PMQs live: Sunak to face Starmer as Zahawi under pressure to quit | Politics

PMQs is now less than 20 minutes away. If Nadhim Zahawi is going to resign before it starts, he is leaving it a bit late.

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

At the end of last year Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan police commissioner, said that there were around 100 officers in his force who could not be trusted to deal with the public, but who could not be sacked. Asked what he was doing about this, Rowley said the Met was considering “more inventive legal measures” that might enable him to get rid of these people.

Rowley says the Met is now looking at previous cases where there were complaints about officers. It is considering whether the right decisions were taken.

He says the press has reported this as 1,000 new cases. But these are not new cases, he says.

He says the Met is also looking at the vetting process.

Some officers will have criminal convictions. Those are on record, and they are not always a cause of concern, he says. He says if someone gets a conviction for possession of cannabis at the age of 13, that does not mean they should not be a police officer.

But the force is now looking at officers who may have been the subject of other complaints.

He says the Met is constrained by the rules about dismissals. The government is looking at this, and the Met itself is looking at whether it can push the rules further to address this.

But he says that “lifting the stone and revealing painful truths will not be resolved overnight”.

This process won’t be rapid, he says. And it will be painful.

He ends by urging people not to lose heart with Met while this happens.

UPDATE: Rowley said:

Lifting the stone and revealing painful truths will not be resolved overnight, and I mustn’t pretend it will do, and I hope you understand that that can’t be done.

We have to prepare for more painful stories as we confront the issues that we face.

We’ve discussed before, the systemic failings that create these problems of these officers who corrupt our integrity, and as we put in more resource, more assertive tactics, as we are more open to people reporting incidents to us from within and from without the organisation, and as we more determinedly take on these cases, it will tackle the problems that we face but it won’t … it won’t be rapid and it will be painful.

Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan police commissioner, opens the meeting with a statement about the David Carrick case.

He says high standards are at the top of his agenda. He has tens of thousands of great men and women working for him. But there are hundreds of officers who should not be in the force, and Carrick was an example.

He says the Met has not applied the same sense of ruthlessness to protecting its integrity as it has to catching criminals.

He apologises to Carrick’s victims, and to all women in London whose trust in the police has been shaken by this.

Turning to the action he has taken, he says he has increased the number of anti-corruption staff and created a new anti-corruption unit. A new integrity hotline is receiving complaints that are being investigated.

Even though this is a Met appeal, one in three of the calls coming through roughly are for other forces. We’re passing information on as well.

Through our challenges, we’re helping the rest of policing confront some issues as well.

Good morning. Rishi Sunak is taking PMQs in about three hours and, as he rehearses how to respond to Keir Starmer’s attack lines, one thing he would appreciate is an interruption from an aide saying that the minister without portfolio in the Cabinet Office (Nadhim Zahawi) is on the line to offer his resignation. If Zahawi were to quit this morning, PMQs would be a lot easier.

That does not mean it will happen. Sunak has said that he wants Zahawi’s fate to be decided by the ethics adviser’s inquiry, and Zahawi has said that he has done nothing wrong and intends to stay in post. But on the Today programme a few minutes ago David Gauke, the former Tory cabinet minister, said it was “hard to see how this doesn’t ultimately end in [Zahawi’s] resignation”. He also said, if Zahawi was still in post at 12pm, PMQs was going to be “very uncomfortable” for the prime minister.

Sunak may have thought that the decision to order an inquiry would close down debate about Zahawi until the findings were in. But that has not happened, and increasingly Zahawi is being criticised, not just for having to pay a penalty to HM Revenue and Customs for not paying tax owed on time, but for threatening journalists with libel action last summer when they started making inquiries. Last night Lord Evans, the chair of the committee on standards in public life, was particularly critical of this in an interview with the BBC’s PM programme. He said:

If you’re trying to close down a legitimate public debate, I don’t think that lives up to the standards Lord Nolan laid down and which the government has committed itself to. Accountability [and] openness are things which the government says that it wants to be characterising its own behaviour, so that I think speaks for itself …

The sort of attempts, apparent legal attempts, to suppress this story … I don’t think that does live up to the sort of standards that the public would rightly expect.

On the Today programme this morning Gauke, a former justice secretary, also criticised Zahawi on this point. He said:

What we now know is that what Nadhim Zahawi was saying in the summer is very hard, if not impossible, to reconcile with the information that he has paid a penalty in respect of his [tax] arrangements …

It appears that he was threatening to sue people for libel for essentially telling the truth, for essentially setting out analysis of what happened that seems to stand up to reality.

Here is the agenda for the day.

10am: Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan police commissioner, takes questions from the London assembly’s police and crime committee about the David Carrick case.

12pm: Rishi Sunak faces Keir Starmer at PMQs.

12pm: Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, speaks at the Convention of the North conference. Lisa Nandy, his Labour shadow, is speaking at 2.50pm.

2.30pm: Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, gives evidence to the women and equalities committee about equality in the asylum process.

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