Axel Heitmueller has been appointed as the new head of the prime minister’s delivery unit, Downing Street has announced. He has been working in the policy unit as a health specialist. Previously he worked as CEO of Imperial College Health Partners, and he has also worked for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

No 10 said Heitmueller would “advise ministers and drive forward the government’s vision for national renewal to ensure more people get help with the cost of living and see a change in their bills, communities, and health service”.

Stormont’s main parties remain at loggerheads over proposals for a new multi-year budget after the finance minister published his version of the spending plan, PA Media reports.

John O’Dowd’s move to initiate an eight-week public consultation exercise on a draft budget came amid an ongoing disagreement within the powersharing administration on how funds will be allocated to individual departments, PA says. The Sinn Féin minister urged Executive colleagues to engage with his proposals in a “constructive manner” and keep their “eyes on the prize” of setting a multi-year budget – something Stormont has been unable to do for more than 10 years. However, in a signal of how far apart the two lead executive parties remain on the issue, the DUP rejected the draft spending plan as “deeply flawed” and in need of “significant changes”.

Police chiefs facing scrutiny over a decision to ban fans of an Israeli football team from attending a match in Birmingham have insisted the move was not politically influenced, PA Media reports. PA says:

West Midlands police (WMP) leaders defended their position at the home affairs committee this afternoon after being recalled to give further evidence over the controversial decision to ban fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv from attending a Europa League match against Aston Villa on 6 November.

Supporters of the Israeli football team were barred from travelling to the game at Villa Park by the local safety advisory group (Sag), which cited safety concerns based on advice from the police force.

The decision by the Sag – which is made up of representatives from the council, police and other authorities – sparked political outrage, including from Keir Starmer.

Since then, doubts have been growing over the intelligence used by police, including disputes over the accuracy of information.

WMP chief constable Craig Guildford told the cross-party group of MPs: “From everything that I’ve read, and the commanders that I spoke to, I do not believe that there was political influence on that decision.

“Lots of local politicians and local members of the community I’m sure wanted to try and influence it, but I honestly don’t think it was influenced.”

The fixture had been classified high risk by WMP, with the force pointing to alleged violent clashes and hate crime offences that occurred during the 2024 Europa League match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam.

However, Dutch police have disputed the accuracy of this information, the Sunday Times reported.

Guildford defended claims put to him by committee chairwoman Karen Bradley that it feels like the force was “scraping” to find a reason to justify the ban.

“I’m really sorry if it comes across in that way. That was absolutely not the case,” he said.

The committee heard West Midlands police thought “vigilante groups” from the local community posed a threat to Maccabi Tel Aviv fans when it decided to ban them from the game.

MPs heard the force had information from as early as 5 September last year that the Israeli visitors would be targeted with “violence”.

Assistant chief constable Mike O’Hara said: “We got a lot of information intelligence to suggest that people were going to actively seek out Maccabi Tel Aviv fans and would seek violence towards them.

“So we had sort of like a bubbling position locally.

“We had people purporting to be Maccabi fans online who were goading local community members and saying, ‘this is what you’re going to get’.

“This was all forming part of the heat of the situation, so based on that, the commanders tried to make the right decision.”

WMP had previously been warned over misleading parliament after evidence given to the home affairs committee last month by O’Hara suggested the police had been told by members of the Jewish community they did not want Maccabi fans to attend the match.

The force later clarified it was not his intention to imply that and subsequently apologised when pressed for more clarity by Bradley.

The failure at a water treatment centre that left tens of thousands of Tunbridge Wells households without water (see 4.38pm) was foreseen weeks before it happened and could have been stopped, the regulator has said. Helena Horton has the story.

The chief executive of the water company responsible for 24,000 customers experiencing water outages last month told MPs his company did “so much” to respond to the crisis, PA Media reports. PA says:

Tens of thousands of people were left without water in Tunbridge Wells for days after a “water quality issue” at the Pembury water treatment works.

David Hinton, the chief executive of South East Water (SEW), was criticised by MPs for a “fundamentally lacking” human response to the crisis during an environment committee hearing this morning.

Hinton, who has an annual base salary of £400,000, told the committee he “hates it” when things go wrong, but was picked up by MPs for a lack of accountability in his responses.

The problems in Tunbridge Wells began on Saturday 29 November and continued for almost two weeks.

Originally, properties experienced a loss of water or low pressure before the company brought back undrinkable water so that people could shower and flush their toilets.

