Michael Forsyth, the former Tory cabinet minister, has been elected as the new Lord Speaker. He got 56.3% of the vote, beating Deborah Bull, a crossbencher and former artistic director of the Royal Opera House.

Forsyth got 383 votes and Bull got 297. Of the 814 peers eligble to vote, 680 (83.5%) participated. Forsyth, who joined the Lords in 1999 and who has been chair of the Lords economic affairs committee and chair of the association of Conservative peers, replaces Lord McFall, a former Labour MP.

Forsyth said:

I would like to thank all my supporters for the trust and confidence they have shown in me. I am grateful too to my opponent Baroness Bull who ran a vigorous, courteous, and friendly campaign.

I would also like to pay tribute to Lord McFall the outgoing Lord Speaker. He has made great strides in improving the governance of the House and the accountability of the administration to members. I intend to build on that work as chair of the House of Lords Commission and Lord Speaker.

Helena Horton is a Guardian reporter.

Jess Asato, a Labour MP and campaigner against AI nudification, said the abuse was still happening to her on X as of this morning.

She said explicit and degrading images were being created using the Grok app – which is also available separately from X – and other AI apps and posted on X, because she was speaking against Musk’s platform. She said:

It’s still happening to me and being posted on X because I speak up about it.

Thankfully it’s just bikinis, no one has properly nudified me yet. Just this morning someone has made me of a tradwife with a massive pregnant tummy. It’s like they’re saying, this is where you should be, this is your role, you should be a baby birthing machine. This has disturbed me weirdly more than the bikini pictures.

The MP added that “thousands of people” had sent hateful messages and AI-augmented images of her as a result of her campaign to ban AI nudification.

She added:

There are users themselves telling me they are still able to create images of women nudified and they don’t necessarily have to pay for it. So many people are able to do it without paying, on the Grok app. We need the nudification to stop. There are thousands of these apps still generating this content. Women are not consenting to being digitally stripped.

Nadhim Zahawi approached Kemi Badenoch’s team about trying to become a Tory peer – only to defect to Reform UK after being told he would not get one, Pippa Crerar reports.

❤️‍🔥Tory sources confirm that Nadhim Zahawi made approaches to senior members of Kemi Badenoch’s team about getting a peerage just weeks before defecting to Reform UK - but was turned down.

Tory source: “Nadhim asked for a peerage several times. Given he was sacked for his dodgy tax affairs, this was never going to happen. His defection tells you everything you need to know about Reform being a repository for disgraced politicians.”

The Telegraph’s Tony Diver has been given the same briefing.

Nadhim Zahawi was denied a Conservative peerage weeks before he defected to Reform, Tory sources claim.

Zahawi said to have made “multiple approaches” in late 2024, asking to be on the most recent political peerages list.

“We were very clear he wasn’t going to get one.”

Zahawi is said to have made approaches in person and on the phone to senior members of Kemi Badenoch’s team. Tories say he was told that he was “not suitable” for elevation because of his resignation from the Sunak cabinet over unpaid tax.

Zahawi does not dispute that he discussed a peerage, but says he has a “message from the top that they want to look at elevating me” and said he was told he would be contacted again about it in 2026.

Tory defections are becoming relatively commonplace now, but there was still something striking about Nigel Farage being able to unveil Nadhim Zahawi as a new recruit this morning. There are now at least 22 former Tory MPs in Reform UK (there is a list of 20 of them here, plus Ben Bradley, plus Zahawi), and that is not including the two former Tory MPs who are now Reform UK MPs (Lee Anderson and Danny Kruger).

Almost without exception, recruits from the Tories to Farage have all come from the more shifty, opportunist wing of the party (other adjectives are available) and Zahawi, who called on Boris Johnson to quit only 24 hours after agreeing to serve him loyally as chancellor and who was later sacked from cabinet by Rishi Sunak over an ethics breach, won’t do anything to change the Lib Dem thesis about what is happening. (See 1.13pm.)

But Zahawi is still technically the most senior person to cross the floor. As vaccines minister during Covid, he established a higher profile than most cabinet minsters. And, above all, his defection implies some sort of snowball effect is underway, and that there is an inevitability about Reform UK eclipsing the Tories.

Farage always insists, and did again this morning, that the two parties are different. And the Conservative party is also happy to claim that the two organisations remain very distinct. But the Tory statement (see 1.23pm) today was a masterclass in wishful thinking. Farage’s party does not support higher welfare spending and higher taxes, with each defection the “one man band” claim becomes a bit weaker, and it is hard to describe Reform UK as has-beens when their polling still looks so encouraging.

