Michelle Mone has condemned Rishi Sunak after he expressed concern at her admission she lied about involvement in a company that won lucrative deals during Covid, saying the government “knew about my involvement from the very beginning”. But Lord Bethell, a health minister at the time, has claimed she was not honest with him about her links to PPE Medpro. (See 5.04pm.) Council leaders have warned that well-managed local authorities will start to go bust because today’s settlement for councils in England will not alleviate the crisis they are facing. (See 4.40pm and 5.24pm.) In a statement, Solace, which represents local authority chief executives, said: Local authorities right across England are facing unprecedented financial pressures – and all the independent analysis makes clear that the problems are systemic, in particular due to rising demand for adults and children’s social care, special educational needs provision and housing services, all accentuated by inflation. The ever-growing number of councils issuing or warning of forthcoming s114 notices underlines the peril we face. Without a genuinely sustainable financial settlement for the sector, it won’t be long before a stream of well-managed authorities start to tip over the edge. The bare fact is there are very few savings options left. And the cuts that councils are now making to their services in order to remain financially sustainable are only storing up trouble for years ahead – reducing quality of life for our residents in the here and now, but also leading to increasingly complex social problems that cost the public purse much more in the long run. Even worse, the chronic underfunding of our services and our areas will negatively impact our national economic prospects at a time when an upswing in productivity and growth is much needed. The Democratic Unionist party (DUP) has quashed speculation about a deal to break Northern Ireland’s political deadlock and restore power sharing before Christmas. Jeremy Miles has entered the race to become the Welsh first minister and said that as a young gay man from a working-class family he could never have imagined putting himself forward as the leader of Labour and Wales.