Ben Quinn is a senior Guardian reporter.

Reform UK’s simmering civil war was re-ignited today as the party was served with papers as part of a legal action being taken by staff for the MP, Rupert Lowe.

Lowe’s staff are taking legal action after Reform UK published an internal report into bullying allegations, in which they were named.

The libel action is separate from an announcement earlier this month by Lowe that he would be suing Nigel Farage and two other senior party figures after they accused him of bullying staff and making verbal threats.

Lowe, who now sits as an independent, said he was suing Farage along with Lee Anderson, its chief whip, and Zia Yusuf, the party chair, for comments he said had “caused serious harm to my reputation”.

The Great Yarmouth MP was suspended after Anderson and Yusuf issued a joint statement saying the party had “received complaints from two female employees about serious bullying” in Lowe’s offices, and had at least twice made threats of violence against Yusuf.

The papers served on Reform UK today were on behalf of four people working for Lowe.

“The action follows the publication of an internal report commissioned by Reform UK which publicly named then when there was no legal basis for doing so,” a law firm acting for them said in a statement.

One of the four individuals was pregnant, it is understood.

Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, has become notorious for his oddball photo opportunities, but today’s is one of the strangest yet. He has been signing wooden spatulas – or “the magic spatula of victory”, to be exact – and distributing them to party activists.

No – in the office, none of us had a clue what this was about either.

But the Lib Dem press office was able to elucidate. Apparently Lib Dem activists often use spatulas when they are delivering leaflets because it makes it easier to push them through letterboxes, and reduces the risk from dog bites.

Other parties don’t normally hold photocalls to celebrate their campaigning paraphernalia. But other parties don’t have quite the same leaflet obsession, as anyone living in a Lib Dem target ward will know.

Kemi Badenoch has said that she feels “vindicated” by Tony Blair’s comments on net zero.

The Tory leader gave a speech last month saying that having 2050 as a legal target for achieving net zero was unrealistic and, as Sky News reports, on a campaign visit this afternoon she said:

I do feel vindicated, and I’m really glad that a former prime minister - a Labour former prime minister - agrees with me.

The plans that we have for net zero by 2050 are impossible, and what Keir Starmer needs to do is scrap what Ed Miliband is planning, which is actually going to bankrupt the country. It’s not workable.

Much of what Blair said in the foreword he wrote to the TBI report published yesterday does echo what Badenoch has argued on climate policy. But the clarification his thinktank released earlier today explicity says the thinktank does back the 2050 net zero targets. (See 11.58am.)

When Tony Blair was PM, he commissioned Nicholas Stern (now Lord Stern), a former chief economist at the World Bank, to write a report on the economics of climate change. It was published in 2006, it was vast and it was highly influential – seen as helping to persuade policy makers around the world not just that there was an environmental/humanitarian case for tackling climate change, but an unarguable economic case too.

So what does Stern think of the Blair report? Not much. Stern is now chair of the Grantham Research institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the LSE and he has issued this comment.

This new report is muddled and misleading. There is far more progress being made around the world to decarbonise the global economy than it suggests. For instance, China is the world’s leading producer and domestic deployer of renewables and electric vehicles. Its power generating capacity from renewables has now exceeded that of fossil fuels and its emissions are likely to peak in the next two years.

The UK’s leadership on climate change, particularly the elimination of coal from its power sector, is providing an influential example to other countries. So, too, its climate change legislation and its Climate Change Committee. If the UK wobbles on its route to net zero, other countries may become less committed. The UK matters.

The transition to clean domestic energy offers British consumers the prospect of lower bills, and greater energy security by not being dependent on volatile international markets for fossil fuels.

And the report downplays the science in its absence of a sense of urgency and the lack of appreciation of the need for the world to achieve net zero as soon as possible, in order to manage the growth in climate change impacts that are already hurting households and businesses across the world and in the UK. Delay is dangerous.

