James Cartlidge, the shadow defence secretary, accused the government of undermining national security with the defence cuts announced today. (See 3.10pm.)

Responding to John Healey in the Commons, Cartlidge said:

Whatever the chancellor’s true grasp of economics, she’s certainly been able to force her priorities onto the country, getting the MoD to scrap major capabilities before they’ve undertaken the department’s much vaunted strategic defence review.

They’ve killed off North Sea oil, undermining our energy security; this week they are killing off the family farm and threatening our food security. Today they’re scrapping key defence capabilities and weakening our national security.

Labour have made their choices; they own the consequences.

Cartlidge also said that when he was a defence minister in the last government he was told that the former flagships HMS Bulwark and HMS Albion could have used in the event of a war. He said:

I personally sought and received assurances from the Navy’s leadership… that in the event of a full-scale war fighting scenario where the priority for the navy was literal capability, those ships could have still been regenerated to a condition able to fight, and the crews found.

Permanently scrapping the landing ships means we remove that capability entirely.

Ukraine has fired UK-made Storm Shadow missiles into Russia for the first time since the beginning of the conflict, Dan Sabbagh and Andrew Roth report. Amy Sedghi has full coverage of this story on our Ukraine war live blog.

Kemi Badenoch has put the finishing touches to her front bench team, and such are the depleted Conservative ranks that as a Tory MP, you had a better than one-in-two chance of getting a job.

Including Badenoch herself, 64 Tories are shadow ministers or whips, which is just under 53% of the total of 121 Conservatives in the Commons. The full front bench list is longer, but some people are named as both whips and junior ministers in departments.

There are no fewer than twenty whips, which at a ratio of one per six Tory MPs is not far short of a personal whipping service.

We would not normally publish the full list of shadow frontbench appointments, but it does not seem to be available anywhere else online (and certainly not on the news section of the Conservative party’s website, which has not been updated for more than a month) and so here it is, taken verbatim from the CCHQ news release.

The full Shadow Cabinet is:

• Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer: Mel Stride MP

• Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs: Dame Priti Patel MP

• Shadow Home Secretary: Chris Philp MP

• Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland: Alex Burghart MP

• Shadow Secretary of State for Defence: James Cartlidge MP

• Shadow Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero and Shadow Minister for Equalities: Claire Coutinho MP

• Shadow Secretary of State for Education: Laura Trott MP

• Shadow Secretary of State for Justice: Robert Jenrick MP

• Shadow Secretary of State for Business and Trade: Andrew Griffith MP

• Shadow Health and Social Care Secretary: Ed Argar MP

• Shadow Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities: Kevin Hollinrake MP

• Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs: Victoria Atkins MP

• Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions: Helen Whately MP

• Shadow Secretary of State for Transport: Gareth Bacon MP

• Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport: Stuart Andrew MP

• Shadow Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology: Alan Mak MP

• Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland and Shadow Minister of State for Energy and Net Zero: Andrew Bowie MP

• Shadow Secretary of State for Wales and Shadow Minister for Women: Mims Davies MP

• Opposition Chief Whip (Commons): Dame Rebecca Harris MP

• Shadow Leader of the House of Commons: Jesse Norman MP

• Shadow Leader of the House of Lords: Lord True

• Co-Chairmen of the Party: Nigel Huddleston MP & Lord Johnson

• Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury: Richard Fuller MP

Also attending:

• Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Leader: Julia Lopez MP

The Conservative Party Shadow Ministers in the Commons are:

• Shadow Financial Secretary to the Treasury: Gareth Davies MP

• Shadow Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury: James Wild MP

• Shadow Economic Secretary to the Treasury: Mark Garnier MP

• Shadow Minister of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs: Wendy Morton MP

• Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs: Andrew Rosindell MP

• Shadow Minister of State for the Home Office: Matt Vickers MP

• Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Home Office: Alicia Kearns MP

• Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office: Mike Wood MP

• Shadow Minister of State for Defence: Mark Francois MP

• Shadow Minister of State for Justice: Kieran Mullan MP

• Shadow Minister of State for Education: Neil O’Brien MP

• Shadow Minister of State for Health and Social Care: Dr Caroline Johnson MP

• Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Health and Social Care: Luke Evans MP

• Shadow Minister of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities: David Simmonds MP

• Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities: Paul Holmes MP

• Shadow Minister of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs: Robbie Moore MP

• Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs: Neil Hudson MP

• Shadow Minister of State for Business and Trade: Harriet Baldwin MP

• Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Business and Trade: Greg Smith MP