But perhaps the debate about whether or not Reform UK will replace the Conservatives as the UK’s party of the right is misframed. Instead, arguably the Tories are regenerating, like Dr Who, with a new name and a new identity, but in other respects just an update on what was there before. Watching the press conference this morning, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that, whatever Farage says, a Reform UK government would heavily infused with Tory DNA.

Zahawi’s defection means the competition for who might be chancellor in a Reform UK government has just opened up. Richard Tice and Zia Yusuf were seen as the lead candidates, but today Zahawi sounded up for a big job.

Or Lord Zahawi, as he may end up. Last week, in an interview with Danny Kruger for the Spectator, Tim Shipman said that Kruger believes Farage might have to appoint 500 new peers to be sure of getting his plans through the upper house. That is a lot of potential peerages for people who have yet to defect. At the press conference this morning, Zahawi did not sound unhappy about the prospect that his name might be on that list.

And this is what the Tories are saying about the loss of Nadhim Zahawi. A Conservative spokesperson said:

Reform is fast becoming the party of has-been politicians looking for their next gravy train. Their latest recruit used to say he’d be ‘frightened to live in a country’ run by Nigel Farage, which shows the level of loyalty for sale.

Reform want higher welfare spending and higher taxes. They are a one-man band with no plan for our country. Under Kemi Badenoch the Conservatives are demonstrating we have the plan, the competence and the team to get Britain working again.

And the Liberal Democrats say that the Nadhim Zahawi defection to Reform UK shows that Nigel Farage’s party is becoming “a retirement home for disgraced former Conservative ministers”.

Manuela Perteghella, who took Stratford-upon-Avon, Zahawi’s former seat, for the Lib Dems at the last election said:

Reform is becoming a retirement home for disgraced former Conservative ministers.

Zahawi served under Liz Truss and Boris Johnson and now he’s being championed by Nigel Farage.

It’s no wonder voters in Stratford kicked out the Conservatives at the last election and put their trust in the Liberal Democrats.

Labour has issued a response to Nadhim Zahawi joining Reform UK from Anna Turley, the Labour party chair. She says:

This confirms what we already knew: Reform UK has no shame. Nadhim Zahawi is a discredited and disgraced politician who will be forever tied to the Tories’ shameful record of failure in government.

Zahawi himself has previously repeatedly lambasted his new boss over his divisive and extreme rhetoric - and Farage has said that Zahawi has no principles and is only interested in climbing the greasy pole. This shameless scurry of yet another failed Tory over to Reform will tell people everything they need to know about both of them.

The final question at the press conference went to Daisy Eastlake from the Times. At Reform UK press conferences, the news organisations deemed hostile to the party (eg, the Guardian, the Daily Mirror etc) normally get called last – although, Farage does make a point of taking questions from every reporter who wants to ask one, which is not what most other party leaders do. Normally the Times gets called quite early. But it must be on the naughty step because of it investigation into Laila Cunningham published last week.

Q: Last week you said that the chief constable of West Midlands police, Craig Guildford, should be sacked for supposedly misrepresenting the evidence used by his force to justice the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans ban. When does that need to happen?

Farage said he was amazed that Guilford has not been sacked already. He claimed that Guildford “hasn’t just lied to everybody, but he’s literally kowtowed to … a form of violent extremism”.

Zahawi said he found the Maccabi Tel Aviv ban really serious. He went on:

The message this sends is so dangerous and corrosive to our country. Why do I say that? Because the question is, who controls our streets?

If the police force in the West Midlands needed additional support, they should have called the home secretary and the defence secretary and got the army in.

No way should we allow Islamist thugs and terrorists to feel that they can have control of our streets.

He suggested Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, would have a “serious problem” if she did not sack Guildford today.

The Times has a story today by Eastlake, Geraldine Scott and David Woode saying that the Commons home affairs committee, which took evidence again from Guildford last week about this matter, is gearing up to call for his sacking or resignation. They say:

Members of the home affairs select committee are understood to be “unanimous in their disappointment” at the evidence given by the force, with several believing it had “retrospectively gathered evidence to suit their decision making” rather than basing the ban on genuine intelligence at the time.

Pressure is mounting on Craig Guildford, the West Midlands chief constable, to go after Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were barred from travelling to the game at Villa Park in November by the local Safety Advisory Group (SAG), which cited safety concerns based on advice from the police force …

One MP told The Times that sacking Guildford would be “the nuclear option” but said there was now “no other option” if their suspicions were confirmed that the force had given a misleading account.

The committee has a Tory chair but a Labour majority.

