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3 hours ago
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Good morning. Keir Starmer is in Ukraine and, as Pippa Crerar and Luke Harding report, he is signing a 100-year partnership deal with the president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
We will be covering the trip in detail in a live blog here.
Back in the UK it is also an important day for Kemi Badenoch, who is delivering a major speech on the subject “Rebuilding Trust”. She has been leader of the Conservative party for just over three months, and so far she has not had much success. Her performances in the Commons have been mediocre, her pronouncements on policy and values have either been predictable and reductive, and sometimes just bizarre, and she is being outplayed by Nigel Farage, whose Reform UK party is hoovering up her vote and is now level pegging with the Tories in the polls.
One problem Badenoch has is that she is leader of a party that suffered its worst election result in 200 years because its record in office was generally seen to be terrible. Badenoch has often said that the party made mistakes while it was in power, but she has not done much to disown former leaders and she has not managed to persuade voters yet that she represents a radical break with the past.
Today’s speech seems to be an attempt to change that. On the basis of the fairly lengthy extracts released overnight, it contains her strongest criticism yet of the mistakes made by the past government (of which she was part – but only at cabinet level from September 2022).
Here is the key passage.
I will acknowledge the Conservative Party made mistakes …
We announced that we would leave the European Union before we had a plan for growth outside the EU.
We made it the law that we would deliver net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. And only then did we start thinking about how we would do that.
We announced that we would lower immigration, but immigration kept going up.
These mistakes were made because we told people what they wanted to hear first and then tried to work it out later.
That is going to stop under my leadership. If we are going to turn our country around, we’re going to have to say some things that aren’t easy to hear.
The admission that the Tories failed on immigration sounds largely like a rehash of a speech Badenoch gave in November. She has frequently criticised net zero targets in the past. But what she is saying about Brexit does seem to be new.
Last year she criticised the fact that the last Conservative government organised a referendum on Brexit without a plan for implementing it if people voted to leave. This was a relatively bold thing to say, because it was obviously a rebuke to David Cameron, and at the time he was back in cabinet as foreign secretary. But comments like this were popular with the pro-Brexit Tory mainstream, who by that point were suspicious of Cameron.
Today Badenoch seems to be saying something slightly different – that Brexit went wrong not just because there was no plan in 2016, but because there was no plan in 2020. This means she’s also blaming Theresa May for Brexit failures, and probably Boris Johnson too. We will find out this afternoon quite how far she is willing to go in condemning Johnson, who is still popular with Tory members, but it seems to be a new approach.
Here is the agenda for the day.
Morning: Keir Starmer is in Kyiv, where he is meeting Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, and signing a 100-year partnership deal.
9.30am: Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
Morning: Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, gives evidence to the Covid inquiry as part of the module covering vaccines.
10.30am: Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, gives a speech on British leadership and links with Europe.
Noon: John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, takes questions at Holyrood.
1.30pm: Kemi Badenoch delivers a speech on restoring trust.
Afternoon: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, holds a meeting with regulators, urging them to do more to promote growth.
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