Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons speaker, is telling MPs about the privileges committee debate,He says he received letters from various MPs, including the opposition leader,He says issues like this should be taken to the privileges committee sparingly,He is a gatekeeper, he says,He says he is there to stop frivolous complaints being taken forward.

He says his job is to consider if the Commons should take a view.Having taken advice, he has decided to let MPs take this decision.He says Kemi Badenoch will be able to table a motion for debate tomorrow.The debate will be held after any statements and urgent questions.Gordon Brown, the former prime minister, has urged Labour MPs to support Keir Starmer when the Commons votes tomorrow on a Tory motion saying the privileges committee should investigate allegations Starmer lied to MPs about the Peter Mandelson vetting process.

Brown issued a statement after the speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, announced that a vote will take place tomorrow.Brown said:double quotation markAt challenging times both for our country and the world, the Labour party, has always sought to put the needs of the country first and with conflicts raging around the world with profound consequences for our country, this is the time to do so.Whatever the parliamentary games at Westminster, what the country expects of everyone in Labour is to focus on the priorities of the British people, which is what Keir Starmer is doing and for which he deserves all our support.Labour has a working majority of 165, and the government should be able to vote down the Tory motion (which is based on very flimsy reasoning anyway – see 1.32pm) without difficulty.

But, with Starmer’s authority with his MPs already diminished, No 10 is taking no chances.This is from the Times’ Steven Swinford:double quotation markWavering MPs are being bombarded with calls from ministers and Starmer allies, sometimes half a dozen in quick successionThe PM is addressing PLP tonightGordon Brown has rowed in behind him, along with Alan Johnson and David BlunkettThe line - again and again - is that this is not a time to be distracted by Mandelson.The pitch is effectively this - don’t you know there’s a war on?The debate will start tomorrow around lunchtime, or soon after – after Philip Barton, the former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, and Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s former chief of staff, have given evidence to the Commons foreign affairs committee in the morning about the Mandelson appointment process.Police are assessing evidence about donations to Robert Jenrick’s campaign to become Conservative leader in 2024 after a referral from the elections watchdog, the Guardian can reveal.John Swinney will call a vote seeking independence powers on the first day of the next Scottish parliament even if he fails to win an overall majority, his aides have said.

For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, has said Labour will implement changes to the Equality Act required by the supreme court’s trans ruling if it wins the Holyrood election.This was the main pledge in his party’s women’s manifesto published today.As the Press Association (PA) reports, the supreme court ruled in April 2025 that the definition of a woman in equalities law is based on biological sex.This has changed the definition of a “woman” in the 2010 Equality Act to mean a biological female, and that the term “sex” means biological sex.

It also said that sex is binary, meaning someone is either male or female.Sarwar said today:double quotation markFirst of all, the clearest example of the difference is we will stop using taxpayers’ money to challenge women and people, and we’ll get on straight away with implementing the Equality Act and making sure we’re protecting single-sex spaces based on biological sex.Services, spaces and schools.The manifesto also pledges to deliver single-sex spaces on the basis of biological sex, “recommitting” the NHS to delivering single-sex wards and to “remove all biologically male” prisoners from women’s prisons within days of the election, PA says.Sadiq Khan may oppose Scotland Yard using Palantir’s AI systems to process criminal intelligence because of his “concerns about using public money to support firms who act contrary to London’s values”.

Robert Booth has the story,Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has suggested that Keir Starmer’s fate will be decided not by the vote tomorrow, but by the results of the May elections,Asked about the privileges inquiry debate, Farage told the Press Association:double quotation markThere’s no doubt [Starmer has] misled parliament more than once and not just on this issue, on others as well,I suspect what will happen is the Labour MPs will be three-line whipped to support the government, a handful will abstain, and we’ll just move on from here,Starmer’s future will be decided by the elections on May 7 and if Reform do as well as I think we can in the old Labour areas, that will be the end of him.

