The British government and intelligence agencies failed to prepare or conduct any proper assessment of Kremlin attempts to interfere with the 2016 Brexit referendum, according to the long-delayed Russia report. Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, has said the UK should join the US and countries around the world in being more assertive towards China. Speaking at a news conference, he praised Boris Johnson for his decision to exclude the Chinese firm Huawei from the UK’s 5G network, saying that the PM was making a decision in the national interest, and not just responding to pressure from Washington. Pompeo went on: We think that the entire world needs to work together to ensure that every country - including China - behaves in the international system in ways that are appropriate and consistent with the international order. You can’t go make claims for maritime regions that you have no lawful claim to. You can’t threaten countries and bully them in the Himalayas. You can’t engage in cover-ups and co-opt international institutions like the World Health Organization ... We want every nation to work together to push back against the Chinese Communist party’s efforts in every dimension that I have described. That certainly includes the United Kingdom, it includes every country. We hope we can build out a coalition that understands the threat and we’ll work collectively to convince the Chinese Communist party it’s not in their best interests to engage in this kind of behaviour.
Prof Chris Whitty, the UK government’s chief medical adviser, has dismissed suggestions that ministers ignored scientific advice when they put off ordering a full lockdown until relatively late. In evidence to the Commons health select committee, Whitty said: Ministers at the time, who were put in an incredibly difficult position, in my view, followed the advice given by Sage [the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies], which are clearly signposted through the minutes of Sage, with a delay that was no more than you would reasonably expect for what are really very difficult things to operationalise and decide. I do not think - I’m not saying now and I’m not going to say at any point, to be clear - that in my view there was huge delay between the advice that ministers received, given the enormity of the difficulties that we were asking of people, and the practical implications of what was being done. At a committee last week Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, suggested that ministers did delay following scientific advice to order a lockdown - although it has been reported that Vallance may have misremembered when Sage moved to recommending a full lockdown. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has told MPs that Public Health England was not suited to setting up a national testing programme. Giving evidence to the Commons science committee, he said: We need a standing capability, right, we need a public health agency that isn’t only brilliant at science, but also is ready to mass scale very, very quickly. PHE was designed as a scientific organisation, and it is really good as a scientific organisation, and remains so, and has some of the best public health scientists in the world in PHE. The challenge that it found was it was not set up to be an organisation ready to go to mass national scale and we didn’t go into this crisis with that mass of testing capability. In that we were like almost every other country in the world. Germany was the exception in this space rather than the norm, and some of the far eastern countries. Hancock also described his decision to set 100,000 tests a day as a target was a “big, hairy, audacious goal”. He explained: I’ve been accused of over-promising and sometimes delivering. And the point is that when you’re handling a pandemic response and the response you need is to scale-up at a speed that is almost unprecedented within government at a national scale, the tools that I found worked were to set demanding goals. In fact the chancellor told me afterwards that I set a ‘big, hairy, audacious goal’, apparently this is a classic business school doctrine that I didn’t know that I was following. NHS chiefs have told the Welsh government the country is likely to need 5,000 extra beds on top of its normal capacity to deal with coronavirus this autumn and winter. As Steven Morris reports, at the government’s weekly press conference health minister Vaughan Gething said some field hospitals would be needed to meet the demand of what he believed would be “a truly extraordinary autumn and winter.” Priti Patel has promised to revolutionise the culture of the Home Office in the wake of the Windrush scandal, pledging a more compassionate, “people first” approach to immigration to meet the recommendations of an independent review into UK government failures. A Conservative MP’s behaviour has been branded “completely unacceptable” by his own party, following allegations over WhatsApp texts sent to a young female intern and a male parliament worker. As PA Media reports, Rob Roberts, MP for Delyn, North Wales, is under investigation by the office of the parliamentary commissioner for standards. CCHQ confirmed an investigation is under way, that Roberts has apologised and he is undergoing training in social media. That’s all from me for today. Coronavirus coverage continues on our global live blog. It’s here.