🔴 Exclusive: The former PM said that the proposals were 'not acceptable' and backed proceeding with the NI Protocol Bill
Read the full story here ⤵️
🔴 The Privileges Committee is set to publish its partygate evidence this morning, just hours before Boris Johnson will face a grilling which could determine his future as an MP
🗣 The committee will publish a "core bundle" of evidence at 9am which will be referred to throughout this afternoon’s session with the former premier which is due to get underway at 2pm and could last four hours
🗣 New evidence published by the Privileges Committee on Wednesday morning showed Mr Case, the Cabinet Secretary, denied giving Mr Johnson "any assurances that Covid rules were followed at all times in No 10"
🗣However, Mr Cain said: "From memory there were around 40 people in attendance including the PM, the PPS, Mrs Johnson and - unusually - advisers from other departments. They were joined by a cross section of staff from across Downing Street"
🔴 Simon Case, the then Cabinet Secretary, and Jack Doyle, who was director of communications at the time, replied "no" when asked if they had assured Johnson that the guidance was adhered to
🇪🇺 The vote is seen as indicative of overall support for the Northern Ireland Protocol deal with the EU, which was struck in February after years of discord between Brussels and London
🔴 Steve Baker claimed Boris Johnson risked being viewed as a "pound shop Nigel Farage" after the former prime minister announced he will vote against Rishi Sunak’s Brexit deal amid a growing Tory revolt
🗣 Mr Baker, a Northern Ireland minister, said Mr Johnson "has got a choice" as he urged the ex-premier to follow the path of a "statesman".
"He can be remembered for the great acts of statecraft that he achieved or he can risk looking like a pound shop Nigel Farage"
🗣 Mr Farage, the former leader of the Brexit Party, hit back and said: "You give Steve Baker a government job and he stops being a Brexiteer. What a fraud this man is."
🔵 Inside Boris Johnson’s preparations for partygate grilling
If political danger can be measured in the hours of preparation dedicated to a given event, then Boris Johnson is all too aware of what is riding on the partygate hearing
🗣 Dominic Cummings has ridiculed Boris Johnson's "comical" claims around partygate as the former prime minister faces a four-hour grilling that is likely to determine his political future.
🗣 Mr Cummings insisted he had not given any reassurances, and is quoted as telling the Cabinet Office investigation team: "The idea the PM could have thought this drinks event was 'work' is comical, given the tables covered in bottles of drink, everyone standing around drinking"
🔵 Elsewhere, two other key revelations from today's partygate evidence is that two Downing Street aides have denied telling Boris Johnson that all Covid guidance was followed
🔴 LATEST: The European Research Group of Tory Brexiteers has urged its members to vote against Rishi Sunak's Windsor Framework this afternoon in a fresh blow to the Prime Minister.
The European Research Group of Tory Brexiteers has urged its members to vote against Rishi Sunak's Windsor Framework this afternoon in a fresh blow to the Prime Minister
🔴Yvonne Fovargue, the Labour MP for Makerfield, points to multiple remarks he made weeks before both gatherings that "people should be limiting" their contact with others.
🔴 Johnson's temper flared in response to a line of questioning from Sir Bernard Jenkin who suggested he had not sought sufficient advice before denying there had been any Downing Street parties in lockdown
🗣Dominic Cummings has been posting his own updates on his Substack website.
""[Boris Johnson's] whole defence rested on claims that he was repeating to the Commons assurances he'd been given by senior officials," Mr Cummings said.
Here's the latest on the global tech outage from reporter @matthfield:
Television channels, airports and banks around the world have been knocked offline in a massive outage causing Windows computers to suddenly shut down.
Sky News’s breakfast show was not on air on Friday morning, replaced by archive footage.
Downdetector, a website which monitors outages, reported sudden spikes in problems with websites including Microsoft applications, banking websites and airline apps.
On Ryanair’s website, the company urged passengers to arrive at airports three hours early blaming a “third party IT issue, which is outside Ryanair’s control and affect all airlines operating across the network”.
Our Senior Technology Reporter @GazTheJourno will be here from 1pm today to answer all of your questions!
Drop them below 👇
✍️ @GazTheJourno: Elon Musk has always wanted to create a company called X.
The first X was in fact an online bank he set up in the late 1990s - and its CEO was Peter Thiel. That company later became PayPal and was bought by eBay in 2002.
@GazTheJourno 🗣️ @GazTheJourno: Twitter’s blue bird logo has been with the site since its creation in 2006. Its branding has always been twee(t!), featuring the bird doing cutesy things including lifting up the fail whale on its ‘site over capacity’ page back in the 2010s… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
🇺🇦 Elderly and vulnerable Ukrainians were taken into Russian territory, stripped of their citizenship, forced to give blood and left in agony from botched medical procedures, a Telegraph investigation has found.
🔴 Elderly and vulnerable Ukrainians were taken into Russian territory, stripped of their citizenship, forced to give blood and left in agony from botched medical procedures.
Oleg Andreev, 65, who is paralysed, was taken by Russian invaders occupying his village in eastern Ukraine. Mr Andreev said his wheelchair was stolen by a Russian soldier, who used it for an
injured comrade.
🇺🇦 Exclusive: Alexander Lukashenko implicated in alleged war crime as boys and girls as young as six are taken to camps in 'forced deportation'
Read this exclusive in full from @sophia_yan, @Nat_Vasilyeva, and @VerityBowman here 👇
@sophia_yan @Nat_Vasilyeva @VerityBowman It is estimated that 2,150 Ukrainian children have been taken to at least four camps in Belarus since September 2022, with numbers expected to reach 3,000 by autumn this year.
Three of the “camps” are in the Minsk region, namely the Ostroshitsky Gorodok Sanatorium, the Zubrenok national children’s educational and health centre, and Dubrava children’s camp. The fourth site is the Golden Sands Sanatorium in the Gomel region.
🔴NEW: The US was concerned about what would happen to Russia’s nuclear weapons during the armed coup staged by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an official has said.