A “boil water notice” was then put in place until 12 December, when the company reported it had “changed” its water treatment processes.

Hinton blamed a lack of infrastructure in the South East for the failures and said that the risks are “inevitable” without investment.

Hinton also said that in the “absence of the infrastructure” they had focused resources on the response, including “mobilising” 100 people on the ground.

“We’ve done so much in terms of the response,” he said.

But Alistair Carmichael, the Lib Dem chair of the committee, said: “I would have more sympathy for this line of reasoning if this had come out [of] a clear blue sky but it didn’t, did it?

“There was repeated failures down the years, up to and including the warnings from the drinking water inspector last year.

“Essentially, it looks to me like your procurement, your quality control, your contingency arrangements at site were just not adequate.”

In 2023, SEW was found to be the worst company for supply interruptions in the UK, since then there have been multiple high profile outages.

Last year, Hinton received a £115,000 bonus for his work at SEW.

Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.

The pay for MSPs in Scotland’s devolved parliament will rise to £77,710 in April, after Holyrood’s cross-party corporate body agreed an above inflation 4.3% pay rise.

A parliament spokesperson said that pay increase, which leaves MSPs earning a little over twice the average wage of £38,464.40 in Scotland, had risen in line with the annualised average weekly earnings index figure for September 2025 – a measure Holyrood has used since 2022.

Jackson Carlaw, the former Scottish Conservative leader who chairs the corporate body, stressed when he announced the pay rise that MSPs’ pay was still below that for MPs and for members of the Welsh Senedd.

He said it also left MSPs lagging 8.2 percentage points below the consumer prices index rate of inflation, a real terms pay cut of about £5,300. (CPI does not include housing costs, however, which if applied would reduce that deficit somewhat.)

Addressing Holyrood’s finance and public administration committee, Carlaw said:

I do not say this to virtue signal, but to counter the inevitable reporting of any increase that is generated by actions of the corporate body, and point out that that still leaves us behind Westminster and the Senedd when the initial arrangement between the three parliaments was that the Scottish parliament MSP sat in the middle of the street.

Office staffing costs for MSPs would rise by the same rate to £169,000 per member, while the parliament’s overall budget would rise to £150m, equivalent to 0.255% of the Scottish government’s overall budget of £60bn.

Carlaw noted that that budget was, in cash terms, twice as large as Holyrood’s budget in 2007. But he said that while day to day costs were being cut, rising staffing costs and costs for next May’s parliament election had driven up overall spending.

Liz Kendall, the science secretary, has said that sexualised deepfake content being produced by Grok AI on Elon Musk’s X social media platform is “absolutely appalling, and unacceptable in decent society”.

As Amelia Gentleman, Helena Horton and Dan Milmo report in our story on this from yesterday, there has been a growing outcry over the way X (formerly Twitter) has an AI feature that allows users to create degrading images of children and women with their clothes digitally removed.

Despite multiple global protesters, and investigations being launched by regulators, the problem does not yet seem to have been resolved.

The issue is particularly embarrassing for the government for two reasons. First, only last month Keir Starmer specifically said the government would ban apps that allow this sort of image to be created. He said:

We are going to aim to make it impossible for children to take, share or view a nude image, and we’re banning apps that create deepfakes.

Starmer posted that message on X. And the Grok semi-naked deepfake feature is also awkward for the government because it has revived complaints about why the government continues to use X as a communications platform when, even before this scandal was exposed, it was already reviled for weak moderation policies that have led to a surge of hate speech on the platform.

Yesterday, when asked about the problem and why it was continuing to use X, Downing Street said that it always kept its communication strategy under review and that the Online Safety Act was designed to address this sort of problem. Ofcom also announced it was urgently contacting X to find out what it was doing to ensure it complied with the law.

Today Liz Kendall, the science secretary, has intervened with a statement saying that the sexualise deepfake content produced by Grok was “absolutely appalling” and that she would back Ofcom in taking any enforcement action.

She said:

What we have been seeing online in recent days has been absolutely appalling, and unacceptable in decent society.

No one should have to go through the ordeal of seeing intimate deepfakes of themselves online. We cannot and will not allow the proliferation of these demeaning and degrading images, which are disproportionately aimed at women and girls.

X needs to deal with this urgently. It is absolutely right that Ofcom is looking into this as a matter of urgency and it has my full backing to take any enforcement action it deems necessary.

Services and operators have a clear obligation to act appropriately. This is not about restricting freedom of speech but upholding the law.

