Sunday interviews

Angela Rayner: ‘You cannot buy your way into democracy’ This week, Reform UK received an unprecedented £72m in donations from the crypto billionaires Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo. This amount is more than the total secured by all UK political parties last year, which stood at £69m. On Sky News this morning, Rachel Johnson asked Housing Secretary Angela Rayner if Labour were rattled. Rayner said the government's priority was having ‘secure elections… for the people’, pointing to the Rycroft Review and new legislation targeting overseas donations, which she said would be backdated to the 25th of March, when the review was published, to close any loopholes for recent returnees to the UK.

Lisa Nandy insists government will ‘meet that moment’ with defence budget Keir Starmer’s premiership is now under enormous strain, after John Healey, the former Defence Secretary, resigned weeks before the Nato summit in Ankara. In his resignation letter, Healey said he could not ‘accept a defence investment plan… that does not give our forces the resources they need’. On Sky News this morning, Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, told Wilfred Frost that new Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis would be taking his role ‘very seriously’, and that Starmer had asked the Cabinet to find cuts in their departments in order to find more money for defence.

Brandon Lewis: Conservatives are now ‘united behind the PM’ Mounting dissatisfaction with Boris Johnson’s leadership came to a head last Monday when he survived a vote of confidence amongst Conservative MPs by 211 to 148. The party’s rules as they stand mean that his position is now notionally safe for a year. The Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis spoke to Sophie Raworth about what this result meant for his leadership https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0guA_zVE-o CMA will review petrol stations’ practices Raworth asked Lewis about how the government would ensure the cut in fuel duty would be passed on to motorists at the petrol pumps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?