”An end to the long-running Birmingham bin strike is “within sight” after a breakthrough in the bitter dispute over jobs and pay, the Press Assocation reports.PA says:double quotation markCouncil leader John Cotton said he believed a new offer could be made to the Unite union, whose members have been on all-out strike for more than a year.Onay Kasab, Unite national lead officer, said the offer, which has not yet been put to the union’s members, includes compensation of £16,000 for workers.Previous offers did not include compensation for drivers, Kasab said today, and this change helped bring the dispute close to a conclusion.The strike flared over council plans to remove a role in its waste recycling and collection service that it insisted was necessary to make improvements and bring the service in line with other local authorities.

Unite said the move would lead to pay cuts of around £8,000 for hundreds of its members, a figure the council has always disputed,Rubbish piled up on Birmingham’s streets, leading to residents complaining about it being a health hazard,Speaking outside Birmingham City Council’s offices today, Cotton said: “After months of frustration and delay, for the first time in over 12 months, a negotiated settlement to end the bin strike is now within sight,“This has been a challenging and complex process, but after months of hard work, on the principles and parameters of a deal, I believe a new, improved offer can be made and terms can be put in place that addresses the ballpark issues discussed at Acas, that Unite members can agree in order to end the strike once and for all,“A deal that would be good for the workforce, represent good value for money and would not repeat the mistakes of the past and risk creating new structural equal pay liabilities.

”Unite said the broad outline of the ballpark deal included:– Workers receiving a minimum of two years “cushion” from the impact of the job evaluation process, rather than six months;– Striking agency workers with at least 12 months of employment on the contract will be offered a path to permanent jobs;– Disciplinary issues will be quashed and gross misconduct issues reviewed;– For pension purposes, the dispute will be treated as authorised absence;– Legal action on both sides will be ended.There will now be a series of meetings to complete the offer and the union warned it will escalate the dispute if it is reneged on in anyway.Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: “The move made today by the leader of the council is a vindication of the bin workers’ struggle for a decent deal.”In the Commons Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the PM, has just made a statement updating MPs on the progress the government is making towards publishing all the doccuments required by the humble address saying all government paperwork relating to Peter Mandelson’s appointment should be disclosed.One tranche of material has already been published.

Officials are working on a second batch that will be made public.Jones said:double quotation markThe house will recognise that, given the breadth of the motion, that a very significant number of documents have been found to be in scope and that it is taking time to process these accordingly.Material that is judged potentially prejudicial to national security or international relations is going to the intelligence and security committee, which will have the final say on whether it should be published or withheld, and Jones said that by the end of today more than 300 documents would have gone to the ISC.Some of those were relevant to Mandelson’s vetting, he said.He said the material would be published “as soon as possible” after the state opening of parliament.

In response, Alex Burghart, Jones’s Tory shadow, said the humble address was passed 12 weeks ago and that the government should not be taking so long to publish the material,Downing Street has published a previously confidential memo in a bid to refute the claim that Keir Starmer misled MPs when he told them due process had been followed when Peter Mandelson was appointed ambassador to the US,(See 1,32pm,)The memo is dated 16 September 2025 and is from Chris Wormald, cabinet secretary at the time, to Starmer.

Starmer had asked him to review the Mandelson appointment process.Wormald said:double quotation markThe process for his appointment was unusual but not irregular …The evidence I have reviewed leads me to conclude that appropriate processes were followed in both the appointment and withdrawal of the former HMA Washington.With regard to the claim that Starmer ignored advice from Simon Case, the previous cabinet secretary, saying Mandelson should be vetted before the appointment was announced, Wormald said:double quotation markTwo actions, the security vetting and the process on conflicts of interest took place after the decision to appoint.I do not however consider that to be material as the vetting process was complete before the previous HMA [His Majesty’s ambassador] Washington took up post on 10 February 2025, and it is more usual for security vetting to happen after appointment.At the end of last week Zack Polanski, the Green leader, suggested in an interview that Donald Trump was worse than Vladimir Putin because of Trump’s threat at one point to wipe out all Iranian civilisation.

On the BBC’s Politics Live today, Ellie Chowns, the Green party’s Westminster leader, was asked if she agreed.She said she didn’t.She told the programme:double quotation markThat’s not my position, let me be clear.We have seen Vladimir Putin himself launch an illegal invastion of Ukraine.He’s responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.