Lindy Fursman, director of energy and climate policy at the Tony Blair Institute thinktank, wrote the report published yesterday that infuriated environmentalists. In truth, it was the comments in the foreword, written by Blair himself, that provoked most of the uproar. But Fursman is clearly unhappy about the way her report was interpeted.

In a post on LinkedIn, responding to a journalist who quoted what Nigel Farage said about the report yesterday and who asked if this was the response she was expecting, Fursman replied:

This is exactly the problem - the paper *doesn’t* say that the push for net zero is irrational, it says that the current state of debate about it is.

I thought I was really clear in the paper that we need net zero, and that we need more action - including on continued use of renewables and their financing, especially in developing countries.

In fact, I even say that an added benefit of CCS would be to show how much cheaper renewables are!!

In what might be a first, Unite, the most leftwing of the major unions affiliated to the Labour party, has put out a new release backing Tony Blair. The press release is headlined Grangemouth closure and Blair’s net zero intervention must be wake up call for government warns Unite and it quotes Sharon Graham, the Unite general secretary, saying:

Unite is not against net zero but it will not be achieved without serious investment in new jobs.

Unite has warned time after time, that all the rhetoric about a joined up industrial strategy and future jobs must be backed up with serious investment that actually delivers. What is Labour waiting for? The time to act is now.

If they fail to do this, then Labour cannot expect workers to support their net zero plan.

At the joint committee on human rights Helena Kennedy, the KC and Labour peer, asked Shabana Mahmood why the government is reviewing the application of article eight from the European convention on human right (the article guaranteeing a right to family life) in immigration cases. Kennedy said many of the cases where article eight got the blame were spurious, or they involved cases where people should not be forced to leave the country because they had been here from a very young age.

Mahmood said the government supported the convention, and the Human Rights Act. But she said it would be wrong for the government to adopt a “nothing to see here” approach and to pretend there were not some problems. Not all cases that have led to article eight being criticised are “completely spurious”, she said. She went on:

Some do not always stand up to scrutiny when you get into the full facts, and they do raise questions of whether the law is working as it should.

Asked when the review would concluded, Mahmood said the Home Office was in charge of this.

Carla Denyer, the Green party co-leader, has now put out a fuller response to yesterday’s report from Tony Blair’s thinktank about climate policy. She said:

Tony Blair has decided to mimic Nigel Farage on net zero and sounds like he is speaking on behalf of petro-states like Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan for whom he has lobbied for more years than he was prime minister.

It is vital that the government distance itself from this latest dodgy dossier from Blair and turn its attention instead to what the Climate Change Committee is saying today. Their report could not be clearer: we are woefully unprepared for the impacts of climate breakdown as a country. Tomorrow is likely to be the hottest local election day on record - a potent reminder that we need a comprehensive plan to prepare for increasingly extreme weather events.

Tony Blair and Nigel Farage apparently need reminding that a huge 89% of the world’s people want stronger action to fight the climate crisis, not a reset or watering down of ambition. And the CBI points to the fact that the UK’s net zero sector expanded 10% last year, three times faster than the rest of the economy.

The future is green; Labour must not allow yesterday’s man to drag us back into the dark ages. The government must press ahead with the drive towards clean energy and the green economy and all the advantages that will bring in creating good quality jobs, cutting energy bills and creating a healthier society.

Earlier Denyer released a video comment on this. See 11.31am.

David Lammy, the foreign secretary, has just started giving evidence to the Lords international relations and defence committee, about the work of his department.

There is a live feed here.

Asked about today’s Guardian splash saying President Trump has decided that a trade deal with the UK is a second-order priority, Lammy said that he read the Guardian but that it wasn’t always right. He said the government was still working hard to agree a trade deal.

UPDATE: Here is the clip.

