Jenrick damaged his Tory leadership chances at conference, members survey suggests – UK politics live

James Cleverly is seen by voters as the Tory leadership candidate most likely to become prime minister, according to new polling by Ipsos..

In its write-up, Ipsos says:

When asked which leadership candidate would be most likely to become prime minister if they become Conservative leader, one in five Britons say James Cleverly (21%) marking a 7-point increase since late September 2024 before Conservative party conference. Robert Jenrick trails behind at 10%, with Tom Tugendhat and Kemi Badenoch at 7% each. The main shift here being between those saying don’t know (-6) and those saying Mr Cleverly is most likely (+7).

However, more than one in four still say they don’t know (27%) and 28% think none of the candidates are likely to become prime minister.

But the polling also suggests, as the public heard and read about the last four candidates in the contest while the Tory conference was happening, all of them saw their net favourability ratings with the public at large go down. Cleverly’s ratings only fell by 2 points, from -16 to -18. But Tom Tugendhat’s fell by 6 points, and Kemi Badenoch’s and Robert Jenrick’s both fell by 8 points.

On this measure, Badenoch is the most unpopular candidate, with a net favourability rating of -26, followed by Jenrick (-24), Tugendhat (-19) and Cleverly (-18).

The UK population is estimated to have risen by 1.0% in the year to June 2023, the largest annual percentage increase since comparable data began in 1971, according to a report from the Office for National Statistics. In its report on the figures PA Media says:

Some 68,265,200 people were likely to have been resident in the UK in the middle of last year, up 662,400 from 67,602,800 12 months earlier.

The jump of 1.0% in the year to mid-2023 follows a rise of 0.9% in the year to mid-2022, according to the ONS.

It means the UK population is estimated to have increased by 1.28 million in the two years to mid-2023.

The rise of 662,400 in the 12 months to June 2023 is also the largest annual numerical increase since comparable data began in 1971.

Net international migration was the main contributor to the rise in population for all four countries of the UK in the year to mid-2023, the ONS said.

Asked about the figures at the Downing Street lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson said Keir Starmer was determined to bring net migration down. The spokesperson said:

The PM and the home secretary have been clear that overall net migration does need to come down, and we should end the situation where legal migration is used as an alternative to tackling skill shortages in the UK.

And indeed, we’ve made announcements recently to achieve this, including the Migration Advisory Committee conducting annual assessments to highlight key sectors where labour market failures have led to rocketing overseas recruitment and the fact that rules around migrant sponsorship will be toughened to ensure employers guilty of flouting employment laws are banned from hiring from abroad.

According a Financial Times report, the UK government’s borrowing costs have risen sharply, “fuelled by investor concerns about the Labour government’s budget, pushing the gap with Germany to the widest in more than a year”.

In their report, Ian Smith and Sam Fleming say:

With three weeks to go to Rachel Reeves’ first Budget, bondholders say the UK chancellor will have to walk a “tightrope” if she is to proceed with her borrowing and investment plans without triggering a gilt sell-off.

The spread between UK and German benchmark 10-year bond yields has already risen to 1.94 percentage points, its highest since August 2023, on worries Reeves will increase debt, as well as concerns about persistent inflation, investors say.

At the Downing Street lobby briefing this morning the PM’s spokesperson said he did not accept the claim that uncertainty about what the government would do was pushing up borrowing costs. He said:

I wouldn’t accept that characterisation … One of the first steps of this government is to restore economic stability, The budget will absolutely deliver on that, delivering on the robust fiscal rules that were that were set out in the manifesto. That includes moving the current budget into balance, that includes debt as a share of the economy.

More broadly, the budget will be about fixing the foundations of the economy, delivering stability, because it’s only with economic stability that we’ll get the growth and investment that the economy needs, that public services need, and deliver the higher living standards for people across the country.

Graeme Wearden has more on the government’s rising borrowing costs on his business live blog.

Yesterday Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former communictions chief, said a big reason why the government was in political difficulties was the fact that it decided to wait almost 16 weeks from the election before holding a budget.

On the Today programme this morning Liam Byrne, the Labour MP and former Treasury minister who chairs the Commons business committee, defended the government’s decision to wait that long.

Byrne said that, although there were “virtues getting the budget done fast”, there were also good reasons for waiting until the end of October.

Campbell said that after the elections in. 1979, 1997 and 2010, budgets were held respectively five weeks later, eight weeks later and six weeks later.

But now the Office for Budget Responsibility has to publish an economic assessmement alongside the budget, and that takes at least 10 weeks, Byrne said.

He also said there was an interest rate cut at the start of August, public sector pay deals were only agreed at the end of July, and new planning rules were published at the start of August. All these factors influence the budget, he argued. He went on:

You definitely can do these things fast – Liz Truss did it in 18 days – but I think the whole country will thank the chancellor for not doing a Liz Truss, because now is the time to be strategic and not slapdash.

The budget will be on Wednesday 30 October.

Yesterday, in response to a question from Andrew Mitchell, his Tory shadow, about whether the Chagossians were consulted about the government’s deal handing over sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, David Lammy, the foreign secrtary, said: “Of course we kept the Chagossians informed all along the way.”

Chagossian Voices, a group representing Chagossians, says Lammy was not telling the truth.

We will be writing to @DavidLammy and The Speaker of HOC. It was claimed in Parliament today that he and his team had met Chagossian groups to discuss the sovereignty negotiations. Neither we, nor any other groups we know have met him or his team to discuss this since the election. We learned about the announcement at 9.00am last Thursday in an email from the BBC.

At a meeting with Chagossian groups about community support for Chagossians with FCDO Minister Doughty on 30th September (the first and only meeting) attendees were told he could not talk about the negotiations and they even confirmed this in an email (last four lines of extract…

The Foreign Office has been approached for a comment. I will post their reply when I get it.

Political parties will be required to justify offering peerages under new rules being drafted by the government to overhaul the image of the House of Lords. As Jessica Elgot reports, the move – which could involve similar citations as those when people receive honours from the monarch – is in response to a number of controversial appointments over the years including those of two of Boris Johnson’s key aides and of Evgeny Lebedev, the Independent’s largest shareholder. Jess’s full story is here.

Today the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) thinktank has published a report saying Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, should change the government’s fiscal rules and adopt a new measure of debt. Richard Partington has written about it here.

On the Today programme this morning Mohamed El-Erian, one of Britain’s leading economists, also said the fiscal framework needs to change. El-Erian, who is president of Queen’s College, Cambridge, and chief economic adviser to Allianz, a fund manager, called for “a rational adjustment to the fiscal rules”. He explained:

Right now the government’s operating with a very arbitrary fiscal framework that it has inherited. It tends to be biased against investment, and it tends to undermine the one thing this country needs most, which is productivity and growth.

I would like to see the anti-investment biases taken out, so it means don’t treat spending on current consumption as the same as spending on investment. They are fundamentally different in terms of the impact.

He also said the rules should be changed so they don’t “apply arbitrary time horizons that have nothing to the underlying economics”. Currently the debt rule just says debt should be falling as a proportion of the GDP in the fifth year of the forecast period – which means between year 4 looking ahead and year 5 looking ahead. It is a rolling target, and so every year year 5 is another five years in the future. El-Erian said:

These are changes that are supported by the vast majority of economists, and they will be better for a government that’s seeking growth, because that is what we need.