Urgent question in Commons as pressure grows on PM to publish Lord Geidt’s resignation letter – UK politics live

The deportation flight to Rwanda was stopped from leaving the UK on Tuesday night not because the European court of human rights ruled that the policy was illegal, but because the court granted what was effectively an injunction saying the removal of one of the people on the flight should be halted.

In interviews this morning Dominic Raab, the justice secretary and deputy PM, said the UK government wanted to stop the court having that sort of power of injunction in Britain. He said the government’s bill of rights – legislation promised in the Queen’s speech amending the Human Rights Act – would address this. He told Times Radio:

In relation to the latest intervention from Strasburg, so called rule 39 interim orders, which are not grounded in the European convention [on human rights], they’re based on the rules of procedure, internal rules of the court. I certainly believe – and our bill of rights would provide – that they should not have legally binding effect under UK law.

In terms of the rule of law, I think when the high court, the court of appeal, have considered the matter, the supreme court, and said there is no grounds for an appeal, it is not right. And there is no basis in the European convention for Strasburg to intervene.

I’ve always said I think we should stay a state party [to the court]. But I think it requires us to respect the obligations, but also the Strasburg court to respect the limits of its mandate and it’s a two way street.

The number of people in England waiting to start routine hospital treatment has risen to a new record high, PA Media reports. PA says:

A total of 6.5 million people were waiting to start treatment at the end of April, NHS England said.

This is up from 6.4 million in March and is the highest number since records began in August 2007.

The number of people having to wait more than 52 weeks to start hospital treatment in England stood at 323,093 in April, up from 306,286 the previous month.

The Government and NHS England have set the ambition of eliminating all waits of more than a year by March 2025.

Journalists often like to take credit for forcing the resignation of politicians or senior public figures. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein set this as a benchmark for journalistic virility with Watergate and – rightly or wrongly – this has been a feature of newspaper culture ever since.

Normally it is news reporters or investigative journalists who get to claim scalps. But in the case of Lord Geidt, it may be the sketchwriters – including my colleague, John Crace – who forced him out. Geidt experienced a very bruising session with the Commons public administration and constitutional affairs committee on Tuesday, but facing the questions can’t have been as painful as reading about it in the papers the following day. Here is John’s sketch.

On Sky News this morning Dominic Raab, the justice secretary and deputy PM, said he thought the committee hearing was a factor in Geidt’s resignation. He said:

He had a pretty rough grilling by MPs this week, I think sometimes we in the media and as politicians maybe underestimate how civil servants feel with that kind of scrutiny.

Raab is right to say Geidt is someone who for most of his career has not had to put up with media vilification. For 10 years he was private secretary to the Queen and in that post he was regarded as a sophisticated establishment powerbroker.

Being turned into a figure of ridicule at the select comittee can’t have been pleasant for him. But the hearing did also force him to face questions about his own role that he found hard to answer.

A Cabinet Office minister will answer an urgent question about the resignation of Lord Geidt at 10.30am in the Commons. The UQ has been tabled by Labour’s Fleur Anderson, the shadow paymaster general, and so we will probably get a reply from Michael Ellis, paymaster general and minister for the Cabinet Office. When a minister is needed in the Commons to make a statement that involves defending Boris Johnson’s integrity, it’s normally Ellis who gets the call.

Good morning. More than a year ago, after he was first appointed as Boris Johnson’s independent adviser on ministers’ interests (official title) or “ethics adviser” (media shorthand), Lord Geidt said that, if Johnson ignored his advice, he could retaliate by resigning “as a last resort”. He told MPs: “The power is there.” Last night, in a surprise move, he used it. Our overnight story about his departure is here.

Geidt’s resignation provides a fresh component to the (extraordinarily long) catalogue of evidence testifying to the ethical incontinence of the Boris Johnson administration. Regular readers will not need reminder of what else is on the list (and, besides, it would take a while just typing it up).

But Geidt has not given a proper account of why he quit. We know that he was unhappy about the fact that Johnson initially withheld important evidence from him when he was investigating the funding of the Downing Street flat refurbishment (Johnson claims that this was a mistake), and we know that Geidt was concerned about Johnson not seeming to care whether his Partygate fine meant he had broken the ministerial code. But last night Geidt just issued a one-sentence explanation for his departure, saying: “With regret, I feel that it is right that I am resigning from my post as independent adviser on ministers’ interests.”

The government has put out a statement suggesting the resignation was linked to Geidt being asked to look at “a commercially sensitive matter in the national interest, which has previously had cross-party support”, but it has not said what this means.

Geidt wrote a resignation letter to the PM and this morning the government is under pressure to publish it. Sir Philip Mawer, who did Geidt’s job when Gordon Brown was prime minister, told the Today programme:

If the letter and the prime minister’s reply are not published, then I think people will draw their own conclusions and it won’t be favourable to the prime minister.

And Chris Bryant, the Labour MP who chairs the Commons standards committee, said the same. He told the programme:

Reading between the lines and between all the various different reports he has produced, he [Lord Geidt] basically thinks that the Prime Minister has broken the ministerial code himself. He feels that because the only person who is the arbiter of the code is the prime minister that he does not feel able to say that.

Dominic Raab, the justice secretary and deputy PM, was giving interviews on behalf of the government this morning and, on the Today programme, he professed to not even know whether Geidt had written a resignation letter. Asked if it would be published, he replied:

I know No 10 will give a proper update later today and these questions will be answered.

Here is the agenda for the day.

10am: Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, gives a speech on rail reform.

11.30am: Downing Street holds its lobby briefing.

12pm: Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, takes questions from MSPs.

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