That was a rather odd PMQs because it felt as though Kemi Badenoch had slipped back in time to January, when calls for a national inquiry into the grooming gang scandal were dominating the pages in rightwing newspapers because Elon Musk kept banging on about this on his global disinformation network and the news was not yet dominated by Donald Trump, because the world was still waiting for his inauguration. Most of what Badenoch said today she could have said, and did say, back then. The newish point was that, more than three months after promising five local inquiries into grooming gangs, the government can only say where one of them will actually take place.

If that was the point Badenoch wanted to make, she landed it perfectly well. She told the Commons:

[Starmer] cannot name a single place because nothing is happening. He stood there at the despatch box and promised five local inquires, nothing is happening, on the last day of term he had his minister come out to water down the promise to say they would provide funding – that’s not good enough.

At least 50 towns are affected by rape gangs, places like Peterborough, Derby, Birmingham, Nottingham, Leicester, Rotherham, Rochdale and Preston. Is he dragging his heels on this because he doesn’t want Labour cover ups exposed?

And yet – was this really the best and most important issue to raise?

For some people, the answer is yes. There are plenty of voters who think that the systematic grooming and rape of young girls was a horrific scandal (it was) and that a holding a national inquiry would help stop it happening again (which is a lot more questionable). In taking up this issue, Badenoch is very much appealing to the core vote. But it is not even her core vote – it’s Nigel Farage’s. As this YouGov polling from January shows, the people who care most about this topic are Reform UK supporters.

One reading of this is that Badenoch’s PMQs strategy is yet more evidence of the Tories and Reform UK in competition with each other over the same voters. There was an even more bizarre example of this week when Reform UK said they would promise a national grooming gangs inquiry in their election manifesto, only for the Tories to say this was “too important to wait until the next election” and that it should take place now (which of course is what Reform UK also wants).

But there is another reading; that, for all the talk of a potential Tory/Reform UK coalition, the reality is that the merger is already happening.

As well as choosing an issues mostly of interest to Farage supporters, Badenoch also picked an argument today where, on balance, Keir Starmer has a stronger case anyway. He was on tricky ground when Badenoch asked where the other four local inquiries were happening. But he clearly had the upper hand when he pointed out that Badenoch ignored this issue when she was in office, and that multiple recommendations from previous inquiries on this were ignored by the Tories when they were in office.

Starmer set out a plausible strategy for approaching this problem that would achieve more than the inquiry demanded by the Tories.

My position is absolutely clear. Where there’s evidence then police should investigate and there should be appropriate prosecutions. That’s route number one.

Route number two we should implement existing recommendations which did expose what went wrong. They weren’t implemented by the last government, they’re being implemented by this government.

We are providing for local inquiries, we are investing more on delivering truth and justice for victims than the party opposite did in 14 long years.

And he also argued – persuasively – that his record as director of public prosecutions means he has done much more to bring grooming gangs to justice than Badenoch.

I was the prosecutor who brought the first case and when that file was brought to my attention I noticed that one of the defendants had not been prosecuted previously.

Far from covering up, I asked for that file so I could have a look at it. On the back of that I then changed the entire approach to prosecutions, which was then lauded by the government that we were doing the right thing, and brought those prosecutions.

So my record was going after where I thought something had gone wrong and putting it right. She stayed silent throughout their years in government.

Most lawyers believe the changes to prosecution guidelines introduced by Starmer when he was DPP made a considerable difference, because he said it was no longer acceptable to drop prosecutions just because the girls involved did not fit the “model victim” stereotype. The Starmer guidelines are here, and here is the Guardian’s news report at the time.

Badenoch also, of course, missed the opportunity to ask about something much more topical and arguably much more important. This is the verdict on her performance from Henry Hill, deputy editor of the ConservativeHome website.

So Tony Blair puts out a report basically agreeing with Kemi Badenoch about Net Zero... and she doesn’t mention it once at PMQs?

Sammy Wilson (DUP) says Starmer’s net zero policy “is not only bad, it is mad”. Even Tony Blair says so, he says.

Starmer says Blair said there should be more carbon capture. The government agrees. He called for more use of AI. That is happening too, he says. And Blair said domestic targets were needed too, he says.