• Shadow Minister of State for Work and Pensions: Danny Kruger MP

• Shadow Minister of State for Transport: Jerome Mayhew MP

• Shadow Minister of State for Culture, Media and Sport: Saqib Bhatti MP

• Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Culture, Media, and Sport: Louie French MP

• Shadow Minister of State for Science, Innovation and Technology: Dr Ben Spencer MP

• Shadow Minister of State for Energy and Net Zero: Andrew Bowie MP

• Shadow Minister for Women: Mims Davies MP

• Shadow Solicitor General: Helen Grant MP

• Shadow Paymaster General: Richard Holden MP

The following appointments have also been made to the Opposition Whips Office, supporting Opposition Chief Whip Rebecca Harris MP

• Opposition Deputy Chief Whip: Joy Morrissey MP

• Opposition Deputy Chief Whip: Gagan Mohindra MP

• Senior Opposition Whip: Mike Wood MP

• Senior Opposition Whip: Greg Smith MP

• Senior Opposition Whip: Alicia Kearns MP

• Senior Opposition Whip: Paul Homes MP

• Senior Opposition Whip: David Simmonds MP

• Senior Opposition Whip: James Wild MP

• Senior Opposition Whip: Jerome Mayhew MP

• Senior Opposition Whip: Richard Holden MP

• Junior Opposition Whip: Harriet Cross MP

• Junior Opposition Whip: Ashley Fox MP

• Junior Opposition Whip: Rebecca Smith MP

• Junior Opposition Whip: Katie Lam MP

• Junior Opposition Whip: Ben Obese-Jecty MP

• Junior Opposition Whip: Rebecca Paul MP

• Junior Opposition Whip: Andrew Snowden MP

• Junior Opposition Whip: Greg Stafford MP

• Junior Opposition Whip: Nick Timothy MP

Furthermore, the following Lords appointments had been made, working with Lord True in his capacity as Shadow Lords Leader:

• Deputy Shadow Lords Leader: Earl Howe

• Opposition Lords Chief Whip: Baroness Williams of Trafford

• Opposition Lords Deputy Chief Whip: The Earl of Courtown

• Opposition Lords Attorney General: Lord Wolfson of Tredegar

• Shadow Treasury Minister: Baroness Neville-Rolfe

• Shadow Treasury Minister: Lord Altrincham

• Shadow Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Affairs Minister: Lord Callanan

• Shadow Home Office Minister: Lord Murray of Blidworth

• Shadow Home Office Minister: Lord Davies of Gower

• Shadow Defence Minister: The Earl of Minto

• Shadow Defence Minister: Baroness Goldie

• Shadow Advocate General for Scotland and Shadow Justice Minister: Lord Keen of Elie

• Shadow Heath and Social Care Minister: Lord Kamall

• Shadow Education Minister: Baroness Barran

• Shadow Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Minister: Baroness Scott of Bybrook

• Shadow Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Minister: Lord Jamieson

• Shadow Energy Security and Net Zero Minister: Lord Offord of Garvel

• Shadow Work and Pensions Minister: Viscount Younger of Leckie

• Shadow Work and Pensions Minister: Baroness Stedman-Sott

• Shadow Business and Trade Minister: Lord Sharpe of Epsom

• Shadow Science, Innovation and Technology Minister: Lord Markham

• Shadow Science, Innovation and Technology Minister: Viscount Camrose

• Shadow Transport Minister: Lord Moylan

• Shadow Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Minister: Lord Roborough

• Shadow Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Minister: Lord Blencathra

• Shadow Culture, Media, and Sport Minister: Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay

• Shadow Cabinet Office Minister: Baroness Finn

• Shadow Northern Ireland Minister: Lord Caine

• Shadow Scotland Minister: Lord Cameron of Lochiel

• Shadow Wales Minister: Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist

• Shadow Women and Equalities Minister: Baroness Stedman-Scott

Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist, Baroness Stedman-Scott, The Earl of Effingham, Lord Sandhurst and Lord Jamieson will also serve as Shadow Lords Whips.

In his Commons statement John Healey, the defence secretary, also announced new retention payments to encourage members of the armed forces to stay longer. He explained:

I can announce today that I am introducing, from April, a new £30,000 retention payment for a cohort of tri-service aircraft engineers who sign up for [an] additional three years of service. This will affect and be open to around 5,000 personnel in total.

And from January, a new £8,000 retention payment for army personnel who served four years, supporting 4,000 personnel each year for three years. So 12,000 troops in total.

