Housing Secretary Michael Gove and former business secretary Andrea Leadsom will not stand at general election
Housing Secretary Michael Gove and former business secretary Andrea Leadsom have said they will not stand at the general election.
Mr Gove announced after nearly 20 years as the Conservative Party MP for Surrey Heath, and serving in multiple cabinets over the course of the last 14 years, “a new generation should lead”.
In a letter to his constituency chairman, the veteran cabinet minister said being an MP and minister has been a “profound privilege”.
General election latest: Reaction as Gove and Leadsom standing down
Just hours later on Friday evening, Ms Leadsom, who unsuccessfully stood to lead the Conservative Party against Theresa May in the wake of the Brexit referendum, said she would also be standing down.
In her resignation letter, Ms Leadsom said it has been “the greatest honour to serve the people of South Northamptonshire as their MP for the last 14 years”.
Ms Leadsom, who is currently a junior health minister, was business secretary under Mrs May.
She did not praise Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in her letter – but instead said she will “continue to support the Conservative Party through this general election and in the future as the party best aligned with the ideals and values of the people of the United Kingdom”.
Gove says serving ‘honour of my life’
Mr Gove, who held roles including education secretary, chief whip, justice secretary, environment secretary, chancellor of Duchy of Lancaster, and most recently the housing brief, said serving in government had been the “honour of my life”.
He was a vocal leader of the Vote Leave campaign during the Brexit debate.
There was also his shock decision to withdraw his backing for Boris Johnson in the 2016 leadership election to replace David Cameron – which ended up seeing Mrs May take the reins of the party.
Mr Johnson had his revenge when he sacked Mr Gove from government as his administration collapsed.
He became the 77th Conservative MP to announce he was standing down – you can read the full list of MPs leaving parliament here.
Mr Gove said: “As a child in Aberdeen I could never have imagined I would have the opportunity to sit in the Commons, let along the cabinet table.
“That four prime ministers asked me to serve the country in their governments has been the honour of my life.”
A blow to the morale of the Conservative Party
Michael Gove is an iconic figure who has traversed all the 14 years that we’ve had Conservatives in Downing Street.
He’s not just been any other cabinet minister – he’s almost always been at the top table.
He was extremely close to David Cameron when he was prime minister, advising him for Prime Minister’s Questions as part of his kitchen cabinet – that relationship enduring all the way up to the Brexit referendum, when once again he played an absolutely pivotal role leading the Brexit referendum for the Vote Leave side.
Mr Gove was a key face alongside Boris Johnson that delivered Britain’s departure from the European Union.
After a little hiatus from government, he did return under Theresa May and then was central for many years of Mr Johnson’s premiership until he was sacked in the final hours of his time in Downing Street – and then again served under Rishi Sunak.
But I think of late has struggled to feel like he was making as big a difference in government as he has at some time.
It will be a blow to the morale of the Conservative Party because for so many years, when the Conservative Party has perhaps been a little low, Michael Gove has had the wit, the ability and the intelligence to pick them and pick the party up again.
He added: “I also know the toll office can take, as do those closest to me. No one in politics is a conscript. We are volunteers who willingly choose our fate.
“And the chance to serve is wonderful. But there comes a moment when you know that it is time to leave. That a new generation should lead.”
Paying tribute to Mr Gove, Mr Sunak said: “Michael Gove has been one of the most transformative cabinet ministers of recent times.
“His radical reforms as education minister have made real and lasting change with children in England now the best readers in the Western World. He brought dynamism to our levelling up agenda ensuring we spread opportunity no matter where you live and he has been a stalwart guardian of our precious union.
“I want to thank him for his dedicated public service to his constituents and his country, his relentless energy and ideas around the cabinet table and on a personal level, I want to thank him for his generous support and wise counsel.
“The government and the country will be poorer without him on the front line of politics and I wish him all the very best for the future.”
While he was elected with a majority of 18,349 in 2019, Mr Gove’s seat in Surrey is the kind which the Liberal Democrats will be targeting.
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Reacting, Lib Dem MP Sarah Olney said: “Conservative politicians are fleeing the blue wall in their droves. Michael Gove is running scared of the Liberal Democrats.