What Tony Blair said is we should have more carbon capture, we’ve invested in carbon capture. That’s many jobs across different parts of the country.

He said that AI [artificial intelligence] should be used, we agree with that. We’ve invested huge amounts in AI and the jobs of the future. He also said we need domestic targets so that businesses have their certainty.

If you look at the detail of what Tony Blair said, he’s absolutely aligned with what we’re doing here, these are the jobs and the security of the future.

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, asks Starmer to declare a national emergency in relation to illegal immigration. He claims ‘smash the gangs’ was just a slogan.

Starmer says Reform UK voted against Labour’s plans to crack down on smuggling gangs. And he quotes reports saying Reform UK have now got Liz Truss as an adviser.

In a subsequent answer, he accuses Farage of “fawning over Putin and taking Liz Truss’s advice”.

UPDATE: Farage said:

To date, so far this year, 10,000 young, undocumented males have illegally crossed the English Channel into our country, a 40% increase on this time last year. Many coming from cultures that are somewhat alien to ours.

“They are being housed at a cost of many billions of pounds a year in hotels and increasingly in private rented homes. The effect on communities is one of a sense of deep unfairness, actually bordering on resentment. In Runcorn alone, there are 750 of these young men.

Is it not time to admit that ‘smash the gangs’ was nothing more than an election slowdown, not a policy?

Isn’t it time to declare a national emergency and to act accordingly?

And Starmer replied:

We are passing a borders bill with extensive powers to smash the gangs.

These are terrorist-like powers that give powers to the police to intercept where they think the suspects are committing people-smuggling, which is a vile trade.

We must take back control of our borders after the last government lost control.

But what did he and his party do? Did they support those extra measures to actually smash the gangs? No, they went in the lobby with this lot in their new coalition to vote against them

And let’s be clear what a vote for his party means. It means a vote to charge for the NHS, it means a pro-Putin foreign policy, and a vote against workers’ rights.

And now we here he’s recruited Liz Truss as his new top adviser, as he was cheering on the mini budget.

Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, says he asked last week for a vote on any trade deal with the US, and Starmer did not answer last week, or when Clive Jones asked the question earlier.

Starmer says any deal will go through the known procedures of this house.

The Tony Blair Institute has issued a statement saying that the UK government’s approach to the climate crisis is “the right one” and saying that it supports the 2050 net zero target.

Here is the clarification is full.

The TBI report is clear: we must prioritise technologies which capture carbon, place a bigger emphasis on protecting and enhancing nature, and develop new nuclear power, smart grids, and a new system of financing existing renewable solutions in developing economies. The UK government is already pursuing these, and their approach is the right one.

The report also makes a plea for a different international policy approach which focuses on the global sources of emissions and the additional solutions we are likely to need to meet climate goals. It notes that ongoing domestic decarbonisation efforts in all countries remain vital for reducing emissions and delivering a sustainable future. In the short term - and we emphasise short term - fossil fuels will continue to be a large part of the global energy supply, particularly in developing countries who need to meet the immediate and increasing energy demands of their people as their economies develop.

The report is clear that we support the government’s 2050 net zero targets, to give certainty to the investors and innovators who can develop these new solutions and make them deployable. People support climate action, and it is vital that we keep the public’s support for how we do it.

This statement does not mention Tony Blair directly, or the foreword that he wrote to the report published yesterday that has generated a considerable backlash, from environmentalists and from people in the Labour party.

It is true, as the TBI statement says today, that Blair did not directly refer to UK government policy. But many of the general points he was making were clearly applicable to the UK. The foreword, and the report itself, did not directly defend the 2050 net zero target. And Blair in his foreword said:

Though action by the developed world is still vital, by 2030 almost two-thirds of global emissions will come from China, India and South-East Asia. Yet the global financial flows for renewable energy in the developing world have fallen and not risen in the past few years.

These are the inconvenient facts, which mean that any strategy based on either “phasing out” fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail.

