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| Brexit: 'Not surprising' people are angry with MPs, says Dominic Cummings – as it happened | |
| (about 1 year later) | |
| We’re going to close down this live blog now. Here’s a summary of the day’s events: | |
| The prime minister faced widespread criticism over his refusal to apologise for his provocative comments; including those he made about the murdered MP, Jo Cox. Some of the staunchest criticism came from Johnson’s own sister, Rachel, who accused him of deploying “highly reprehensible language”. | |
| But Johnson insisted he would continue to use the rhetoric of war when referring to Brexit. The prime minister said he had every right to call the Benn Act the “surrender bill”, despite MPs’ complaints such action was emboldening those who might harm them and their families. Nigel Farage sided with Johnson on the issue. | |
| The prime minister’s senior aide, Dominic Cummings, suggested that only carrying out Brexit would calm tensions, as MPs complained of facing death threats. Cummings shrugged off the concerns of such one MP, telling him: “Get Brexit done.” And he legitimised the “anger” being directed at MPs, saying it was not surprising because the Brexit process was still dragging on. | |
| A man was arrested trying to smash windows at Jess Phillips’ constituency office, the Labour MP said. The man was shouting that she was a fascist and her staff had to be locked inside, Phillips told LBC radio. She also complained about the prime minister’s rhetoric. | |
| MPs refused to schedule a mini-recess for the Tory party conference. A No 10 spokesman later insisted the conference would go ahead. | |
| Opposition parties agreed to explore ways to censure Johnson in parliament. And they agreed to renew efforts to block the UK leaving the European Union without a deal. | |
| And you can read yet more from my colleague, Rowena Mason, who has the full story: | |
| Johnson refuses to say sorry for remarks about murdered MP Jo Cox | |
| Cummings has also said serious threats of violence have been seen on both sides, adding that the “situation can only be resolved by parliament honouring its promise to respect the result” of the 2016 referendum. | |
| People on all sides have said things that veered between unwise and very unpleasant, and sometimes criminal. That is true of people of the leave side and that’s true of people on the remain side. | |
| People have been running around during the referendum campaign saying I was a Nazi, they run around for three years afterwards saying I am a criminal, and now a criminal Nazi. | |
| And there are also a bunch of people on the Leave side who have said terrible things about remainers. | |
| I also think there is a very important distinction between, on the one hand, a robust political discussion and debate, and threats of violence. Threats of violence are a completely different matter. They should be treated in a completely different matter; everyone should take those extremely seriously. | |
| I know people on both sides of leave and remain who have had serious threats like that and it is obviously bad. In the end, the situation can only be resolved by parliament honouring its promise to respect the result. | |
| According to the Press Association, Cummings added: | |
| I don’t think anyone is going to listen to reason because a lot of people (MPs) become really badly disconnected from what people in the real world and England outside central London thinks. | |
| Dominic Cummings has been addressing the language used in the Brexit debate and the threats sent to some MPs this evening. The Press Association reports that he has said it is “not surprising” people are angry with parliamentarians. | |
| He’s appearing at an event marking the launch of a new book by the Vote Leave supporter and businessman, Stuart Wheeler. Asked if he blamed MPs for the abuse they were getting, he has said: | |
| The MPs said we will have a referendum, we will respect the result and then they spent three years swerving all over the shop. | |
| It is not surprising some people are angry about it. I find it very odd that these characters are complaining that people are unhappy about their behaviour now and they also say they want a referendum. How does that compute for them? | |
| To me, it says that, fundamentally, a lot of people in parliament are more out of touch with the country now than they were in summer 2016. | |
| If you are a bunch of politicians and say that we swear we are going to respect the result of a democratic vote, and then after you lose you say, we don’t want to respect that vote, what do you expect to happen? | |
| Asked directly if he believed MPs have themselves to blame for the abuse they are receiving, Cummings said: “That’s the way you’re putting it. I am using my language.” | |
| Major also offers some pretty strong criticism of Johnson and his cabinet over their approach to Brexit and their use of language: | |
| Like many in my party, who have been expelled for voting with their conscience, I am a lifelong Conservative. | |
