Johnson using election to move Tories further right, says Hammond

Around 40 members of staff at the People’s Vote campaign have written to Roland Rudd, who effectively runs it, complaining about his decision to dismiss two of its most senior executives, James McGrory and Tom Baldwin. In the letter, which was sent last night, they said:

It is utterly absurd that at this critical time for our country, you have started an argument about how our campaign is run.

We do not want a public argument, we simply want to get back to work, delivering the people’s vote that our country so desperately needs.

Your actions have meant that we have been unable to do that, at this critical juncture for the campaign and the country.

As the staff of the People’s Vote campaign, we demand you allow us to continue with our work, under the leadership of James and Tom.

My colleagues Rajeev Syal and Rowena Mason have a good article explaining the background to the row here.

The gender pay gap for full-time workers in the UK has increased slightly to 8.9%, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said. As the Press Association reports, the new figure compares with 8.6% last year, which was the lowest since records began in 1997, when it stood at 17.4%. The difference in pay of all men and women workers, including those in part-time jobs, has fallen from 17.8% in 2018 to 17.3% in 2019, and continues to fall, the report said. For people under 40 years of age, the pay gap for full-time employees is now “close to zero”, the ONS said.

The SNP’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford has said that his party’s votes “should not be taken for granted” by the prime minister today, refusing to confirm whether he would support Johnson’s latest attempt to call a December election, but insisting that his party still wanted one “as soon as possible”.

Of course, Blackford can’t take his own MPs for granted either: yesterday the long-serving Western Isles MP Angus Brendan MacNeil broke ranks to criticise SNP support for a winter election.

Asked on BBC Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme about his own comments last week that going to the polls in December was “barking mad”, especially in a northern constituency like his, Blackford insisted that circumstances had now changed because of the EU’s extension. He said:

I have no particular relish to have an election over the course of the next weeks but we’re going to have to accept our responsibility. People will still come out.

Asked whether he accepted that a potential outcome of a general election could be a Tory majority and a no-deal Brexit, Blackford said that is was “up to the Labour party and others in England and Wales to do their job in defeating the Conservatives, we will do that in Scotland. But the simple fact remains that we cannot sit back and allow this prime minister to take us out of Europe.”

He added that in Scotland “we have the insurance policy of having a referendum on independence”, which the SNP intends to make a key election issue.

But the party must also be aware of echoes of 1979, when the SNP helped to bring down the minority Labour government, ushering in two decades of Tory rule, a memory that still smarts for some.

In his Today interview Philip Hammond, the former Tory chancellor, also said that he thought the Vote Leave faction in Downing Street – the advisers who used to work with Boris Johnson on the Vote Leave campaign in 2016, of whom the most important is Dominic Cummings – wanted an early election because they wanted to recast the Conservative party, removing remainers such as Hammond himself. He told the programme:

I fear that the real narrative here is that the Vote Leave activists – the cohort that has seized control in Downing Street and to some extent in the headquarters of the Conservative party – want this general election to change the shape of the Conservative party in parliament. To get rid of a cohort of MPs it regards as not robust enough on this issue and then replace them with hardliners.

As evidence, Hammond cited this tweet last night from Arron Banks, the former Ukip donor and founder of the Leave.EU campaign.