Now the TBI is suggesting that this statement referred mainly to policy in the developing world, and that he was only referring only to the short term. That is not quite what he said yesterday.

PMQs is starting soon.

Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.

The Green party co-leader Carla Denyer described Tony Blair as a “dinosaur” in a video on social media for his views on climate change. “What a surprise. A political dinosaur is a big fan of fossile fuels,” she says.

Denyer says today’s Climate Change Committee report shows why action to tackle the climate crisis is needed. Fiona Harvey has written it up here.

Denyer says this shows why doing nothing about climate is unrealistic.

Julia King, a scientist, crossbench peer (she is Lady Brown of Cambridge) and chair of the Climate Change Committee’s adaptation sub-committee has accused Tony Blair of sending out the wrong message on the climate crisis.

Speaking on the Today programme this morning, she said:

My concern is that people might take away a message from that report that we should do adaptation instead of mitigation, and that is absolutely the wrong message.

We need to do adaptation, because even if we get to net zero by mid-century, there’s still a huge amount of climate change to come, and we need to be ready for that. But we can’t adapt to everything.

As people know who live on the coast and suffer coastal erosion and flooding. No, we can’t adapt to everything. It’s absolutely critical that alongside adaptation, we are reducing emissions as well.

Aletha Adu has more on the backlash that Blair is facing in a story here.

Aletha also quotes an unnamed senior Labour MP saying this about the former PM.

It’s maddening. Blair parachutes in, and is handing talking points to the Tories and Reform on a silver platter. TBI [the Tony Blair Institute – Blair’s thinktank] might want to remember it’s not running the country.

“All politics is local,” as the saying (normally attributed to the former US speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O’Neill) goes, and that explains what is happening in the campaign for the English local elections. There is one day left until polling day and the main political parties, quite literally, talking rubbish.

Labour has announced a crackdown on fly-tipping. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs issued a press release about this last night, but the new element is a bit vague, and partly it is just promoting things that already happen. It says:

Councils will work with the police to identify, seize and crush vehicles of waste criminals. Drones and mobile CCTV cameras will be deployed to identify cars and vans belonging to fly-tippers so they can be destroyed.

Ministers have launched a rapid review to slash red tape blocking councils from seizing and crushing vehicles. Councils currently have to bear the significant cost of seizing and storing vehicles but under new plans, being consider by ministers, fly-tippers will cover this cost, saving councils and taxpayers money.

In addition, waste cowboys will now face up to five years in prison for operating illegally. Any criminals caught transporting and dealing with waste illegally will now face up to five years in prison under new legislation.

Alongside the government press release, the Labour party has released figures showing that “under the last Conservative government rates of fly-tipping in England increased by more than a third to over 3,000 incidents per day”. Here is their table.

A Labour spokesperson said:

On the Tories’ watch, fly-tipping skyrocketed and enforcement against criminal rubbish dumpers went down. They badly let communities down and had no plan to turn things around.

The Conservative party put out its own press release last night, and it was about the bin strike in Labour-controlled Birmingham. Birmingham is not one of the areas where local elections are taking place. But the Tories are arguing that, in effect, Birmingham is on the ballot everywhere, because it is a template for Labour. Kevin Hollinrake, the shadow local government said:

Labour-run Birmingham is a warning to every community in the country going to the polls on Thursday. Under Labour, council tax soars, services collapse — and you’re left with rats in the streets and rubbish piling up.

The party also put out a response to Labour’s fly-tipping news. Victoria Atkins, the shadow environment secretary, said:

Wherever Labour is in charge, waste is piling high - like in Birmingham, where Labour’s inability to stand up to their union paymasters has left rat infested rubbish littered across the streets.

And here is some more comment on Tony Blair’s net zero comments from environmentalists and commentators

From Damian Carrington, the Guardian’s environment editor, on Bluesky

“We need to depoliticise the climate debate” says that Tony Blair report ...

