Isabel Hardman

Is partygate all in the past? That’s what Rishi Sunak is hoping. He sent Penny Mordaunt to the Commons this afternoon to back the Privileges Committee report into Boris Johnson, while saying the vote on sanctions for Johnson himself ‘is a matter for individual members’. The chamber had far more opposition MPs in it than Conservatives. Sunak himself has packed his diary so he is unlikely to attend the Commons for the vote. Labour’s aim for the debate is to tie Johnson very firmly to the current administration. Shadow leader of the Commons Thangam Debbonaire gave a furious speech in which she accused Sunak of being too weak to take a position on the report.

Nadine Dorries has this evening explained why she isn’t yet resigning as an MP, after she initially quit ‘with immediate effect’ last Friday. The Mid Bedfordshire MP had gone mysteriously quiet after her announcement, prompting Downing Street to suggest that she was letting her soon-to-be-former constituents down. She has now revealed that she is waiting for a subject access request to the House of Lords Appointment Committee, Cabinet Secretary and Cabinet Office.

Boris Johnson has announced he will be standing down from parliament with immediate effect, after the Privileges Committee recommended a ten-day suspension for his conduct over partygate.  There will be a by-election in his constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Johnson will not contest his seat. In his resignation letter, the former prime minister attacks the committee, saying it has made clear to him in a letter ‘that they are determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of parliament’. He insists that ‘they have still not produced a shred of evidence that I knowingly or recklessly misled the Commons’, and that ‘they know perfectly well’ that he was not doing this.

Rishi Sunak and Joe Biden’s White House press conference started late, presumably to make a point that the two had just found so much to talk about in their bilateral. Like a date that had gone really well. When the pair eventually appeared before journalists, they spent most of their opening statements banging on about how much they had in common and how they agreed on everything. Biden described the ‘depth and breadth of our relationship’, ‘our common values’ and said ‘there’s no issue of importance – none – that our nations are not leading together on’. Sunak claimed that ‘not for decades has the relationship between our two nations been so important’, and that the only thing that had changed was ‘the challenges that we face’.

An appearance from ageing rocker Gene Simmons from KISS, watching from behind his dark glasses in the gallery, was one of the few highlights from today’s stand-in session of deputy Prime Minister’s Questions. This session wasn’t so much glam rock as it was rock bottom boring. Oliver Dowden and Angela Rayner had written a list of stock jokes and attacks that both were very keen indeed to use, regardless of the questions or answers they were actually dealing with. There was a supportive question in the opening by Tory MP David Johnston about reading standards and Labour party policy. This allowed Dowden to celebrate the recent news that England was now in the top five international rankings for reading in primary schools.

What’s wrong with the government’s AI strategy? Labour has been claiming today that it is ‘already out of date’, with shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell arguing that developers should be licensed by the government before they can work on advanced AI. Powell has suggested that an arms-length body could run the licensing regime in the same way as medicines and the nuclear industry are governed. But when she pitched up on the World at One this afternoon, she didn’t sound fully up-to-date herself. There needs to be more of a narrative from the opposition than just ‘we would do this better’ Sarah Montague asked quite reasonably why, if Labour was so worried about AI, the party hadn’t really been talking more about this before.

Where have Boris Johnson’s diaries and WhatsApp messages gone? The row over the demands of the Covid Inquiry for evidence from the former prime minister and his aide Henry Cook took another twist yesterday, with his team insisting that he has already handed over all the relevant material to the Cabinet Office and that it is in fact the government that’s holding the whole thing up. The inquiry wants all messages from Johnson’s phone, and had demanded them by 12 May, then 4 p.m. yesterday, and now there’s another deadline extension of 1 June.