John Healey, the defence secretary, has told MPs that two Royal Navy flagships are included in a list of equipment being decomissioned to save up to £500m over five years.

In a statement to MPs, he said that “outdated military capabilities” were being taken out of service. He told MPs:

These decisions are set to save the MoD £150m over the next two years and up to £500m over five years, savings that will be retained in full in defence.

As PA Media reports, Healey said he was decommissioning HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark which he described “landing ships both effectively retired by previous ministers but superficially kept on the books at a cost of £9m a year”.

He said he would retire HMS Northumberland “a frigate with structural damage that makes her simply uneconomical to repair”, 46 Watchkeeper Mark I uncrewed aircraft systems, and a 14-year-old army drone “which technology has overtaken”.

He said 14 Chinook helicopters “some over 35 years old [will be] accelerated out of service”.

And he said two wave-class tankers “neither of which have been to sea for years” were in the decommissioning process, along with 17 Puma helicopters “some with over 50 years’ flying [which] will not be extended”.

Healey said there would be no redundancies as a result of these decisions. He went on:

These are common sense decisions which previous governments failed to take, decisions that will secure better value for money for the taxpayer and better outcomes for the military.

Decisions which are all backed by the chiefs and taken in consultation with SDR [strategic defence review] reviewers. Allies have been informed, and we have constant dialogue with Nato.

These will not be the last difficult decisions I will have to make to fix the defence inheritance that we were left with, but they will help get a grip of finances now, and they will give greater scope to renew our forces for the future as we look towards the strategic defence review and to 2.5% [of GDP spent on defence].

Instagram, Etsy and Gumtree users could exploit a legal loophole to buy and sell colonial-era human remains, MPs were told at PMQs. PA Media has filed this story based on what the question from Labour’s Bell Ribeiro-Addy. (See 12.04pm.) PA says:

Ribeiri-Addy told the Commons she had heard cases of body parts sold online and in auction houses, including a human thigh bone turned into a cane, a human jawbone necklace and the varnished skull of a six-year-old.

The Labour MP for Clapham and Brixton Hill asked Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, whether the government would look at ending these sales, which she described as “depraved”.

Rayner agreed the practice was “abhorrent” and committed to meetings with ministers about “troubling cases”.

Opening PMQs, Ribeiro-Addy said: “I recently met with members of the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology (BABAO) who highlighted a loophole in the Human Tissues Act which allows human remains to be auctioned, frequently disguised as modified items or replicas.

“This is including a foetal skeleton posed under a glass dome, a human thigh bone turned into a cane, a human jawbone necklace and the varnished skull of a six-year-old, often from indigenous communities in Africa and Asia stolen during colonial expeditions.”

The Human Tissues Act 2004 features a ban on buying and selling human material, but there are some exceptions and suppliers can be reimbursed for expenses connected with transporting, preparing, preserving or storing remains.

Ribeiro-Addy asked: “Does the deputy prime minister agree that it is abhorrent for human remains regardless of their origin or age to be sold by auction houses and on social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, eBay, Etsy and Gumtree? And will the government take action to end this depraved practice?”

Rayner replied: “It’s absolutely horrifying to hear the account of what [Ribeiro-Addy] mentions and I absolutely agree that that’s abhorrent. And while the Human Tissue Authority strictly regulates the public display of human remains, with fines or imprisonment for breaches, it does not cover sales or purchases. However, I will ensure that a meeting is made with the appropriate minister to discuss the troubling cases that she raises.”

Britain’s longest-serving MPs, Labour’s Diane Abbott and the Conservative Sir Edward Leigh, have issued a joint call urging the Commons to reject the assisted dying bill, arguing it is being rushed through and puts vulnerable people at risk, Jessica Elgot and Pippa Crerar report.

In her reply at PMQs to Daisy Cooper, the deputy Lib Dem leader, Angela Rayner claimed there has been “scaremongering” about Labour’s plans to extend inheritance tax to cover some farms.

Cooper asked:

Somebody else who was very worried about the budget is Cathy. Cathy is a farmer in my constituency of St Albans, and she told me yesterday that she thinks the government changes simply do not make sense.

The changes mean that her family may have to pay a bill which will force them to sell land, which makes food production unviable. At the same time, the government has not closed the land buying tax loophole that can be exploited by equity firms and the super wealthy.

And Rayner replied:

I’m sorry to hear that Cathy is distressed by the – what I would say is scaremongering – around what the Labour party is doing.

