Sunak to hold Q&A in north-east as Labour says ‘many questions unanswered’ over firing of Tory party chairThis morning the Department for Levelling up, Housing and Communities has confirmed details of its plan – publicised by Michael Gove yesterday – to force developers to remove unsafe cladding from tall buildings or face sanctions that would in effect stop them building new homes. In a news release it says:Developers today received legally binding contracts that will commit them to pay to repair unsafe buildings.The government has set a six-week deadline for developers to sign the legal agreements and is warning that companies who fail to sign and comply with the terms of the contract will face significant consequences.The big question for the Rishi Sunak premiership was whether his high ratings could pull the Tory party up, or the Tory party’s low ratings would pull him down. And at the moment he is being pulled down by a series of scandals which do not directly involve him, are hangovers, if you like, of the Johnson era. I was the photocopy boy in Downing Street back in the ’90s when John Major had all these problems. And there are similarities in that John Major was likeable, conscientious, like Rishi Sunak, but ultimately, was not able to escape the downward pull of the Tory party. It’s still ‘we’ll see’ with Rishi Sunak, but he knows that as each week passes, as each new scandal unfolds, the window for action gets smaller and smaller.To my mind, the defining thing of his political career was his decision to resign as chancellor from the Boris Johnson government over sleaze, over integrity, but he’s never really talked about that. And we got the very first hint of it at prime minister’s questions this week where he started to say, ‘I resigned from the Johnson government’. I think you’re going to hear a lot more of that. I think he’ll have learned lessons even from the Zahawi affair, that you need to act more quickly than he did – and I think that he’s going to try and define himself now as ‘the sleaze buster’, but it’s extremely hard. Continue reading...
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