Q: What is your response to the fact that there are now 34 contemporaries of Nigel Farage at Dulwich College who recall Farage being racist when he was a pupil there?

Farage says there are so many allegations of racism being thrown around the whole time that they “almost become meaningless”.

Zahawi says, anticipating this question, he made a point of looking up all the things in Britain that have been called racist. He says the list includes coffee, picnics, electricity and mathematics. He claims this shows that this line of criticism is “a joke”.

Farage says even the Traitors has been called racist, by the Guardian. He must be referring to this.

Zahawi also says, if he thought Farage were racist, he would not be sharing a platform with him.

Q: Would you refuse to pay if the EU includes an exit payment in any new deal with the UK to reduce SPS checks?

Farage says:

The tragedy of Brexit is we didn’t do it.

We had the pandemic and that’s that. That’s the argument that always gets made. We had the pandemic, therefore we didn’t get time.

For Keir Starmer to realign with single market rules is easy because we never, ever took the opportunity or the potential advantage of moving away from it. So I’m absolutely furious at both of them.

But he also says he is not convinced that Starmer would “sign up to something as treacherous as this”.

Q: [To Farage] You say you would not support troop deployments to Ukraine. And you think Nato expansion was a mistake.Would you support the continuation of UK troop deployments at the eastern border of Nato territory?

Farage says he said in 2014 that Nato expansion would provoke Russia.

But he supports Nato, he says. And he says Trump has been good for Nato because he has led to other Nato countries increasing defence spending.

Q: [To Farage] A report in the Sunday Times yesterday said that Donald Trump has lost faith in you because he does not think you are for real. Are you for real?

Farage says he met Trump at Mar-A-Lago in November and Trump has always been “enormously supportive” of him.

He says they do not see eye to everything.

Referring to the report, he says:

Sometimes journalists write things that may not necessarily be wholly true.

Q: [To Zahawi] The speaker at the Reform UK conference actually blamed the policy that you implemented for the king’s cancer. And, at that conference, David Bull, the party chair, said the speaker was contributing to Reform’s policy on this.

Farage intervenes. He says Bull spoke about this at the Reform UK rally on Friday night in London. He said he was proud of the UK’s record on vaccines.

Zahawi tells the journalist that he asked a “really stupid question” and that he expected better of him.

(It was not a stupid question at all. It was a fair one, which Zahawi refused to address.)

Farage and Zahawi are now taking questions.

Q: [From the BBC’s Iain Watson] You were sacked from cabinet over your tax affairs. Aren’t you an establishment figure yourself?

Zahawi says the mistake he made was not being specifici in the settlement he made with HM Revenue and Customs to the Cabinet Office.

Farage says in the US most successful people in business have had some failures. So he was not surprised to see his new mayoral candidate, Laila Cunningham, attacked in a paper last week over some past business failures.

On Zahawi’s tax affairs, he says “there’s nobody with a complex business empire that does not have to have negotiations at some point with HMRC”.

Zahawi says he accepts that the Conservatives are to blame for some of the problems facinng the country.

Since leaving parliament, I have been reflecting on the successes and failures of my old party’s time in government, and I rue the timidity, even at times the weakness, with which we try to deal with the problems of the country.

My analysis is that a huge culprit is the over-mighty bureaucratic inertia that now dominates and runs the country, that has taken control of swathes of the economy and, with barely a shrug of the shoulders, restricts the individual liberty of each and every one of us.

Zahawi says he has always defended civil servants as individually. But collectively they have turned the UK into “an administrative state”, he says.

He says MPs have been “terrified of the awesome power and the sacred responsible that the British constitution bestowed upon our ancient and sovereign parliament”.

So it is time for another glorious revolution to get us back to a fully sovereign parliament.

He goes on:

Britain needs Reform.

My own party, and by definition to some extent me personally, should share some blame for the continuation of the Blairite constitutional vandalism and our failure, to coin a phrase, to take back control from the rich powers of the unelected bureaucracy.

Now, Conservatives did some important work stabilising the economy in the early years after Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s destructive reign, reforming education and welfare.

But failures on mass migration, failure to strengthen our armed forces or even protect special forces from insane government lawyers, and bad virtue signalling legislation that has made us less competitive and less prosperous, to name but a few – these have provided me with painful lessons learnt that will, I hope, benefit this great new team.

Nadhim Zahawi is speaking now. He says “Britain needs Nigel Farage as prime minister”.

His declaration will come as a shock to his old colleagues, he says. But he says other people will not be surprised.

We can all see that our beautiful, ancient, kind, magical island story has reached a dark and dangerous chapter.