The budget delivered £5bn for farming over the next two years, a record amount. The last government failed to spend £300 million on farmers, and our plan is sensible, fair and proportionate, and protects the smaller estate while fixing public services that they rely on.

At a post-PMQs briefing, asked who Rayner was referring to when she talked about scaremongering, a No 10 spokesperson said:

You have the deputy prime minister’s own words.

I think obviously the prime minister in his press conference yesterday recognises that there are concerns amongst farmers about the policy and that is why the government has a job to do to communicate the policy and our expectation, which is that the vast majority of farmers will be unaffected by the change.

That was very missable. Alex Burghart, who was standing in for Kemi Badenoch, started well, with a very short, direct question, but after that it rapidly got worse.

He used his first three questions to focus on inflation, trying to make an argument about Labour letting price rises get out of control, but inflation at 2.3% is hardly the Weimar Republic and Angela Rayner quite easily knocked him back with a reminder of his ministerial job title under Liz Truss and a reference to the inflation rate under the Tories.

Burghart was on stronger ground talking about farmers, but at that point he started shouting furiously, conveying strong “madman on the bus” vibes to anyone watching on TV. (He was shouting because in the chamber the background noise is so loud that rookie speakers feel they have to shout to be heard; the experienced ones know that the microphones will do the work for them.)

On farmers, Rayner’s comments did not go beyond anything said by ministers yesterday, and it still does not feel as if the governement is winning the argument with the farming sector. But Burghart’s hyperbole was just playing to the base, and wasn’t persuasive either.

He was also one of several MPs to have a go at Rachel Reeves over her minor CV embellishment (“this morning we had City economists, real economists, saying that next year inflation would hit 3%”) but this just smacked of desperation. Reeves is a real economist.

At least, from Kemi Badenoch’s point of view, Burghart did not upstage his party leader. For that reason alone, he might even get invited back.

Saqib Bhatti (Con) asks why the government has declared war on farmers.

Rayner says she does not accept that.

Graham Stringer (Lab) asks Rayner to condemn the “Stasi-like interview” given to Allison Pearson, the Telegraph columnist, by the police.

Rayner says we should have a free press, but with that comes responsibility.

UPDATE: Stringer said:

Is [Rayner] as concerned as I am about the Stasi-like interview that was given to Allison Pearson, the Daily Telegraph journalist a week last Sunday, and does she agree with me that the Essex police force and other police forces would be better trying to deal with shoplifting, burglaries and other crimes, rather than intimidating journalists?

And Rayner replied:

It is incredibly important around free speech and our press, it’s part of our democracy.

But it’s also, in direct response to his question, of course, police are independent and it’s a live investigation and therefore it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to comment on that.

But I do believe that we should have a free press. It’s part of our democracy and we should have free speech, but with that comes responsibility of those that do it.

Burghart says inflation is going up. It has delivered “high tax, high inflation, low growth, low reform”. He goes on: “There’s a word for that – it’s Starmerism.”

He asks what the government is doing to help farmers.

Rayner says the government is supporting farmers. The last government could not even get money out of the door for farmers, she says.

UPDATE: Burghart said:

It was Ukraine and Covid that drove up inflation. This government is doing it to the British people. High tax, high inflation, low growth, low reform, there’s a word for that, it’s Starmerism.

Yesterday I spoke to farmers from across the United Kingdom. Some of them, families who have farmed their land for centuries. Elderly men in tears, children worried about their parents, all of them worried that their way of life is about to be destroyed. What would she like to say to them?

And Rayner replied:

We are absolutely committed to our British farmers and that’s why we’ve committed £5bn to the farming budget over the next two years. That’s the largest ever amount for sustainable food production in the UK. And it’s alongside £60m to support those affected by extreme wet weather, and over £200m to tackle disease outbreaks.

His party couldn’t even get the money out the door for farmers, failing to spend over £300m on farming budgets. The farmers know they ruined it for them and that’s why we are in government and they are not.

With Keir Starmer still on his way back from the G20 summit in Brazil (they were on the ground refuelling at Cape Verde about two hours ago), Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, is standing in for him. Kemi Badenoch does not have a deputy, but today she has asked Alex Burghart, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, to lead for the opposition.

Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.

Donald Trump’s re-election as US president has prompted fears that he will cut off American support for Ukraine, forcing it into peace talks with Russia that would culminate in a settlement on terms favourable to Vladimir Putin. In an interview with the New Statesman, David Lammy has argued that Trump would not go that far.