We have made intimate image abuse and cyberflashing priority offences under the Online Safety Act – including where images are AI-generated. This means platforms must prevent such content from appearing online and act swiftly to remove it if it does.

Violence against women and girls stains our society – and that is why we have also legislated to ban the creation of explicit deepfakes without consent, which are both degrading and harmful.

Make no mistake - the UK will not tolerate the endless proliferation of disgusting and abusive material online. We must all come together to stamp it out.

Kendall did not address the calls for the government to stop using X. But in the Lords yesterday Ruth Anderson, a government whip (formerly Ruth Smeeth, when she was a Labour MP), answered a question about this. She said that with 19.2 million Britons using X, and 10.8 million families describing it as their main source, the government still felt it worth posting on the platform. She said:

The government use an audience-first approach, assessing all communication channels against the GCS [government communication service] Safe framework. Paid advertising on X has been suspended since April 2023; the platform is used only for organic content. We continuously evaluate all channels’ value for money and brand safety and use a wide range of digital platforms to reach all UK audiences.

Anderson herself has not posted on X since December 2024.

Some organisations have already left X because of the way the platform has become more toxic under Musk. In November 2024 the Guardian announced that it was no longer using for any of its official accounts, although we still consult it as a news source and some journalists still post there.

An X spokesperson said:

We take action against illegal content on X, including child sexual abuse material (CSAM), by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary.

Downing Street has declined to back Kemi Badenoch’s claim that the American operation to depose and arrest Nicolás Maduro was “morally” right. (See 9.20am.)

At the lobby briefing this morning, asked if Keir Starmer agreed with the Tory leader’s comment, the PM’s spokesperson said:

The prime minister is a world leader, not a commentator [giving] a running commentary on foreign policy decisions taken by other countries and I’m not going to get drawn into that now.

But we’ve also been very clear abour our views on the fall of the Maduro regime. It turned a functioning democracy into a hub for organised crime with corrupt ties to Iran and Hezbollah, aligned support from Russia, involvement in illicit finance, sanctions evasion, narcotics trafficking and illegal gold trading. We are on the side of the Venezuelan people as they look towards a peaceful transition to a democratic government.

The spokesperson adopted a similar line about not wanting to give a “running commentary” on global affairs when asked about Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, saying that Greenland should “obviously ... be part of the US”. The spokesperson referred to the statement signed by Starmer and other EU leaders (see 12.57pm), but said he would not provide a commentary on every remark coming out of the US.

But, when asked about Miller’s comment about might being right (“we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power”), and whether Starmer agreed, the spokesperson did give a substantive answer – albeit one that was a bit waffly. He said:

There have always been moments that lead us to question whether the rules-based international order is working as intended. The prime minister has alluded to that by repeatedly saying the world is more volatile than ever before.

But he’s clear that he has the prosperity and security of the UK at the forefront of his mind in every international engagement that he undertakes. And defending democracy, standing up for human rights and the rule of law are obviously principles that this prime minister cares about deeply.

Whilst there are obvious threats to that world order, our strategic partnerships with our allies are as close as ever. And we remain clear-eyed about the challenges we face and the complex issues we have to navigate that.

But this prime minister is clear that by investing in our defence, and by building stronger partnerships, we can protect our interests and be strong abroad.

But the spokesperson refused to accept the argument that the US might be one of the “obvious threats to … world order”. Asked to say where the threats were coming from, he cited Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Asked if Starmer regarded Trump as a threat to European security, the spokesperson replied: “No.”

Downing Street has declined to say whether it regards Delcy Rodriguez, who has been approved by the US as the interim leader of Venezuela, as the new, legitimate leader of the country.

Rodriguez was vice president before Nicolás Maduro, the president, was seized by US forces on Saturday and taken to the US where is now in jail and facing criminal charges.

At the No 10 lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson said there there was no update on whether UK sanctions on Rodriguez would be lifted.

Asked if the UK regarded her as a legitimate president, the spokesperson said:

It’s a fast-moving situation. We are focused on supporting stability in Venezuela and the best interests of the Venezuelan people.

Keir Starmer has joined the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and Denmark in releasing a joint statement on Greenland saying the Arctic territory belongs to Denmark.

Here is the text.

Frances Mao has more on this on our Europe live blog.

Before Christmas Keir Starmer was hoping to use this week to highlight the government’s determination to bring down the cost of living for people. As explained on the blog yesterday, Donald Trump has blown this out of the news with his raid on Venezuela.

