Politics latest: PM vows to build ‘fairer Britain’ as ministers hold talks with Labour MPs over welfare bill concessions | Politics News

 We’re speaking to James Cleverly on Sky News Breakfast now to get a view from the Conservatives on the prime minister’s trade policy.

Speaking to Wilfred Frost, the former foreign and home secretary lambasted the prime minister’s efforts.

While Starmer was quick to trumpet his US and India trade deals in his speech, Cleverly said the US deal was just “a few lines of concessions on global tariffs”.

He also claimed that the India deal was “99% negotiated” under Kemi Badenoch.

“He’s clutching at these headlines because what we saw in that speech was an incredibly downbeat, slow, ponderous,” Cleverly told Sky News. 

“He’s got very little to say to business because what the people in that room will know, what they will feel is that he’s put up the tax on employment, which means we’re losing jobs.”

A ‘drag anchor held hostage by his back benches’

Cleverly described Starmer as a “drag anchor” on British business, with warm words, he said, failing to paper over the cracks.

Touching on one of the stories of the day, Cleverly said that Starmer was being “held hostage” by his back benches over an attempted benefits cut.

He told us: “This is a Labour prime minister less than a year after general election with a record majority, who is now being held hostage by his own backbenchers, totally incapable, it seems, of delivering even a fairly modest reduction in the welfare bill, which is needed now, perhaps more than at any time in recent history. 

“If he can’t do that, then what’s the point of him?”

‘Farage and his backing singers’

Cleverly described Reform UK as “Farage and his backing singers” after our report this morning on a poll that suggested the party was on track to win the most seats if an election took place this year.

“Whenever you see polls like that it’s disconcerting,” he said.

Such polls seemingly position Reform UK as primed to replace the Conservatives as the preeminent right-wing party in Britain.

But Cleverly promised not only would the Conservative party target the Labour government, it would also work to convince voters of Reform’s “ineptitude”.