That might sound like wishful thinking, but Lammy and Keir Starmer did have dinner with Trump in the autumn. Lammy discusses that too in the interview with George Eaton. Here are the key lines.

• Lammy argued that Trump would not accept a deal over Ukraine that would look like a victory for Putin. Asked about Trump’s stance on Ukraine, Lammy said:

I’ve been a politician for 25 years and I understand the different philosophies at play. There’s a deep philosophical underpinning to friends in the Republican party that I’ve known for many years, thinking back to people like [former US secretary of state] Condoleezza Rice. Donald Trump has some continuity with this position, which is ‘peace through strength’.

What I do know about Donald Trump is that he doesn’t like losers and he doesn’t want to lose; he wants to get the right deal for the American people. And he knows that the right deal for the American people is peace in Europe and that means a sustainable peace – not Russia achieving its aims and coming back for more in the years ahead.

• Lammy said he found Trump “very funny, very engaging and very charismatic” when he and Starmer met Trump for dinner at his home in New York. He also said Trump was “a consummate politician” and very interested in learning how Labour won the election in the UK.

• Lammy said he was confident that the Trump administration would back the UK deal giving Mauritius sovereignty over the Chagos Islands. Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has claimed Trump’s team are strongly opposed to the deal. But Lammy said:

The most important thing about that deal was securing the [US-UK] naval base and securing that naval base well beyond any of our lifetimes [99 years]. That secures global security in many, many ways and it certainly keeps that important part of the Indian Ocean out of play for the Chinese.

I’m very confident that when the new administration looks at the detail of this deal that they will stand behind it because Donald Trump knows what a good deal looks like [a reference to his 1987 book The Art of the Deal] – and this is a good deal.

• Lammy said the Democrats should have focused more on the economy in their presidential campaign.

When I spoke to friends in the Democratic Party, and I raised this privately, I just felt that they hadn’t centred the economy in the way that we [Labour] had done just coming into our own election cycle.

It felt that the campaign was very focused on 6 January [the pro-Trump riot at the Capitol building in 2021], very focused on Donald Trump personally, very focused on abortion rights. But my view is that you don’t get permission to talk about those things unless you have satisfied the bread and butter – the economy and issues of immigration.

A ban on social media for under-16s is “on the table” if companies do not take action to protect children, Peter Kyle, the science secretary, has said. PA Media says:

Kyle made the warning while telling Ofcom to be more assertive with tech firms, as both he and the regulator ready themselves for new legal powers in the Online Safety Act to commence from the start of 2025.

The act will see new safety duties placed on social media platforms for the first time, requiring them to protect users, and in particular children, from harmful content. This will include a crackdown on under-13s having access to age-restricted content.

Speaking to the Telegraph newspaper, Kyle suggested the UK would have to move to “another level of regulation” if tech companies do not get together to enforce the Act.

He said he did not want to pursue further law changes until he sees how the Online Safety Act works. But he signalled he had been speaking to politicians from Australia where social media restrictions for under-16s have been considered.

Asked if the UK could push its age limits up to 16, Kyle told the Telegraph: “When it comes to keeping young people safe, everything is on the table.”

As the government prepares to enforce the Act, Kyle has published for the first time a statement of strategic priorities for watchdog Ofcom.

This says Ofcom should ensure the concept of “safety by design” is being followed by platforms from the start so more harm is caught before it occurs, and pushes for more transparency from tech firms on what harms are occurring on their platforms.

Kyle also announced ministers will launch a research project aimed at helping it understand the impact of smartphones and social media use on children.

Frontline police are losing the confidence to use their full powers after lengthy prosecutions like the trial of the officer who shot Chris Kaba, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary has said.

Speaking at a policing conference in Westminster, Philp said that if the government did not act, the opposition would present plans to parliament itself. He said:

Many officers I’ve spoken to … feel their reasonable use of force or other police powers is treated disproportionately or unreasonably after the event, in a way that doesn’t reflect and recognise the pressures of dealing with an incident or the split second decision making, which is inevitably required.

Some incidents go into lengthy and bureaucratic Independent Office for Police Conduct investigations, or even prosecutions, where common sense says that is not appropriate.

Martyn Blake was cleared of the murder of Kaba in three hours by a jury at the Old Bailey last month. Philp also cited the case of Pc Paul Fisher, who was cleared of dangerous driving after crashing on the way to a terrorist incident in Streatham, south east London. Philp said:

We need police officers on the front line to be prepared to take the lawful action necessary to protect themselves and the public.