“The drumbeat of Conservative MPs stepping down has been getting louder as the days go by – now it’s deafening.
“Every Conservative MP that steps down in a blue wall battleground is a damning statement against Rishi Sunak and proof the Liberal Democrats are on the up.”
Politics
Specialist teams and online investigators deployed across England and Wales to tackle ‘national emergency’ of violence against women and girls
Specialist investigation teams for rape and sexual offences are to be created across England and Wales as the home secretary declares violence against women and girls a “national emergency”.
Shabana Mahmood said the dedicated units will be in place across every force by 2029 as part of Labour’s violence against women and girls (VAWG) strategy due to be launched later this week.
The use of Domestic Abuse Protection Orders (DAPOs), which had been trialled in several areas, will also be rolled out across England and Wales. They are designed to target abusers by imposing curfews, electronic tags and exclusion zones.
The orders cover all forms of domestic abuse, including economic abuse, coercive and controlling behaviour, stalking and ‘honour’-based abuse. Breaching the terms can carry a prison term of up to five years.
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Govt ‘thinking again’ on abuse strategy
Nearly £2m will also be spent funding a network of officers to target offenders operating within the online space.
Teams will use covert and intelligence techniques to tackle violence against women and girls via apps and websites.
A similar undercover network funded by the Home Office to examine child sexual abuse has arrested over 1,700 perpetrators.
Abuse is ‘national emergency’
Ms Mahmood said in a statement: “This government has declared violence against women and girls a national emergency.
“For too long, these crimes have been considered a fact of life. That’s not good enough. We will halve it in a decade.
“Today, we announce a range of measures to bear down on abusers, stopping them in their tracks. Rapists, sex offenders and abusers will have nowhere to hide.”
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Angiolini Inquiry: Recommendations are ‘not difficult’
The target to halve violence against women and girls in a decade is a Labour manifesto pledge.
The government said the measures build on existing policy, including facial recognition technology to identify offenders, improving protections for stalking victims, making strangulation a criminal offence and establishing domestic abuse specialists in 999 control rooms.
Read more from Sky News:
Demands for violence and abuse reforms
Women still feel unsafe on streets
Minister ‘clarifies’ violence strategy
Labour has ‘failed women’
But the Conservatives said Labour had “failed women” and “broken its promises” by delaying the publication of the violence against women and girls strategy.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said that Labour “shrinks from uncomfortable truths, voting against tougher sentences and presiding over falling sex-offender convictions. At every turn, Labour has failed women”.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood will be on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips on Sky News this morning from 8.30am.
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published a crypto wallet and custody guide investor bulletin on Friday, outlining best practices and common risks of different forms of crypto storage for the investing public.
The SEC’s bulletin lists the benefits and risks of different methods of crypto custody, including self-custody versus allowing a third-party to hold digital assets on behalf of the investor.
If investors choose third-party custody, they should understand the custodian’s policies, including whether it “rehypothecates” the assets held in custody by lending them out or if the service provider is commingling client assets in a single pool instead of holding the crypto in segregated customer accounts.
Crypto wallet types were also outlined in the SEC guide, which broke down the pros and cons of hot wallets, which are connected to the internet, and offline storage in cold wallets.
Hot wallets carry the risk of hacking and other cybersecurity threats, according to the SEC, while cold wallets carry the risk of permanent loss if the offline storage fails, a storage device is stolen, or the private keys are compromised.
The SEC’s crypto custody guide highlights the sweeping regulatory change at the agency, which was hostile to digital assets and the crypto industry under former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s leadership.
Related: SEC sends warning letters to ETF issuers targeting untamed leverage
The crypto community celebrates the SEC guide as a transformational change in the agency
“The same agency that spent years trying to kill the industry is now teaching people how to use it,” Truth For the Commoner (TFTC) said in response to the SEC’s crypto custody guide.
The SEC is providing “huge value” to crypto investors by educating prospective crypto holders about custody and best practices, according to Jake Claver, the CEO of Digital Ascension Group, a company that provides services to family offices.
SEC regulators published the guide one day after SEC Chair Paul Atkins said that the legacy financial system is moving onchain.
