Mandelson says he will treat Trump with ‘respect and understanding’ in new job as ambassador to US – UK politics live

In his long Financial Times interview (see 12.11pm) Peter Mandelson told George Parker, the FT’s political editor, to “fuck off” when Parker asked about Mandelson’s friendship with the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Parker says an “icy chill” descended when he raised the subject. Asked about Epstein, the new UK ambassador to Washington replied:

I regret ever meeting him or being introduced to him by his partner Ghislaine Maxwell. I regret even more the hurt he caused to many young women.

I’m not going to go into this. It’s an FT obsession and frankly you can all fuck off. OK?

A report by JP Morgan bank, which dealt with Epstein’s finances, referred to him having a “particularly close relationship” with Mandelson, as well as with Prince Andrew.

Downing Street has said Jonathan Powell, the national security adviser, will give evidence to a parliamentary committee, after it complained publicly that he was ignoring its requests to attend a public hearing.

The joint committee on the national security strategy (JCNSS) says it has contacted Powell three times since he was appointed in November inviting him to give evidence.

In an open letter to the PM released this morning, Matt Western, the Labour MP who chairs the committee, says:

The committee would like to take evidence from Jonathan Powell at the earliest opportunity and, given the time-sensitive nature of the government’s various reviews and upcoming decisions, we attach particular importance to speedy engagement.

We remain unclear about the reasons as to why such engagement with our Committee is proving more limited than expected.

At the Downing Street lobby briefing the PM’s spokesperson said Powell would be giving evidence to the committee. He said:

In his role [Powell] should be taking accountability very seriously. Of course the national security adviser, as with other key appointments, will be accountable in his role.

The spokesperson did not say when an appearance at the committee might take place.

The Bank of England has cut interest rates to 4.5%, but warned UK households face renewed pressure from rising prices and a sluggish economy as it halved its growth forecasts for the year, Richard Partington reports.

The Financial Times has published a very long, but highly readable, interview with Peter Mandelson, the former Labour cabinet minister, former European trade commissioner and new UK ambassador to Washington. It’s by George Parker, the FT’s political editor. Here are some of the main points.

Mandelson has a simple plan for dealing with Trump’s team. He says he will treat them “with respect, seriousness and understanding of where they are coming from politically. Politics is in turmoil. There’s an often alienated and angry electorate which feels the system has let them down.” He admits that supporters of globalisation, which has been a central tenet for Mandelson, had become complacent, as wages stagnated and inequality grew. “A number of politicians, President Trump included, are seen as an antidote to that.”

Parker says Mandelson has two priorities in his new job: persuading the Trump administration to maintain its security guarantee for Europe; and using the UK-US relationship to boost growth. Mandelson said: “Maintaining America’s security guarantee in Europe is of paramount importance to me.”

I’m very worried about Europe. Primarily the problems of the EU are of its own making, regardless of who is in the White House. The most recent period has seen an acceleration, a gamut, of far-reaching regulation, which they are now trying to blunt, reverse or reform.

Mandelson says Brexit “has inflicted the greatest damage on the country of anything in my lifetime”. But he also now says that the UK needs to be “looking at any opportunities opening up as a result of Brexit”. He says the EU model has turned businesses into “compliance machines”.

Some around Mr Trump see me as they view many in Europe. They see me as a leftwing progressive, somebody who might even be anti-business or somebody who might be following the sort of liberalism they’ve just defeated in America. What they will discover is I’m not an uber-liberal, I’m not a wokey-cokey sort of person, and I’m pro-market and pro-business.”

• He insists he has the skills to be a good ambassador. “I’ve always been capable of being diplomatic,” he says. And he says George W Bush used to call him “Silvertongue” becaue he was persuasive.

England saw a net loss of 7,638 social homes in 2023/24, having now sold or demolished more council homes than it has built every year for the past 10 years, analysis shows.

New figures released today show that 17,504 social homes were sold or demolished in 2023/24, a 28% decrease from the previous financial year. But the number of homes completed has stood almost static at 9,866, meaning the country has once again lost more stock than it has built.

In total, England has seen a net loss of 43,821 social homes over the past 10 years.