We need them to drive quickly to the scene of an attack by terrorists and save lives.

We need stop and search to be used to take knives off our streets, we need force to be used where necessary to detain suspects, and I’m concerned that officers are losing the confidence to exercise those powers as required to keep the public safe.

Philp said he wanted the government to allow officers to use the fact they were acting in line with their training as a defence to a criminal or misconduct charge. And he said he wanted this in legislation.

If the government doesn’t make those changes, then at the next opportunity, as the shadow home secretary, I will seek to introduce those measures as an amendment to the next piece of legislation that goes through parliament.

Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, has just started giving evidence to the Commons housing committee. The hearing is about the government’s plan to build 1.5m new homes over the course of this parliament.

Asked if this was deliverable, Pennycook said it was not just deliverable, but also “essential”.

He said it was “an incredibly stretching target”. But he said anything less would have been an inadequate response to the housing crisis. A generation of people were being priced out of home ownership, he said. He went on:

We’ve got millions of low to middle income households forced into insecure, unaffordable and far too often substandard private rented housing. We have 1.3 million people languishing on social housing waiting lists, and to our utter shame as a nation, more than 150,000 homeless children right now living in temporary accommodation. That is the price we’ve paid for not being serious about house building rates.

But Pennycook also said that building 1.5m homes over five years would be “more difficult” than Labour expected when it set the target in opposition. He said the OBR was predicting a fall in housing supply.

Good morning. Keir Starmer is travelling back from the G20 summit in Brazil, but he won’t be in the Commons in time for PMQs, and so Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, will be taking questions on his behalf. In line with recent practice, Kemi Badenoch, the new Conservative leader, won’t go up against a deputy, and she will miss the session too. The Tories don’t have a deputy leader, but Badenoch is getting Alex Burghart, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, to stand in for her.

The PM might not be answering, but that does not mean the questions get any easier. The situation in Ukraine is looking increasingly perilous, inflation is going up, and figures out yesterday have reignited the row about the government’s decision to cut the winter fuel payment. But the Conservatives may also want to ask about farmers, and the plan to extend inheritance tax to some farms. Traditonally the Tories have liked to think of themselves as a pro-countryside, pro-farming party, and they will have been reassured by the fact that, when they lined up alongside farmers at yesterday’s rally, they did not just have Jeremy Clarkson with them; the Liberal Democrats, the Green party, Greenpeace and even Just Stop Oil were on the farmers’ side too.

Now the Tories have combined backing the NFU with another deep-seated rightwing obsession – attacking the BBC. In comments that have provided the Daily Telegraph with its splash, Stuart Andrew, the shadow culture secretary, has attacked the BBC for producing a factcheck analysis saying that some of the claims made by the pro-farming lobby about the impact of the inheritance tax change are exaggerated. He said:

The job of BBC Verify is to do exactly that but they’ve failed on their own terms.

The government is refusing to say how many family farms are subject to their tax raid, only offering partial and out of date statistics which fail to account for the full scale of their reforms.

The taxpayers pay for the BBC to be independent and free from bias, not for them to regurgitate Labour lines.

This matter should be immediately looked into and corrected.

The Telegraph story also makes much of Jeremy Clarkson, the TV celebrity and farmer, accusing the BBC of bias because a BBC reporter had the temerity to ask him at yesterday’s rally about the fact that he bought a farm at least in part to dodge inheritance tax – something that he has been happy to boast about in the past.

Andrew’s broadside against the BBC seems to have been inspired by this BBC Verify article and this video summary by Ben Chu, a BBC Verify correspondent, in which he said that claims from the Country Land and Business Association that 70,000 farms would be affected by the change was “almost certainly an overestimate”. Chu had sound grounds for saying this, for the reasons set out in a Treasury letter to the Commons Treasury committee, and the BBC is standing by its story. As it should; most reasonable commentators would agree these reports were fair, not biased. But the row illustrates how hard it can be for a governing party to win an argument when attacking media institutions trying to report impartially becomes part of the opposition’s modus operandi.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9am: Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, gives a speech to the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s conference.

9.30am: Lord Darzi, the leading surgeon and former health minister, gives evidence to the Commons health committee about the report he wrote for the government on the state of the NHS.

10am: Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, gives evidence to the Commons housing committee about the government’s housebuilding plans.

Noon: Angela Rayner, the deputy PM, faces Alex Burghart, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, at PMQs.

3.20pm: Jess Phillips, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, gives evidence to the Commons women and equalities committee about non-consensual intimate image abuse.

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