But Starmer has not abandoned the plan and, according to a Labour readout from the political cabinet this morning, he told his colleagues that the government should “keep a relentless focus on the cost of living, show relentless delivery of change people can feel and bring relentless clarity to drawing the choice ahead”.

Referring to that choice, Starmer said:

A Labour government renewing the country or a Reform movement that feeds on grievance, decline and division.

They want a weaker state, they want to inject bile into our communities, they want to appease Putin. This is the fight of our political lives and one that we must relish.

Starmer also urged his ministers to ignore the polls

I do not underestimate the scale of the task. But I have no doubt about this team. Governments do not lose because polls go down. They lose when they lose belief or nerve. We will do neither.

(While Starmer is right to say that politicians should not be paralysed by poor poll ratings, because they can change a lot over three years [and sometimes they were wrong too], they can’t ignore polls either. Governments may not lose because polls go down, but normally they do lose when polls go down. A YouGov poll out today has Labour for the first time in third place behind Reform UK and the Tories. See 10.44am.)

Lucy Powell, the deputy Labour leader, attended politcal cabinet. According to the readout, she thanked Starmer and his team “embracing me as deputy leader” and said that she relished “helping to tell the story of whose side we are on”.

Ministers then discussed “successful recoveries of centre-left parties in Norway, Australia and Canada through focussing on delivery and cost of living issues”.

In her Today programme interview this morning Kemi Badenoch tried to outflank Nigel Farage on net zero scepticism by claiming (wrongly) that she started talking out this before he did.

Asked by the presenter, Nick Robinson, to give an example of a single policy that the Conservatives would implement to boost economic growth, Badenoch said that they would allow more drilling for oil in the North Sea.

When Robinson said it was interesting to note that she was proposing a policy that Farage had been championing for years, Badenoch did not accept that. She said that she had a long history of being sceptical about net zero targets and she claimed that, when the Theresa May government legislated for the 2050 net zero target in 2019, she was the only Tory MP who questioned whether this was affordable. She went on:

There wasn’t a Reform party then …

I have always been a net zero sceptic, even in government. I was the one who argued that we need to bring back some of these targets … I’ve been consistent. Nigel Farage is following me.

Badenoch is right to say that, in 2019, when MPs were debating the order setting 2050 as the net zero target, she questioned whether this was achievable. But her intervention in the short debate as a backbencher consisted of two sentences, and she did not vote against the move.

But Farage has been a climate change sceptic for years. In 2015, as Ukip leader, he was telling interviewers that he hadn’t “got a clue whether climate change is being driven by carbon-dioxide emissions” and that efforts to cut carbon production in the UK made “no sense at all”. The VoteClimate website has an archive of his historic tweets about climate change here.

Asked if she thought it would be better to have Farage as PM or Keir Starmer, Badenoch said they were both “bad in different ways”. She explained:

Keir Starmer doesn’t have a plan, doesn’t have an agenda. He’s weak.

Nigel Farage is a one-man band who is all about himself and would make a mess of things. [He] doesn’t do detail.

We need a serious, credible, competent party [the Conservatives].

There were three urgent questions in the Commons yesterday, and two statements. Some of them were unusually long, which meant that the final statement, from Hamish Falconer, the Middle East minister, did not start until 8.30pm. In it, he said that what was happening as a result of Israel blocking aid getting into Gaza was “unforgiveable”.

He said:

More trucks are entering Gaza, and this is very welcome, but right now, key crossings remain closed, convoys are being turned back, medical and shelter supplies are blocked, and NGOs are being banned.

We joined nine other countries in stating that this is not acceptable, over the recess. The peace plan cannot work if NGOs are shut out. Israel’s decision to ban 37 of them is unjustifiable.

Furthermore, many trucks entering Gaza carry commercial goods, which face fewer barriers than humanitarian aid.

This means, perversely, it is currently easier to get cigarettes and luxury goods into Gaza than the basic medicines and shelter that people so desperately need.

Too much aid is still stuck at Gaza’s borders. Thousands of tents and shelter supplies funded by the UK are waiting to get in.

Families are sheltering from winter floods and storms under rubble. They are suffering from hypothermia and sewage running in the streets. This is unforgivable.

Peers inflicted four defeats on the government last night as they debated the bill to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, PA Media reports. PA says:

The government signed a treaty back in May to return sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, which will also see Britain lease back the strategically important military base on Diego Garcia – the largest island within the remote Indian Ocean archipelago.