Despite some yearly net gains over a longer period, net losses are a continuing trend. Between 1991/92 and 22/23, 843,209 social homes have been either sold or demolished in England. 543,869 have been built since then, meaning a net loss of nearly 300,000 homes in this timeframe.

These figures show the scale of Labour’s task in addressing the housing crisis for the most vulnerable in our society. At the end of 2023, there were 112,660 homeless households living in temporary accommodation, which, according to Crisis, cost local authorities £2.2bn last financial year.

Angela Rayner has announced plans to make it harder for tenants to buy social homes, but will need social home building to improve too, with 1.3m people on social home waiting lists and the state not replenishing stock.

UK will oppose any effort to move Palestinians out of Gaza against their will, minister tells MPs

Peter Walker

Anneliese Dodds, the development minister, has given the UK’s strongest opposition yet to Donald Trump’s proposed plan for Gaza, while once again not directly criticising the US president.

Yesterday Keir Starmer made it plain that the UK would not support Trump’s idea of removing Palestinians from Gaza so it could be rebuilt, condemned by many as proposed ethnic cleansing.

Starmer told MPs that Palestinians “must be allowed home”.

Responding to an urgent question in the Commons, Dodds said the UK would oppose “any effort to move Palestinians in Gaza to neighbouring Arab states against their will”.

She went on:

There must be no forced displacement of Palestinians, nor any reduction in the territory of the Gaza Strip. Palestinian civilians should be able to return to and rebuild their homes and their lives. That is a right, guaranteed under international law.

The UK is clear that we must see a negotiated two state solution, with a sovereign Palestinian state, which includes the West Bank and Gaza, alongside a safe and secure Israel with Jerusalem as the shared capital that has been the framework for peace for decades.

The Conservatives have denied putting out their new migration policy as a direct response to the Reform UK surge in the polls.

When this accusation was put to Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, on Sky News this morning, he replied:

This isn’t about opinion polls. This is about doing the right thing. It’s about identifying a problem the country faces, which is [that] we’ve had far too many people coming in in recent years.

And when the BBC’s Chris Mason asked Kemi Badenoch yesterday if she was “panicking about Nigel Farage”, she replied:

I think that people need to look at the past. This is not the first time we’ve been in this situation.

I remember 2019, the elections when the Brexit party won [the European elections], we were 9% in the polls. I remember when the SDP was polling at 50%.

We need to make sure that we understand what is going wrong, and that is that we’ve just been kicked out of government.

The public aren’t just going to rush back to us because Labour is doing badly. We knew they’d do badly. We need to rebuild trust with the public, so of course, they will put their vote with the protest party. They did that with the Liberal Democrats before. We need to make sure that we are fit and ready, and that’s by rebuilding trust and showing that we are a credible alternative to government.

There are two notable things about Badenoch’s reply.

First, although she may remember that the SDP hit 50% in the polls, it is unlikely that she remembers when it happened. The SDP/Liberal Alliance reached that level of support in December 1981. Badenoch was yet to reach her second birthday at that point, and living in Nigeria, and so it is unlikely she does recall it being on the news.

More importantly, Badenoch is implying that Reform UK is just a party for protest votes, like the Liberal Democrats. If that is what she thinks, she is probably making a category error. Reform are a party for protest votes. But they are also an insurgency party, which the Lib Dems aren’t. Protest vote politicians say vote for us because the other parties are doing a bad job; insurgency politicians say vote for us because the whole system needs blowing up. The Disruptive Delivery paper published by the Tony Blair Institute last week is quite good on this distinction.

The Conservative party has described the land use framework plan for England announced by the government last week as “food lunacy”.

During environment questions in the Commons, Robbie Moore, a shadow environment minister, said:

When we thought it couldn’t get any worse, the Government roll out their latest attack on our farming community and UK food production, setting the direction that they want to replace food production with around 20% of farmland being dedicated to solar farms, tree planting, biodiversity offsetting and wildlife habitats, all to meet green targets.

The proposed figures are astonishing, with well over a million hectares being proposed to be taken out of food production by this Government, and the economic analysis already predicts that well over 12,000 farms will be lost within a generation as a result of this government’s policies …

Does the minister recognise the fear amongst our farmers that their policies amount not to food security, but food lunacy?

