‘You ain’t seen nothing yet’: Johnson quotes Reagan as he tells cabinet to work ‘flat out’ for change

At least two bookmakers have sent out press releases today about the odds they are offering on the next Labour leader, with Rebecca Long-Bailey the favourite, followed by Lisa Nandy and then Sir Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary.

Starmer’s opponents, as well as criticising his stance on Brexit, have been arguing that the next leader should be a woman, as well as an MP from outside London.

But Jenny Chapman, who worked for Starmer in the shadow Brexit team and who lost her Darlington seat in the election, has been giving interviews today saying saying gender and regional background should be not factors in the contest. She made this argument in an article for the Daily Mirror and she told the Today programme:

I spent the last couple of months talking to folks on the doorstep in Darlington and getting very clear messages back, as you can imagine.

What people are saying is that they want a leader that they feel could be the prime minister.

It was about, ‘do I trust this person with my mortgage, with the future, with my children, with my pension? And I think that Keir has the qualities that they’re looking for.

Nobody on doorsteps of Darlington said the next leader has to have ovaries or a northern accent, and I think that’s such a patronising attitude to think that presenting someone who speaks the northern accent means you’re going to win support in the north.

Barry Gardiner refuses to rule out standing for Labour deputy leadership

Barry Gardiner, the shadow international trade secretary, has been on BBC News this morning. There were two interesting lines in his interview.

Gardiner hinted that Labour would vote against the withdrawal agreement bill if the government holds a second reading vote on Friday. He said that the decision to remove provisions protecting workers’ rights from the bill (see 9.37am) would make it even less attractive than the original version of the bill, that Labour opposed in October. He said:

The withdrawal agreement, if it is now countenancing the rights and protections which the previous agreement, which did get a majority in parliament contained within it, the protection for workers’ rights and the protections for the environment, given that [Boris Johnson] is now taking that out, is something that is less attractive to us as a party than even the one before.

Gardiner did not rule out standing for the Labour deputy leadership. Asked if he would be a candidate, as some reports have suggested, he replied:

I have not made any decision on that at all … It is speculation.

Labour’s Brexit position at election did not appeal to traditional supporters, says Burnham

In an interview for the Today programme this morning Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester and Jeremy Corbyn’s main rival in the 2015 leadership contest, said that the party’s Brexit policy was a problem at the election. He explained:

We’ve always been a coalition between traditional supporting working class communities and let’s say a university-educated liberal left.

Labour has not been speaking to both sides of that coalition for some time.

And, actually, with the position taken on Brexit at the recent election, it was almost as if they were thwarting the views of people who had been our traditional supporters.

Labour has got to speak to both sides of that coalition.

Burnham refused to say which candidate he would be backing in the forthcoming leadership contest.

He also said that voters in the north should be “wary” of accepting Boris Johnson’s promises, saying that the PM could not simply offer infrastructure improvements that were “decades away” to keep his new northern voters on side. He said:

The north definitely does need new infrastructure.

The rail chaos – that we see this morning even, with more cancellations across the north – is due to Victorian infrastructure more than anything.

But they can’t say that they are doing everything to the north by simply promising infrastructure in the distant future. They have got to deal with the here and now.

More than 140,000 EU citizens applied last month to live and work in the UK after Brexit, PAA Media reports. The Home Office said it received 142,300 applications for the EU settlement scheme in November, compared with more than half a million submitted in the previous month. This takes the total number received by the end of November to almost 2.6 million (2,592,800). Overall, the number of applications finalised in that time was more than 2.2 million (2,230,900), according to the Home Office figures (pdf).

Of these, 59% were granted permanent leave to remain in the country, called settled status, and 41% were granted pre-settled status – which means they have temporary leave to remain and would need to apply again for permanent permission at a later date.

You ain’t seen nothing yet’ – Johnson quotes Reagan as he tells cabinet to work ‘flat out’ for change

Sky News has just broadcast some footage of Boris Johnson addressing cabinet for the first time. He told his ministers:

The voters of this country have changed this government and our party for the better, and we must repay their trust now by working flat out to change our country for the better.

And we should have absolutely no embarrassment about saying we are a people’s government, this is a people’s cabinet, and we are going to be working on delivering the priorities of the British people. And that’s what they want us to do.

And we must recognise that people lent us their votes at this election. It was a quite extraordinary, it was a seismic election, but we need to repay their trust and work 24 hours a day, work flat out, to deliver.

Of course, the first 100 days were very busy – 140 days, or whatever it was; you may remember it was a very frenetic time – but you ain’t seen nothing yet, folks. We are going to have to work even harder, because people have a high level of expectation, and we must deliver for them.

At this point, treating the cabinet like a bit like a primary school class, Johnson asked his colleagues how many new hospitals they were going to build. Forty, they chanted back at him. (No one was brave enough to point out that it would be more accurate to say just six.) Johnson also asked them to tell him how many new nurses they would hire, and new police officers they would recruit. Then he went on:

But there is a huge, huge agenda of delivering social justice, of addressing every problem from social care to homelessness, to levelling up and uniting across our country, with better infrastructure, better education and technology. That’s what we want to do. We are Conservatives; we believe in extending opportunity across the whole of the United Kingdom, and that is what we are going to devote ourselves to.

Johnson ended his opening statement by referring to today’s employment figures (see 9.53am), joking about taking the risk of “sounding more North Korean than normal”. The economy continued to be robust, he said, but the government would take steps to strengthen it.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet” was a Ronald Reagan catchphrase, and Johnson may have been quoting him deliberately. Reagan drew the political map of American by winning the support of blue-collar workers who had previously voted for the other party (“Reagan Democrats”) and, although seen as a leader with a poor grasp of detail, he exuded can-do optimism, which people seemed to like.

The government has repeatedly said that it does not intend to lower standards on workers’ rights, consumer rights or environmental protection after Brexit. (See 9.37am.) The EU will also wants to ensure that it does not get undercut by the UK in the future, but a key issue in the UK-EU trade talks will be what rules are agreed to ensure this happens.

In an interview on the Today programme this morning Liam Fox, the former Conservative international trade secretary, admitted that the EU would start by pushing for “dynamic alignment” – an agreement that, when the EU tightens standards, the UK would follow suit. But Fox argued that, internationally, this sort of approach was going out of fashion. He explained:

There’s a wider debate here, and this discussion is part of it. At the WTO meeting in Buenos Aires there was quite a debate about how do we take forward global trade. Is it by aligning all our regulations? That’s what the EU would call harmonisation, a very legalistic model. Or do we go for outcome-based equivalence? In other words, we agree what the standards and outcomes should look like, but we can find our own way, in our own laws and regulations, to get there. That’s the wider debate.

The EU very much favours that very legalistic model. The rest of the world favours a more flexible model.

Fox was also asked if he thought the NHS would be at risk from a trade deal with the US. He said there was no chance of this whatsoever and that this was a “red herring” that had been dismissed as such by the voters.

He said it was now the “norm” to insert “exemption clauses” into trade deals to protect the running of public services. He went on:

That is the norm now, and we have always said that the Government will retain its right to regulate public services in the national interest. That’s what we said in the election. That’s what we will do.

What the Labour Party said about the NHS was a lie then, and it’s irrelevant now.