As well as establishing a £40m fund for Chagossians expelled from the islands, the UK has agreed to pay Mauritius at least £120m annually during the 99-year agreement, a total cost in cash terms of at least £13bn.

The Diego Garcia military base and British Indian Ocean Territory bill has already passed the Commons. But, at third reading in the Lords yesterday, peers backed by 194 votes to 130 – a majority of 64 – a Tory measure which would force the government to publish the total cost of the payments to be made to Mauritius, including the full methodology used in the calculation.

Peers went on to narrowly vote by 131 to 127 – a majority of four - for a Liberal Democrat provision that would ensure parliamentary oversight over UK government spending linked to the treaty, which would also allow MPs to halt payments if Mauritius was judged to have breached the terms of the deal.

In an earlier government setback, the Lords supported by 210 votes to 132 – a majority of 78 – a Liberal Democrat change requiring a referendum among the Chagossian community on whether the transfer deal adequately guaranteed their rights to resettlement, consultation and participation in decision-making along with a government response to the result.

Peers also voted by 132 to 124 – a majority of eight – in favour of a demand by former military chiefs that payments linked to the agreement would cease if the military base on Diego Garcia could no longer be used for a range of reasons from environmental changes and legal restrictions to an attack by a hostile state.

Wes Streeting, the health secretary, was doing a media round on behalf of the government this morning. Like Kemi Badenoch (see 9.20am), he also acknowledged that support for the rules-based international order was weakening. But he sounded less willing than she was to accept this. He told GB News:

The UK supports the rules-based international system. We have seen it creaking at the seams, and now we see it disintegrating.

It is our responsibility collectively to rebuild the rules-based international system, because a world in which countries are abiding by the same rules and working with each other is a world in which we are all safer, but we are a far cry from where we have been, sadly, since the Second World War in terms of upholding that rules-based international system.

Keir Starmer has told his cabinet ministers that 2026 will be the year when they need to show that “renewal is becoming reality”.

Speaking at the start of this morning’s political cabinet, he said:

This will be an important year as we show that renewal is becoming reality and that Britain is turning the corner.

Getting our country back on track is hard, difficult work and we will reject the politics of easy answers and gimmicks that, frankly, got us here in the first place.

At the next general election we will be judged on whether we’ve delivered on things that really matter, do people feel better off, are public services improving – for which they will look to the NHS – and do people feel more safe and secure in their own community?

They are the issues we will be judged on at the next general election, that is our focus.

In her Today programme interview, Kemi Badenoch also claimed that Brexit was not working because the UK is not “doing anything with it”.

Badenoch was an enthusiastic supporter of Brexit, even though she was not an MP at the time of the 2016 referendum, and as a minister she was seen as a keen Brexiter.

Asked by Nick Robinson, the presenter, how she thought Brexit was going, on a scale of one to 10, Badenoch replied:

We’re not doing anything with it, that’s the problem.

Asked again how it was going, she said:

We successfully left the European Union, so 10 out of 10 for leaving. But using the opportunity – we’re not using the opportunity …

What I’m saying is that nothing’s happening. Nothing’s happening.

We need to compete aggressively with other countries. We need to be close with Europe, not run by Europe. That is Conservative policy. Let’s stay close to our regional and international allies. But sovereignty matters.

Britain formally left the EU in 2020 when Boris Johnson – like Badenoch, a hardline Brexiter – was prime minister. Some rightwingers argue that the UK would thrive outside the EU if it deregulated more aggressively, and diverged more from the EU. But in the four years they were in office after Brexit, the Tories did not implement the sort of policies Badenoch seems to be proposing because they judged they would not benefit the economy.

Recent research says Brexit has cut the UK’s GDP by between 6% and 8%.

A new plan to protect public services from cyber threats has been published today, PA Media reports. PA says:

The government has set out measures to make online services more secure and give the public confidence that their data is protected when applying for benefits, paying taxes or accessing healthcare.

The cyber action plan, backed by £210m, aims to highlight where risks lie across government and take joined-up action across departments as well as speeding up reactions to attacks.

It comes amid efforts to digitise services, which the government hopes will reduce phone queues and paperwork and says could unlock up to £45bn in savings.

Digital government minister Ian Murray said: “Cyber attacks can take vital public services offline in minutes – disrupting our digital services and our very way of life. This plan sets a new bar to bolster the defences of our public sector, putting cyber-criminals on warning that we are going further and faster to protect the UK’s businesses and public services alike.”

