James Forsyth

We have the first declared candidate of this Tory leadership contest. Penny Mordaunt has just taken to Twitter to announce she is running. Given that Mordaunt got more than 100 votes in the final parliamentary round, she has a pretty good chance of making the 100 nominations threshold. Now we wait to see if there is now a big push from her team to get more supporters to go public (you can keep tabs on those numbers here). https://twitter.com/PennyMordaunt/status/1583466532344328193?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw The biggest question at the moment is over whether Boris Johnson runs or not.

The question on everyone’s lips tonight is whether Boris Johnson can get 100 MP nominations by Monday. This is the bar that the 1922 committee have set. Johnson’s supporters have been coming out tonight at pace: he is up to 20-odd supporters already. But the question of whether he can get to 100 is difficult given the circumstances that led to his departure and the coming privileges committee investigation. Johnson’s advocates, though, think that if he can get that 100 and make it to the member’s round, then he will become the favourite.

‘Governments don’t control markets,’ the new Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, likes to say. But there are times when markets control governments. The market, or the fear of how the market might react, is now the driving force in British politics. It explains the dramatic developments of the past week and will determine the new Prime Minister’s fate. Last month’s ‘mini-Budget’ was doomed because it required that the government borrow £70 billion more than had been planned. This money would have to be raised in the gilts market, and Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng assumed that the markets would be happy to continue to lend so much at such low rates. But they missed the fact that attitudes were changing.

Liz Truss’s gaoler has just done another BBC interview. Jeremy Hunt continued to try and give himself maximum room for manoeuvre, saying ‘I’m not taking anything off the table’. He repeated his message: We are going to have to take some very difficult decisions both on spending and on tax. Spending is not going to increase by as much as people hoped, and indeed we're going to have to ask all government departments to find more efficiencies than they'd planned. And taxes are not going to go down as quickly as people thought, and some taxes are going to go up. It will be fascinating to see if Truss is as direct on this when she is asked the question at PMQs next week.

Jeremy Hunt is a man who thinks he is in clear charge of government fiscal policy. After Liz Truss’s press conference yesterday which abandoned the corporation tax cut and opened the way to spending cuts, there were briefings to the papers that no more U-turns were coming. But on the media round on Saturday morning, Jeremy Hunt put the whole mini-Budget under review. He was clear that taxes would rise – in direct contradiction of what Truss had said on the campaign trail, spending wouldn’t go up as much as expected and that every department will have to find savings. The Sunday Times is now reporting that the cut in income tax will be delayed for a year, and return to the date that Rishi Sunak had originally proposed.