Here is a round-up of the day’s main headlines: Boris Johnson bypassed the government’s attempt to keep his unredacted WhatsApp messages secret by handing them over directly to the Covid inquiry. Johnson said he was “not willing to let my material become a test case for others”. Johnson also said he had asked the Cabinet Office to help turn his previous phone back on securely to search “for all relevant material”, which he promised to pass directly to the inquiry chair, Heather Hallett. The potential risks of accessing Boris Johnson’s old mobile phone to retrieve WhatsApps for the Covid-19 inquiry were “minimal”, the security expert Alan Woodward told BBC Radio 4’s World At One programme. “His phone wasn’t hacked, it hadn’t been compromised or any such thing.” Dame Elan Closs Stephens has been appointed as the acting chair of the BBC, the government announced after Richard Sharp resigned from the position earlier this year following a report which found he breached the governance code for public appointments. Civil servants have been offered a one-off £1,500 payment from the government as part of a new pay offer to try to prevent industrial action. Ministers had initially offered a pay rise of up to 4.5%, with an extra 0.5% for those on lower pay bands. The pay rise remains unchanged but the one-off payment has been put on the table “in recognition of the pressures felt during the 2022-23 pay year”. Two senior Conservatives have expressed doubts over Rishi Sunak’s controversial decision to launch legal action against the public inquiry into the government’s handling of Covid-19. George Freeman, the science minister, said he believed the challenge was unlikely to succeed, while the former Downing Street chief of staff Gavin Barwell said it should not have been launched at all. Andy Burnham on Thursday evening called for MPs to be elected by proportional representation as part of Labour’s plans for a “radical rewiring of Britain”. Labour has proposed sweeping reforms to how UK democracy works, including replacing the House of Lords with a directly elected senate for the UK’s nations and regions. The home secretary, Suella Braverman, has been asked to urgently clarify why a large group of asylum seekers were left on the street in Westminster for two nights running. In a letter to Braverman, the leader of Westminster city council expressed his deep concern that about 40 refugees had been placed in the borough on Wednesday night “without appropriate accommodation or support available”. Labour promised to reverse changes to the student loan system being planned by the Conservative government in a way that could reduce monthly repayments for graduates.