| I hope our millions of traditional, moderate, middle-of-the-road supporters understand that this Conservative government’s present position is an aberration. | |
| Most Conservatives are not a Brexit party tribute band, nor have we abandoned our core values to find compromise, seek allies and strive for unity, rather than division and disarray. | |
| We do not believe we have the right to ignore the voices of millions of others, whose opinions differ from our own. | |
| And we abhor the language of division and hate – and words such as “saboteur”, “traitor”, “enemy”, “surrender”, “betrayal” have no place in our party, our politics, nor in our society. | |
| It is emphatically not who we are as a people. And must never be seen as so. | |
| I hope that the Conservative parliamentary party will regain its sense of balance, and rein in the faction of a faction that now prevails in cabinet. | |
| Boris Johnson may use the privy council to bypass the legal requirement on him to seek a three-month Brexit delay if he cannot get a deal, the former prime minister John Major has suggested. | |
| In a speech to the Centre for European Reform thinktank this evening, Major plans to say: | |
| My fear is that the government will seek to bypass statute law, by passing an order of council to suspend the [Benn] Act until after 31 October. | |
| It is important to note that an order of council can be passed by privy councillors – that is government ministers – without involving HM the Queen. | |
| I should warn the prime minister that – if this route is taken – it will be in flagrant defiance of parliament and utterly disrespectful to the supreme court. | |
| It would be a piece of political chicanery that no one should ever forgive or forget. | |
| Major is referring to the difference between an order in council, which needs the approval of the monarch, and an order of council, which does not. | |
| Johnson has repeatedly made the apparently contradictory claims that he will, at once, abide by the law and refuse to ask for a delay. | |
| The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has criticised the prime minister over his inflammatory language, making reference as he did so to the arrest at the constituency offices of his party colleague, Jess Phillips: | |
| On the day Boris Johnson refused to apologise for his inflammatory language, someone has been arrested trying to enter @JessPhillips’ office. When an MP can’t do their job and represent their community due to threats to their safety it’s the people, and democracy, that suffers. | |
| Footage has emerged of the senior No 10 aide responding to an MP’s concerns about death threats with the words: “Get Brexit done”. | |
| More on Labour MP Karl Turner confronting Dominic Cummings in Portcullis house just now. Turner said the PM's language was unacceptable and whipping up hatred, causing MPs to get more death threats overnight (including himself). Cummings response? "Well vote for a deal then." | |
| Karl Turner, the Labour MP for Hull East and a shadow minister, confronted Dominic Cummings in Westminster today. Footage of the incident, posted online by the BBC, showed Turner criticising the prime minister’s inflammatory tone and telling Cummings: “I’ve had death threats overnight; ‘should be dead’.” | |
| Cummings responds: “Get Brexit done.” | |
| "I've had death threats overnight... it's a disgrace"Labour MP Karl Turner's staff film an encounter with Boris Johnson's senior adviser, Dominic Cummingshttps://t.co/2JL9D2WW2f pic.twitter.com/agGnyOiUMR | |
| Speaking to the Press Association about the exchange later, Turner said: | |
| My wife is in Hull with my three-year-old daughter while I’m in Westminster – I take threats seriously. | |
| I saw Dominic Cummings in Portcullis House and I raised with him that the language adopted by the prime minister and others yesterday is inflammatory and causing MPs to receive death threats. | |
| Mr Cummings responded to me: ‘Back a deal, then’. | |
| I then approached him and said, how is it possible for me to be criticised for not backing a deal? I’ve tried three times to back the former prime minister’s deal but it wasn’t good enough for me to support. | |
| The PM should be in Brussels negotiating a deal to bring back to parliament so people like me can support it. I’m desperate to support a deal but it must protect jobs and workers’ rights. | |
| Turner has said he’s “truly worried” about his family’s safety, having previously had a person arrive at his house in Hull to confront him. | |
| The reason I was provoked into making an impassioned plea for him to stop allowing the tone of the debate to be as it is, is because I am truly worried about my family,” he said. | |
| I’ve had previous experiences of attacks on the house and the family and you can’t decide when you see these threats whether it is a serious death threat or whether it is just someone firing off at the keyboard when they’ve had too much to drink. I don’t know and it worries me. | |