.... the main impact of which has been to deepen the right wing culture war against net zero by describing the climate debate as “hysteria”

From Carole Cadwalladr, the former Observer journalist, on Bluesky

Tony Blair is literally being paid by a man with one of the highest carbon footprints on the planet - Larry Ellison. The founder of Oracle is his biggest funder & these techsolutionist remarks have to be seen for what they are: tech lobbying

From Doug Parr, chief scientist and policy officer at Greenpeace UK

Tony Blair Institute have released a report which is getting a lot of coverage in UK today

It says the drive for net zero emissions is flawed and some media outlets have gone to town

However it’s a bit odd

By odd, I mean there’s a lot of bollocks in it and shouldn’t be taken seriously

Parr has posted a long thread explaining why he is saying this on Bluesky. Here are some of his posts.

On technology, it says current technologies have failed

Right

So solar, wind, batteries etc have all ‘failed’?

Has Blair been paying attention? Instead, it says, we should use lots of *carbon capture* & *nuclear power*. which haven’t failed repeatedly, cost a fortune, or struggled at al

For reference Tony, here’s a chart of how solar, wind et al are doing.

I bet loads of companies and stockmarkets would like to fail this badly And wind and solar will continue to expand rapidly

By contrast IEA etc are constantly having to revise down how much CCS will be deployed

From Richard Black, director of policy and strategy at Ember, an energy thinktank, in a post on LinkedIn

Where to start with the ‘new’ paper from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, approved by the great man himself and given fanfare treatment in the UK’s top tier media, calling for a ‘reset’ on action to tackle climate change?

Nothing new about it: just a recycling effort. And not in a good way.

Bearing in mind the word limit on LinkedIn posts, I’ll just deconstruct from the top down and see how far I get.

“Voters feel they’re being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle” - when advances in many countries on renewables, EVs and heat pumps will reduce energy bills in perpetuity.

“Fossil fuel consumption is set to rise up to 2030” - I suggest that TBI puts some of its money into coal stocks, then I’ll believe that they believe it.

“China initiated construction of 95GW of new coal-fired capacity” - and simultaneously made market reforms showing that coal will be running less and less of the time, as renewable generation rises. Oh, they forgot that bit …

The thing is: the paper isn’t entirely bad. Its diagnosis is partially correct. But its prescription is all stuff that we’ve heard a hundred times before, that takes grand but ultimately vapid statements like “The current climate debate is broken” and treats them as tablets of stone.

What’s missing is a call for political leaders to lead with confidence and clarity on solutions that are cost-effective, popular, gaining market share and command the favour of private investors. An odd omission, you might think, for a politician once bold enough to reform his party en route to winning three terms in office.

British fighter jets joined their US counterparts in airstrikes against Yemen’s Houthi rebels overnight, the first military action authorised by the Labour government and the first UK participation in an aggressive American bombing campaign against the group, Dan Sabbagh reports.

Dale Vince, the founder of the renewable energy company Ecotricity and Labour party donor, has accused Tony Blair of talking “nonsense” on net zero policy. In a statement he said:

This from Tony Blair is net zero nonsense. He talks of growing fossil demand from China, when in fact it has peaked. He says we need less focus on renewable energy and more on carbon capture - one is cheap and abundant and prevents carbon emissions, the other is an incredibly expensive way of trying to deal with emissions. Prevention (green energy) is always better and cheaper than the cure.

Net zero is in fact the economic opportunity of the century. Jobs and GDP growth is what’s at stake, green energy can bring both of those, fossil fuels will keep us on the global energy bill rollercoaster and carbon capture is a fools errand. Expected better than this from the TBI.

In his interview with Times Radio, Steve Reed, the environment secretary, was specifically asked about the claim from an unnamed Labour source who said that Tony Blair’s net zero comments amounted to a tantrum. (See 9.46am.) Asked if he agreed, Reed replied: “No, I don’t.”