On Thursday, the SEC gave the green light to the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a clearing and settlement company, to begin tokenizing financial assets, including equities, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and government debt securities.
Magazine: Unstablecoins: Depegging, bank runs and other risks loom
Greens leader Zack Polanski has rejected claims his party would push for open borders on immigration, telling Sky News it is “not a pragmatic” solution for a world in “turmoil”.
Mr Polanski distanced himself from his party’s “long-range vision” for open borders, saying it was not in his party’s manifesto and was an “attack line used by opponents” to question his credibility.
It came as Mr Polanski, who has overseen a spike in support in the polls to double figures, refused to apologise over controversial comments he made about care workers on BBC Question Time that were criticised across the political spectrum.
Mr Polanski was speaking to Sky News earlier this week while in Calais, where he joined volunteers and charities to witness how French police handle the arrival of migrants in the town that is used as a departure point for those wanting to make the journey to the UK.
He told Sky News he had made the journey to the French town – once home to the “Jungle” refugee camp before it was demolished in 2016 – to tackle “misinformation” about migration and to make the case for a “compassionate, fair and managed response” to the small boats crisis.
He said that “no manifesto ever said anything about open borders” and that the Greens had never stood at a general election advocating for them.
“Clearly when the world is in political turmoil and we have deep inequality, that is not a situation we can move to right now,” he said.
“That would also involve massive international agreements and cooperation. That clearly is not a pragmatic conversation to have right now. And very often the government try to push that attack line to make us look not pragmatic.”
The party’s manifesto last year did not mention open borders, but it did call for an end to the “hostile environment”, more safe and legal routes and for the Home Office to be abolished and replaced with a department of migration.
Asked why the policy of minimal restrictions on migration had been attributed to his party, Mr Polanski said open borders was part of a “long-range vision of what society could look like if there was a Green government and if we’d had a long time to fix some of the systemic problems”.
‘We should recognise the contribution migrants make’
Mr Polanski, who was elected Green Party leader in September and has been compared to Nigel Farage over his populist economic policies, said his position was one of a “fair and managed” migration system – although he did not specify whether that included a cap on numbers.
He acknowledged that there needed to be a “separate conversation” about economic migration but that he did not believe any person who boarded a small boat was in a “good situation”.
While Mr Polanski stressed that he believed asylum seekers should be able to work in Britain and pay taxes, he also said he believed in the need to train British workers in sectors such as care, where one in five are foreign nationals.
Asked what his proposals for a fair and managed migration system looked like, and whether he supported a cap on numbers, Mr Polanski said: “We have 100,000 vacancies in the National Health Service. One in five care workers in the care sector are foreign nationals.
Zack Polanski speaks to Sky News from a warehouse in Calais where charities and organisations provide migrants with essentials.
“Now, of course, that is both British workers and we should be training British workers, but we should recognise the contribution that migrants and people who come over here make.”
I’m not going to apologise’
Mr Polanski also responded to the criticism he attracted over his comments about care workers on Question Time last week, where he told the audience: “I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want to wipe someone’s bum” – before adding: “I’m very grateful for the people who do this work.”
His comments have been criticised by a number of Labour MPs, including Wes Streeting, the health secretary, who said: “Social care isn’t just ‘wiping someone’s bum’. It is a hard, rewarding, skilled professional job.
“This is immigration as exploitation.”
Read more:
The Greens leader who wants to be the Farage of the left
Will Farage racism allegations deter voters?
Asked whether he could understand why some care workers might feel he had talked down to them, the Greens leader replied: “I care deeply about care workers. When I made those comments, it’s important to give a full context. I said ‘I’m very grateful to people who do this important work’ and absolutely repeat that it’s vital work.”
“Of course, it is not part of the whole job, and I never pretended it was part of the whole job.”
Mr Polanski said he “totally” rejected the suggestion that he had denigrated the role of care workers in the eyes of the public and said his remarks were made in the context of a “hostile Question Time” where he had “three right-wing panellists shouting at me”.
Pressed on whether he wanted to apologise, he replied: “I’m not going to apologise for being really clear that I’m really grateful to the people who do this really vital work. And yes, we should be paying them properly, too.”
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