| Boris Johnson has recorded a series of regional TV interviews today, and the BBC has released some of the transcripts. At least two of his claims were seriously misleading. Here are the key points | |
| Johnson declined to apologise to the family of Jo Cox for his comments about her last night. His own sister, Rachel, said that what he said about Cox was “particularly tasteless”. (See 1.56pm.) But, when he was asked by BBC’s Look North if he had a message for the Cox family, he replied: | |
| Look, I want to make a very, very important point. There’s a big big difference between a problem that I think is growing and that we need to deal with, which is the threat that MPs are facing, particularly female MPs [and it being important for MPs to be able to use words like surrender.] | |
| Asked again if he was sorry for his language in any way, Johnson said he was “deeply sorry for the threats that MPs face”. But that was an expression of regret about something happening, not an apology for something for which he accepted some responsibility. | |
| He rejected the suggestion that some of the language he had used last night might have contributed to MPs facing threats. When this was put to him, he said: “I dispute that.” | |
| He defended his right to call the Benn Act the “surrender bill”. In one interview he said: | |
| If you look at the language I was using, it’s important to be able to use a simple English word like surrender in a parliamentary context to describe a bill that gives the power to the rest of the EU to keep us locked in the EU by their own decision and to decide how long we should be there. | |
| He falsely claimed that the Benn Act would give the EU the power to decide how long the UK stayed in the EU. In another interview he said: | |
| [The act] would take away the power of this government, and the power of this country to decide how long it would remain in the EU and give that power to the EU and that’s really quite an extraordinary thing. | |
| This is a claim that Johnson has made frequently, but it is not true. The act says, if the PM fails to pass a Brexit deal by 19 October, and if MPs have not voted for no deal, he must request a three-month extension. But it does not say the UK has to accept any length of extension it is offered by the EU. If the EU did offer a longer or shorter extension, under the legislation the PM could either accept it, or refer it to the Commons for MPs to decide. So the UK would have a choice. | |
| He claimed that he had not talked about “betrayal” in the Commons - even though he said in his opening statement: “We will not betray the people who sent us here; we will not.” When it was put to him that he had used words like betrayal, he said: | |
| I don’t think I did say anything about a betrayal. What I worry about is if we don’t get Brexit done, then people will feel very badly let down. | |
| He claimed that some of the things opposition MPs were shouting at him in the Commons last night were “far harsher” than what he said. | |
| He said there was a need for “tempers ... to come down” in the Commons. In response to another question about his language, he said: | |
| You’re right, tempers need to come down, and people need to come together because it’s only by getting Brexit done that you’ll lance the boil, as it were, of the current anxiety and we will be able to get on with the domestic agenda. | |
| He said he accepted the need to “reach out across the House of Commons” to get Brexit done. | |
| That’s all from me for tonight. | |
| My colleague Kevin Rawlinson is taking over now. | |
| The opposition parties are going to meet again on Monday to consider “all parliamentary mechanisms to stop a no-deal [Brexit]”, the Labour party has said. In a statement about this afternoon’s talks, Labour said the parties agreed that stopping a no-deal Brexit was a priority and that the language used by the PM was unacceptable. | |
| The parties agreed that “any election without a lock preventing no deal would not get through parliament”. And Labour made it clear that “it wants an election as soon there’s a lock against no deal”. | |
| The meeting was attended by Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Valerie Vaz and Shami Chakrabarti from Labour, Ian Blackford from the SNP, Jo Swinson from the Lib Dems, Anna Soubry from the Independent Group for Change, Caroline Lucas from the Green and Liz Saville Roberts from Plaid Cymru. | |
| UPDATE: I’ve corrected the final paragraph. It was Liz Saville Roberts representing Plaid Cymru, not Leanne Wood (the former Plaid leader). The original mistake was in the Labour briefing. | |
| Liz Saville Roberts, the Plaid Cymru leader, also told Sky News that at the meeting with other opposition party leaders it was agreed that she would investigate what might be done to impeach or censure Boris Johnson in the Commons. She said: | |
| How do we bring it back to the chamber here in this place that the truth matters and conduct matters and the sort of words that you use in politics, those matter too. So I hope that we will find a way of censuring the prime minister. That’s what I raised with the leaders of the opposition parties today. And we will be looking together at how to take that forward. | |