Absolutely despicable ….I wouldn’t have said that, that’s not my view.But she said she was “deeply concerned” about the actions of Trump, and that the war against Iran was an illegal war.Responding for Labour, Luke Pollard, a defence minister, said:double quotation markEven Zack Polanski’s leader in parliament doesn’t agree with his disgraceful comments about Vladimir Putin.This is a new low for Polanski’s Green Party – and shows why he can’t be trusted with our national security.

This is from my colleague Peter Walker on tomorrow’s debate on referring Keir Starmer to the privileges committee.double quotation markI might be proved wrong, but for now I still think the Conservatives’ insistence on pursuing the Mandelson case as, ‘Starmer misled parliament’ rather than, ‘Why on earth did Starmer appoint this man at all?’ feels like the mother of all political cul de sacs.And this is from Alex Wickham from Bloomberg.double quotation markTory sources say they expect Starmer will win the vote tomorrow but that they want to use it to tell voters at the local elections that their local Labour MP backed him No10 say it’s a “desperate political stunt” the week before the localsPolice are assessing evidence about donations to Robert Jenrick’s campaign to become Conservative leader in 2024 after a referral from the elections watchdog, Rowena Mason reports.The information was passed on by the Electoral Commission, which the Guardian understands has been investigating allegations that almost £40,000 of donations to Jenrick’s leadership campaign before he defected to Reform UK, were from a foreign source in breach of electoral rules.

The Conservative party has confirmed that it has raised a complaint about this with the parliamentary commissioner for standards.Kevin Hollinrake, the Tory chair, said:double quotation markForeign donations are illegal.Politicians who funnel and hide unlawful money should face the full force of the law.The police must investigate Reform UK’s spokesman for financial affairs, Robert Jenrick.The Conservative party has also reported Mr Jenrick to the parliamentary commissioner for standards, given the apparent serious breach of House of Commons rules.

Parliament, the public and the Conservative party all appear to have been deceived,While Robert Jenrick has been kicked out of the Conservative party and is now Nigel Farage’s right hand man, this represents serious malpractice in a leadership contest,Zack Polanski, the Green party leader, has been busy today,He has been in Newcastle promoting a bus policy, but he has also down a series of interviews which have produced various news lines,Here are the key points.

Polanski has said the Greens want to bring buses back under public control.He said:double quotation markYears of deregulation have led to soaring fares, unreliable services and cut routes.Bus privatisation has been an unmitigated disaster.We need to bring buses back into public control so that local councils, who know what their communities need best, can put a ceiling on how much can be charged and make sure their communities are well served.Spiralling transport costs is one of the greatest causes of the affordability crisis and lack of services and the expense of fares affects rural communities in particular.

He has said that he would rather see Andy Burnham or Angela Rayner leading Labour than Keir Starmer,He told Sky News it is “no secret that Andy Burnham and Angela Rayner would be much closer to my politics than Keir Starmer is”,Burnham and Rayner “do care about tackling the cost of living crisis and do care about people in this country”, he said,He has insisted that Green party proposals to cut motorway speed limits from 70mph to 55mph are not manifesto pledges in the local elections,But he did not deny that this was a proposal that Green party members had voted for in the past.

Asked about the policy on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Polanski said:double quotation markThe important point is that what the members have decided already in the document says this will be reviewed and updated.Because if people vote on things from the 1980s or 1990s, then of course that gets regularly reviewed.In an interview last week Polanski said the Green party’s policymaking procedures need to be reformed, amid concerns that the party has too many policies on its books that it cannot defend.After the interview, Labour issued a news release criticising Polanski for not disowning the 55mph policy completely, saying such a measure would “hammer motorists and tank the economy”.Polanski defended the Green party’s drugs policy, saying it wants not just to legalise drugs but “regulate” them too.

He told Sky News that, under the party’s plans, the supply of harder drugs would be in “the hands of a medical health professional”.He had a run-in with Ed Balls, the Good Morning Britain presenter, after highlighting his record as a former Labour cabinet minister.UPDATE: I’ve amended a sentence in the section about speed limits because it was not Polanski himself who said in a Politico interview last week that the Greens’ policymaking process needed to change because the party had too many policies it could not defend.Polanski did talk about the need to change the process; but it was unnamed party officials who briefed Politico that some policies were hard to defend.