Reed also played down the extent to which the Blair article amounted to criticism of government policy. He said:

One of the other points that Tony is making in his piece is that there needs to be more focus on carbon capture and storage technology. Well, we agree with that. The government is investing £22bn in that technology. That’s the highest amount any government has ever invested.

So I think we are doing what Tony Blair says he wants to see, but we’re also shifting away from dependence, over-dependence on fossil fuels because it’s better for the country to take control of our own energy.

And, in an interview with LBC, asked if Blair was right to say “net zero is doomed”, Reed replied:

I don’t think that’s quite what Tony Blair said, to be a fair. This government is transitioning the economy away from being dependent on fossil fuels.

In the foreword he wrote to the report published by his thinktank yesterday, Blair did not explicitly talk about UK government policy (he was talking about climate policy in the developing world generally – although the points he made apply as much to the UK as to anywhere else) and he did not directly mention the 2050 net zero target. But he did say:

Any strategy based on either “phasing out” fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail.

Good morning. Keir Starmer faces PMQs a day after Tony Blair in effect fired a torpedo at his net zero strategy – an essential part of Labour’s Plan for Change. We covered the Blair comments on the blog yesterday and here is Jessica Elgot’s story.

Blair has been out of office for 15 years, but he is still an influential and knowledgeable figure and there is no one alive in British politics who has a better record at winning general elections. Until relatively recently, climate policy was an area on which all the main parties were broadly agreed. After Kemi Badenoch recently gave a speech saying that the government’s legal target of getting carbon emissions down to net zero by 2050 was unachievable (despite the fact the Tory government legislated for this, and Badenoch herself was one of the MPs who approved the secondary legislation without voting against), and with Nigel Farage now saying the government does not need to do anything about climate change, the Blair intervention is final proof that that consensus is now in tatters.

Badenoch is likely to raise this at PMQs today, not least because much of what Blair said sounded as if it could have come from one of her speeches. According to Politico, Farage is also due to get a question today too.

Steve Reed, the environment secretary, was doing a morning interview round, and he played down the significance of Blair’s intervention. He told Times Radio:

[Blair is] making a valid and important contribution to a very significant debate that we’re having. I agree with much of what he said, but not absolutely every word and dot and comma of it.

But this government is moving to clean energy because it’s best for Britain. It’s more energy security for Britain. It’s jobs and investment right across the United Kingdom. And those are all things we all want to see.

Reed was following Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, who said this when asked about the Blair comments in the Commons yesterday.

I agree with a lot of what [the report from Blair’s thinktank] says. It says that we should move ahead on carbon capture and storage, which the government are doing. It says that we should move ahead on the role of artificial intelligence, which the government are doing. It says that we should move ahead on nuclear, which the government are doing.

But, privately, Labour figures are not as relaxed about Blair’s intervention as these comments imply. This is what Sam Blewett and Noah Keate are reporting in their London Playbook briefing.

Anger in the Labour ranks was palpable last night, with one campaigner telling Playbook the foot soldiers “working their socks off” ahead of the locals are “incredibly pissed off.” The well-connected campaigner suggested it was the tantrum of “someone struggling for influence” … and even went on to point out the TBI has received funds from Saudi Arabia. (Blair’s think tank insisted it was “editorially independent.”)

Here is the agenda for the day.

10am: John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, speaks to the Scottish TUC conference in Dundee.

Morning: Adrian Ramsay, the Green party’s co-leader, is campaigning in Doncaster.

Noon: Keir Starmer faces Kemi Badenoch at PMQs.

2pm: Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, gives evidence to the joint committee on human rights.

2pm: David Lammy, the foreign secretary, gives evidence to the Lords international relations and defence committee.

Afternoon: Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, is campaigning in Tunbridge Wells in Kent.

Afternoon: Kemi Badenoch is campaigning in Hertfordshire. She is also due to do an interview with GB News.

Afternoon: Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, is campaigning in south Yorkshire.

If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.

If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.

I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.