He says in Westminster people may think things are going fine.

But that is not the experience of people around the country, if they are trying to get a GP appointment, or if they want to express an opinion on X, or if they just want their children “to be taught facts, not harmful fictions at school”, or if they are being “crushed into the dirt by ever growing taxes”.

Addressing these people, he says:

You know in your heart of hearts that our wonderful country is sick.

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is holding his press conference now.

He has unveiled Nadhim Zahawi, the former Tory chancellor (if only for a two months), as a defector to his party.

There is a live feed here.

Here is the Ofcom statement about the Grok AI investigation.

And here is an extract.

Our initial assessment

There have been deeply concerning reports of the Grok AI chatbot account on X being used to create and share undressed images of people – which may amount to intimate image abuse or pornography – and sexualised images of children that may amount to child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

As the UK’s independent online safety watchdog, we urgently made contact with X on Monday 5 January and set a firm deadline of Friday 9 January for it to explain what steps it has taken to comply with its duties to protect its users in the UK.

The company responded by the deadline, and we carried out an expedited assessment of available evidence as a matter of urgency.

What our investigation will examine

Ofcom has decided to open a formal investigation to establish whether X has failed to comply with its legal obligations under the Online Safety Act – in particular, to:

-assess the risk of people in the UK seeing content that is illegal in the UK, and to carry out an updated risk assessment before making any significant changes to their service;

-take appropriate steps to prevent people in the UK from seeing ‘priority’ illegal content – including non-consensual intimate images and CSAM;

-take down illegal content swiftly when they become aware of it;

-have regard to protecting users from a breach of privacy laws;

-assess the risk their service poses to UK children, and to carry out an updated risk assessment before making any significant changes to their service; and

use highly effective age assurance to protect UK children from seeing pornography.

Ofcom’s role

The legal responsibility is on platforms to decide whether content breaks UK laws, and they can use our Illegal Content Judgements Guidance when making these decisions. Ofcom is not a censor – we do not tell platforms which specific posts or accounts to take down.

Our job is to judge whether sites and apps have taken appropriate steps to protect people in the UK from content that is illegal in the UK, and protect UK children from other content that is harmful to them, such as pornography.

Ofcom’s investigation process

The Online Safety Act sets out the process Ofcom must follow when investigating a company and deciding whether it has failed to comply with its legal obligations.

Our first step is to gather and analyse evidence to determine whether a breach has occurred. If, based on that evidence, we consider that a compliance failure has taken place, we will issue a provisional decision to the company, who will then have an opportunity to respond our findings in full, as required by the Act, before we make our final decision.

Ofcom has launched a formal investigation into X’s AI tool, Grok, over it being used to create sexualised imagery of women and children, Sky News is reporting.

In an interview on the Today programme this morning, Sadiq Khan revived speculation that he will not stand for a further term as London mayor.

Khan was first elected London mayor in 2016 and he is the only London mayor to have been elected (in 2024) for a third term in office. In Labour circles it is taken as almost certain that he won’t run for a fourth term.

But, in an interview on LBC in September last year, Khan muddied this assumption by declaring that he did intend to stand for a fourth term. “There is no reason I would give this job up for another job in politics,” he said. “I love what I am doing.”

The next mayoral election will be in 2028.

Today, in an interview on the Today programme, Khan did not repeat the LBC line. Instead, when asked if he would run again, he just replied:

The last election I fought and won is nearer than the next one, so ask me again in a year’s time.

In a post last year on his London Centric Substack, Jim Waterson said that the Khan LBC interview took place at a time when the papers were full of speculation about Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham returning to parliament to challenge for the Labour leadership and Khan was just trying to assure people that he was not planning something similar; Khan did not mean to commit to a fourth term, Waterson said.

London Centric has been told that the mayor’s intention had been to shut down speculation that he might consider double-jobbing by holding a Westminster seat at the same time as the mayoral role — only to accidentally inflame speculation.

Instead, the official line remains one of constructive ambiguity — with Khan aware that acknowledging any intention to stand down at the end of his term in 2028 would leave him as a ‘lame duck’ mayor, which inevitably causes power to drain away.

Waterson also pointed out that Dawn Butler, who is a friend of Khan’s, is actively campaigning to be Labour’s next candidate for mayor. He said Khan would not be letting her waste her time on this if he intended to be the 2028 candidate himself.

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is holding another press conference today. Last week he held one that was largely devoted to the crime late in London, which he depicted as a ghastly hellhole where it wasn’t safe to walk the streets. He and Laila Cunningham, his candidate for mayor in London, claimed the capital used to be safer in the past.

