Author: Rowena Mason Whitehall editor

The new Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, has said the Partygate scandal was “overblown” as she rejected the need to “churn over” everything that went wrong with previous Tory prime ministers. Badenoch won the party leadership on Saturday and said she was going to be “honest” about what went wrong in the party under her predecessors. However, speaking on BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme, the new party leader said Boris Johnson was a “great prime minister” and that he had fallen into a “trap” of breaking Covid rules that should never have been introduced. Badenoch said she had resigned during Johnson’s premiership because of “serious…

UK chancellor says she had not known true picture of public finances but no need to increase taxes further after budget Rachel Reeves has admitted she was wrong to say before the election that no major tax rises would be needed, but promised there was “no need to increase taxes further” after last week’s budget raised £40bn. The UK chancellor said she had not known the true picture of the “huge black hole in public finances” left by the Conservatives, which the government says amounted to £22bn. “I was wrong on June 11, I didn’t know everything,” she said. Reeves…