Mary Creagh, the nature minister, dismissed Moore’s comments as “sound and fury” and said the plan was a development of something the last government had been working on. She also said it had been welcomed by farmers as “giving certainty and security”.

Senior civil servants must find cuts in their Whitehall budgets or risk losing their jobs under new rules, ministers are announcing today. Eleni Courea has the story.

Yvette Cooper told LBC that she did not believe the Conservative party had any credibility on migration.

In her phone-in, asked about the plans announced by Kemi Badenoch today, Cooper did not comment on the detail of what the Conservatives are saying but instead just attacked their record. She said:

I just can’t take seriously a single word they say.

They said all sorts of things, and then they quadrupled net migration in the space of four years. They totally lost control of our borders, and on the Channel, they saw this huge increase in boat crossings [and] every time they said they were going to do something, the opposite happened.

They said Rwanda was going to solve it, and they spent £700m pounds sending four volunteers to Rwanda.

So you’ll forgive me if I don’t give much credibility to anything that the Conservatives say.

Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has been taking part in a phone-in on LBC.

Asked if she would like tech companies to have the ability to just “switch off” stolen phones, she said that is what she would like to see. She said this does happen already to some extent, but that she would like to see it extended.

She also said she wanted the police to do more to recover stolen phones. Asked if she was concerned about the many reports of people telling the police they have found where their stolen phone in, using a find my phone app, and the police refusing to act, Cooper said she wanted to see “swift action [by the police] in those circumstances”

She said she is holding a summit today to consider how this problem can be addressed.

Good morning. Kemi Badenoch has been saying that the Conservative party should not have to have a full policy offer at this stage in the electoral cycle, but she has not ruled out having any policy and today she has launched a brand new one. She has said that foreign workers would have to live in the UK for 10 years without claiming any kind of benefit before being allowed indefinite leave under a Tory government. Kiran Stacey has the story here.

To publicise the plan, Badenoch has given a long interview to the BBC’s political editor, Chris Mason, and in it she confirmed that on Monday she told Conservative party staff that they weren’t as effective as they should be and that they needed to do a better job.

Mason asked about a report on the Guido Fawkes website saying that on Monday Badenoch summoned all CCHQ staff for a call where she told them they had to raise their game. The website reported:

Guido hears that Kemi summoned an all-staff call at CCHQ today, rallying the wider party. After 100 days in LOTO, Kemi’s verdict is that machine “must do better”, saying party members told her during the leadership election they “wanted everyone in CCHQ sacked,” with some even saying they should “burn the whole place down.” At the time she defended CCHQ—now that she’s seen it up close, she’s shifting course…

When Mason asked if it was true that she had told CCHQ staff they were not up to the job, Badenoch replied:

I believe that everyone who works for the Conservative Party needs to be fully dedicated to the mission.

Asked if she was saying some weren’t, Badenoch went on:

It is what the members have asked for. And if we feel that there are people who are doing a great job, we will tell them. And when people aren’t doing a great job, we will do the same. We need to make sure that we have good feedback. And one of the things that I want to see.

Mason said that Badenoch seemed to be saying that she thought some of her staff were “useless”. Badenoch did not accept that categorisation, but she repeated her point about the need for staff to improve. She replied:

No, that’s not what I’ve said at all. What I want people to know is that we want to have a high performing organisation. And leadership isn’t just about telling everybody how great they are. Sometimes it’s about telling them how to improve.

And quite frankly, one of the things that we’re seeing in this country is millions of people out of work, and not enough people getting pulling their socks up and getting back on their feet. We need sometimes to have tough words when people aren’t doing well, and words of praise when they are doing well. And that’s exactly what I did.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9am: Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, takes part in an LBC phone-in.

9.30am: Steve Reed, the environment secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

Morning: Keir Starmer and Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, are on a visit to promote the government’s plan to expand nuclear power in England and Wales, by changing planning laws to make it easier for more small modular reactors (SMRs) to be built.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

Noon: The Bank of England announces its interest rate decision. As Heather Stewart reports, it is expected to cut interest rates and downgrade forecasts for economic growth.

Noon: John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, takes questions in Holyrood.

5.15pm: Starmer has a meeting with Dick Schoof, the Dutch PM, in Downing Street.

If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.

If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.

I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.