Today Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, is highlighting postive crime figures for London. As Vikram Dodd reports, the murder rate is at its lowest level for a decade.

Khan has written about this in an article for the Guardian. He says:

London’s homicide rate is lower than rates in New York, Berlin, Brussels, Milan, Toronto and Paris, five times lower than the rate in LA, and almost 12 times lower than the rate in Chicago. Last year, the capital recorded the fewest number of homicides of victims aged under 25 this century. Our homicide rate for under-25s is now three times lower than it was when I set the VRU up in 2019, and hospital admissions of young people for knife assault have fallen by 43% in the same period.

The success of our crackdown on violent crime means Londoners are safer in their homes and on our streets.

Khan and Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan police commissioner, have both been giving interviews this morning. Cunningham says Rowley should be sacked. Speaking to Times Radio, Rowley did not criticise Reform UK directly, but he said that surveys show that people who live in London feel safe. He said it was people who don’t live in London who think that it isn’t safe, because of the “rhetoric” they hear, he said.

He went on:

London is getting safer. And don’t just judge it on what I say. Casualty departments are seeing far fewer people coming in with assault based injuries. The footfall in the West End in December was up on last year. And I saw some recent YouGov survey data that said well over 80% of Londoners feel safe in London.

So this isn’t just about my data, this is how people feel. These are the facts. The fact that so much public debate is now more on sort of rhetoric than it is on facts is not my responsibility.

Rowley accepted that shoplifting was a problem in London. But he said shoplifting prosecutions were doubling.

Good morning. We are expecting developments this week in relation to Grok AI sexualised deepfakes scandal, which meant users of Elon Musk’s X social media platform have been able to digitally undress women and children. An announcement on Friday that this service would only be available to paid subscribers was taken by No 10 as evidence the platform had yet to grasp why this was so objectionable, and Liz Kendall, the tech secretary, said that Ofcom must act “in days, not weeks”. That was three days ago.

Kendall is expected to make a statement on this to MPs today.

Peter Kyle, the business secretary, and Kendall’s predecessor as business secretary, has been giving interviews this morning (mostly about other matters – more on those later) and, when asked on LBC why the government was waiting for Ofcom to take a decision, he replied:

Because the law requires us to.

The law requires Ofcom as an independent enforcer and regulator to enforce the law. Now, Ofcom has requested information from X. I believe X has given Ofcom that information and Ofcom is now expediting an inquiry into the behaviour and decisions of X when it comes to operating in the UK market.

Now, at these points in time, Ofcom acts as an enforcer, as an enforcement agency, and it must use those powers to the full extent of the law to keep people safe in this country.

Under the Online Safety Act, Ofcom has sweeping powers to fine companies like X for breaches of online safety rules. In extremis, it could even go to court to to have X blocked from the UK. But the main provisions of the act only came into force relatively recently and they have not been used in a big dispute with one of the global tech giants before. This is uncharted territory.

And it is also politically hazardous. Although Musk left his job in Donald Trump’s administration last year after a row with Trump (mostly about Trump’s budget plans), Musk remains a leading figure in the Maga movement, and the pair had dinner very recently. In Magaworld, it is regarded as axiomatic that European attempts to regulate social media companies are an attack on US free speech. JD Vance, the vice president, told David Lammy last week that allowing an AI app to sexually undress children wasn’t really acceptable. But a day or so later, a more junior figure in the administration, Sarah Rogers, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy, was on social media attacking the UK for “contemplating a Russia-style X ban to protect them from bikini images”.

We have more on this in our First Edition briefing.

Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: Keir Starmer and Peter Kyle, the business secretary, are on a visit in London where they will be speaking to the media.

Morning: And Kemi Badenoch and Laura Trott, the shadow education secretary, are on also doing a London visit, where they will be recording a clip for broadcasters.

11am: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, holds a press conference.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

2pm: Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, chief of the defence staff, gives evidence to the Commons defence committee. Last week it was reported that he has warned the PM of a £28bn shortfall in the defence budget.

Afternoon: Starmer is due to give a speech to staff at No 10. Later, at 6pm, he will speak to Labour MPs in private at a meeting of the parliamentary Labour party (PLP).

Afternoon: The House of Lords will announce the result of its election for the next Lord Speaker. The two candidates are Michael Forsyth, a former Tory cabinet minister, and Deborah Bull, a crossbencher and former artistic director of the Royal Opera House.

After 3.30pm: Liz Kendall, the tech secretary, is expected to make a statement to MPs about the Grok AI sexualised deepfake imagery scandal on Elon Musk’s X.

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