Angela Rayner has accused the Conservatives of spending hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money on “loophole lawyers” in an attempt to obstruct the Covid inquiry.
The deputy Labour leader stepped in for Keir Starmer at prime minister’s questions while Oliver Dowden covered for Rishi Sunak, who is in Washington for talks with the US president, Joe Biden.
Mocking Dowden’s attempts to present himself as a “man of the people” because of his working-class background, Rayner questioned why the government was frustrating the Covid inquiry set up to “get to the truth”. Boris Johnson is asking for “another 1m for his lawyers”, she said.
Johnson has been at the centre of a row as ministers launched a high court attempt to challenge the inquiry’s demand for his unredacted WhatsApp messages and contemporaneous notebooks.
Rayner launched the deputy PMQs session with a question on whether the Conservatives were still planning on reforming judicial reviews, as set out in the last Tory manifesto.
“He [Dowden] pretends that it’s complicated but it’s simple,” Rayner said. “They set up the inquiry to get to the truth, then blocked that inquiry from getting the information that it asked for and now they’re taking it to court.
“I know he considers himself a man of the people, so using his vast knowledge of working-class Britain, does he think working people will thank him for spending hundreds of thousands of pounds of their money on loophole lawyers, just so the government can...
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