but the first act of this tragedy opened eight years earlier – almost to the day – when Russian forces began fanning out across Crimea, and taking control of a peninsula seizing which constitutes 10,000 square miles of sovereign Ukrainian territory.

• He said the UK should continue to give Ukraine “all the military, humanitarian, economic and diplomatic support that they need until Russia ends this hideous war and withdraws its forces from the entirety of Ukraine”.

Rishi Sunak has suggested that Liz Truss would “spook” international investors if she threatened the independence of the Bank of England.

In an interview with Sky News, referrring to Truss’s plans to review the Bank’s mandate, the former chancellor said this might alarm investors. Asked what he would do to bring down inflation, he replied:

I think we need to let the Bank of England get on with its job with interest rates.

And I’m worried, quite frankly, by reports from others that they want to curb the independence of the Bank of England. I think that would be a mistake, and I think it would spook international investors into the United Kingdom and will be bad for all of us.

Truss and her supporters say that the Bank of England has not managed to keep inflation down and that its mandate should be reviewed because there has not been a proper reassessment since it was given its independence 25 years ago. Critics claim this means the independence of the Bank is under threat, but the Truss camp dispute this.

In the interview Sunak also rejected the suggestion that he should stand down to allow Truss, the clear favourite, to take over as prime minister now and start implementing an economic rescue plan. Asked if he would do that, Sunak said he had many campaign events organised and that he was “focused relentlessly” on persuading people that his plan was best for the country.

There has been at least one call from a newspaper columnist for Sunak to stand aside in favour of Truss. And yesterday an energy company boss said the Conservative party should bring forward the end date for the contest to allow the new PM to get to work more quickly. But that would be a decision for that party, not Sunak. At this point in the contest, no one seriously thinks he would, or should, just unilaterally withdraw.