Labour will switch to an “incumbency first” model to protect MPs at the next election rather than targeting seats, the deputy leader, Lucy Powell, has told Labour MPs. Jessica Elgot has the story.

Good morning. Over the last three days it has been hard to find anyone in British politics willing to defend the US raid on Venezuela leading to the capture of its president, Nicolás Maduro. In the Commons last night, Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, engaged in a delicate balancing act – stressing the UK’s support for international law, while doing her best not to criticise the fairly blatant US breach of it – as MPs from all the main parties lined up to demand a more robust pushback against Donald Trump.

But this morning Kemi Badenoch has defended the US president. At the weekend, her initial response was much like Keir Starmer’s – noncommittal, and claiming that she could not give a proper view until more information was available. Even yesterday she was still broadly still sitting on the fence.

However, this morning, in a long interview with the Today programme (which is promising in-depth, start-of-year interviews with all the main party leaders), she declared that what Trump did was “morally … the right thing to do”. She also implied that faith in the rules-based international order, sustained by international law, was overrated because the world did not operate like that any more.

When it was put to her that Margaret Thatcher condemned the US invasion of Grenada in 1983, Badenoch said that Thatcher was right at the time, but that Trump’s action was different. She went on:

Venezuela was a brutal regime. We didn’t even recognise it as a legitimate government. I think that what’s happened is quite extraordinary. But I understand why America has done it.

And the reason why I say this is because, where the legal certainty is not yet clear, morally I do think it was the right thing to do.

Badenoch said she was saying this because she was different from other party leaders and MPs.

I grew up under a military dictatorship [in Nigeria], so I know what it’s like to have someone like Maduro in charge. I know what it’s like to have people celebrating in the street. So I’m not condemning the US.

Asked again if sending special forces in to seize Maduro was the right thing to do, Badenoch replied: “Morally, yes.”

Badenoch did say that the invastion raised “serious questions about the rules-based order”. But, in another shift from the position adopted by Keir Starmer, she went on to question how robust the rules-based international actually is any more. She explained:

As we all know, international law is what countries agree to. Once people decide they don’t agree, there is no international law. There’s no world police, no world government, no world court. These are agreements.

And when we look at what the opposition leader, María Machado, said, she said Venezuela had already been invaded. It had been invaded by Russia, by Iran, by Hezbollah. Where were the people talking about international law then?

Badenoch was then asked if she agreed with Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, who said yesterday that “we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Badenoch implied that she did. She replied:

The US has actually been saying this for a very long time. I remember as trade secretary, the US has basically walked away from the World Trade Organization saying that everybody else was breaking the rules, China in particular, and if people weren’t following the rules, there was no rules-based order.

And we go through the motions, we act as if it is still 1995, we were living off the peace dividend of the cold war and World War Two.

The world has changed. What I want to see is a strong Britain. We can’t control everything that the US does. Venezuela is very far away from here. It’s not Grenada, for example. But what they do respect is strength. And we are getting weaker.

This is quite a bold position to take, not least because it is at odds with what most Britons think.

I will post more from the interview shortly.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9am: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet. Most of the meeting will be devoted to a political cabinet, where civil servants leave the room and ministers focus on party political matters – such as the Scottish parliament, Welsh Senedd and English local elections in May.

10am: Dave Hinton, chief executive of South East Water, gives evidence to the Commons environment committee about the Tunbridge Wells water shortage last month.

10.30am: Stephen Doughty, a Foreign Office minister, gives evidence to the Commons foreign affairs committee as part of its inquiry into “Disinformation diplomacy: How malign actors are seeking to undermine democracy”.

Morning: Kemi Badenoch is on a visit in London.

11.30am: Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

Noon: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

Afternoon: Keir Starmer joins other European leaders in Paris for a meeting of the “coalition of the willing” group willing to provide security guarantees to Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, and Donald Trump’s advisers Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are attending. A press conference is due at around 5.45pm.Frances Mao will be leading our coverage of this on the Europe live blog.

2pm: The Commons business committee takes evidence from former post office operators, laywers, the Post Office, ministers, and others about progress in Post Office Horizon scandal compensation payments.

2.30pm: Craig Guildford, chief constable of West Midlands police and Mike O’Hara, an assistant chief constable at WMP, give evidence to the Commons home affairs committee about claims they misrepresented the intelligence they used to justify their call for a ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans attending the Villa Park match last year.

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UPDATE: I have corrected the agenda because Dave Hinton is chief executive of South East Water, not South West Water as it originally said.