| Opposition party leaders have finished their meeting where they discussed what more might be done to stop a no-deal Brexit on 31 October. Jeremy Corbyn spoke with the SNP’s Ian Blackford, the Lib Dems’ Jo Swinson, the Independent Group for Change’s Anna Soubry and Plaid Cymru’s Liz Saville Roberts. According to the Press Association, Swinson left the talks early to speak to police about a threat made against one of her young children. | |
| After the meeting Saville Roberts said they had spoken about how to ensure that Boris Johnson complied with the Benn Act, which will require the PM to request a Brexit extension if no deal has been agreed by 19 October. She said: | |
| We have got to get the Benn Act extension and we have to make sure that actually happens. There are a lot of pressures on, but that overrides everything. | |
| Here is the Labour MP Jess Phillips talking about the man who tried to break into her constituency office. | |
| Sound up: 🔊This is @jessphillips ripping into @BorisJohnson after a man was detained trying to break into her constituency office shouting ‘fascist’ pic.twitter.com/Gk34BzuiTc | |
| The government motion saying the conference recess should go ahead next week was backed by 275 Conservative MPs, nine DUP MPs and five independents. Three of them were Tories who lost the whip after rebelling over Brexit earlier this month (Steve Brine, Greg Clark and Caroline Nokes), another was the Tory Charlie Elphicke, who is suspended over a court case, and the other was the former Labour MP Ian Austin. | |
| Fifteen independent MPs joined the opposition parties and voted against the government. They included seven of the 21 Tories who had the whip withdrawn over Brexit earlier this month: Guto Bebb, Ken Clarke, David Gauke, Justine Greening, Dominic Grieve, Anne Milton and Antoinette Sandbach. Another was Amber Rudd, who resigned the whip herself in solidarity with the 21. | |
| Another 10 of the 21 who lost the whip did not vote. They were Richard Benyon, Alistair Burt, Philip Hammond, Stephen Hammond, Richard Harrington, Margot James, Sir Oliver Letwin, Sir Nicholas Soames, Rory Stewart and Ed Vaizey. | |
| The other member the group of 21 rebels was Sam Gyimah. He is now a Liberal Democrat, and voted against the motion with his new party. | |
| The Labour MP Jess Phillips, who represents Birmingham Yardley, has revealed that a man has been arrested after trying to “kick the door” of her constituency office while reportedly shouting that she was a fascist. She told LBC Radio: | The Labour MP Jess Phillips, who represents Birmingham Yardley, has revealed that a man has been arrested after trying to “kick the door” of her constituency office while reportedly shouting that she was a fascist. She told LBC Radio: |
| I’ve only just heard about it myself but my staff had to be locked into my office while the man tried to smash the windows and kick the door, I believe. I don’t know what I can say because the man has been arrested. | I’ve only just heard about it myself but my staff had to be locked into my office while the man tried to smash the windows and kick the door, I believe. I don’t know what I can say because the man has been arrested. |
| According to HuffPost’s Paul Waugh, Boris Johnson is planning to go ahead with his speech to the Tory conference on Wednesday – even though PMQs is scheduled. | According to HuffPost’s Paul Waugh, Boris Johnson is planning to go ahead with his speech to the Tory conference on Wednesday – even though PMQs is scheduled. |
| Tory source confirms @BorisJohnson speech to Tory Tory conf going ahead next Weds."PM's speech continues as is" | Tory source confirms @BorisJohnson speech to Tory Tory conf going ahead next Weds."PM's speech continues as is" |
| If Johnson does skip PMQs, that would be seen as a gross discourtesy to the Commons. Earlier I speculated that he might send Dominic Raab in his place (see 3.13pm), but given the state of relations between No 10 and the Commons he might even palm MPs off with Kevin Foster, the junior Welsh Office minister and interim Cabinet Office minister who responded to the UQ about Johnson’s language today. | If Johnson does skip PMQs, that would be seen as a gross discourtesy to the Commons. Earlier I speculated that he might send Dominic Raab in his place (see 3.13pm), but given the state of relations between No 10 and the Commons he might even palm MPs off with Kevin Foster, the junior Welsh Office minister and interim Cabinet Office minister who responded to the UQ about Johnson’s language today. |
| From the BBC’s Chris Mason | From the BBC’s Chris Mason |
| There will be a Political Cabinet at 5pm — this is different from a conventional cabinet meeting where civil servants are present and instead a forum for discussing party political tactics | There will be a Political Cabinet at 5pm — this is different from a conventional cabinet meeting where civil servants are present and instead a forum for discussing party political tactics |