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Richard Neal, the US congressman who chairs the powerful ways and means committee, has described the row about the Northern Ireland protocol as a “manufactured” dispute that could be solved with goodwill from the UK.

Neal has been leading a nine-strong delegation from his committee on a protocol fact-finding mission and, after a meeting with the Irish foreign minister, Simon Coveney, he said he and his colleagues had now heard views from Brussels, London and Dublin. He went on:

The protocol dispute seems to me to be a manufactured issue. I have on this delegation people who are experts at trade and they also would confirm that they think these issues on the trade front, if that’s really the dispute, could be ironed out quickly.

So, what we’ve heard so far, clearly from European Union, is they want to find a solution. What we’ve heard from the minister [Simon Coveney], the taoiseach and the president, they want to find a solution. We, the congressional delegation, want to find a solution. So, I think now it’s up to London to help us all find a solution.

Neal is seen as one of the most influential figures on Capitol Hill where Democrats have threatened to block any future UK-US trade deal if the UK were to act in a way that they perceived as likely to undermine the Good Friday agreement.

The British government has argued that it is the protocol itself that is undermining the Good Friday agreement, but this claim has not been widely accepted overseas.

The Resolution Foundation thinktank says raising the energy price cap to around £2,800, which is what Ofgem expects to happen in October, would almost double the number of families in fuel poverty.

Fuel poverty, or fuel stress, is defined as needing to spend at least a tenth of the household budget on energy bills. The Resolution Foundation says the number of families in this position would rise from five million to 9.6 million under the Ofgem projections.

Jonny Marshall, a senior economist at the thinktank, said:

The sheer scale and depth of Britain’s cost-of-living crisis means the government must urgently provide significant additional support.

The fact that the crisis is so heavily concentrated on low-and-middle incomes households means it’s clear how the government should target policy support.

The benefits system is clearly the best route to support those worst affected in the short term – be that via an early uprating or lump sum payments to help poorer households get through the difficult winter ahead.

Looking beyond this winter, these households will also benefit most from cheaper renewable energy and lower consumption from better insulated homes – showing why Britain needs to massively step up its retrofitting programme.

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has written to the Metropolitan police asking for an explanation for its decision not to fine Boris Johnson for attending the Lee Cain leaving drinks at No 10 on 13 November 2020, the Telegraph’s Martin Evans reports. Others who attended were fined.

Earlier Khan said he thought the police should explain why they took that decision for the sake of “trust and confidence” in the force. (See 9.39am.)

As mayor of London Khan is the police and crime commissioner for the capital. Ultimately, if he is not happy with the way the Met is operating, he can force the commissioner to quit. But the Met does not have a full-time commissioner at the moment, because Khan got rid of the last one (Cressida Dick), and so currently he has less leverage over the force than usual.

One rebel Tory thinks the number of letters submitted to the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee demanding a vote of no confidence in Boris Johnson is now in the high 40s, the Telegraph’s Christopher Hope reports. The threshold for a ballot to take place is 54.

Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, says the news that the energy price cap is now expected to rise to £2,800 in October makes an emergency budget even more necessary.

Amanda Milling, the Foreign Office minister, was also in the Commons to answer an urgent question about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe being forced to sign a false confession before she was allowed to leave Iran.

Asked by Labour’s Tulip Siddiq if the government had authorised the UK official with Zaghari-Ratcliffe at the airport to advise her to sign the document, Milling said the official did not force her to sign. Milling said:

The Iranian authorities made clear at the airport that they would not allow Nazanin to leave unless she signed a document … The UK official present passed on the message to Nazanin, and, given the situation Iran put her in, she agreed to sign it. The UK official did not force Nazanin to do so.

Milling also stressed that she did not view this as acceptable. “Nothing about the cruel treatment by Iran of detainees can be described as acceptable, including at the point of release,” she said.

In response to an urgent question earlier Amanda Milling, a Foreign Office minister, said the BBC revelations about China operating a shoot-to-kill policy against Uyghurs escaping prison camps amounted to “compelling evidence” of abuse. She said:

The reports suggests a shoot-to-kill policy was in place at re-education camps for detainees seeking to escape; this is just one of many details that fatally undermine China’s repeated assertions that these brutal places of detention were in fact vocational training centres or a legitimate response to concerns around extremism.

On the contrary, the compelling evidence we see before us reveals the extraordinary scale of China’s targeting of Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities, including forced labour, severe restrictions on freedom of religion, the separation of parents from their children, forced birth control and mass incarceration.

Nusrat Ghani, the Conservative MP who tabled the urgent question, said the government should accept that what was happening to the Uyghurs amounted to genocide. But Milling said the government’s view was that it was for “a matter for a competent national or international court rather than for governments or non-judicial bodies” to determine when genocide was happening.

This is from Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, on the revelations in tonight’s Panorama from insiders about the drinking culture at No 10. (See 2.11pm.)

Boris Johnson is addressing the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee at 5pm tomorrow, Bloomberg’s Kitty Donaldson reports.

We are also expecting him to do a press conference tomorrow, but it is not clear when. If the Sue Gray report is published tomorrow, as expected, then the obvious time for PM to make his statement to MPs on it would be at 12.30pm, after PMQs.

Downing Street insiders have described chaotic mid-lockdown parties in No 10 they felt were condoned by Boris Johnson as he “was grabbing a glass for himself”, PA Media reports. PA says:

Three anonymous individuals have told BBC Panorama in detail what they witnessed at regular rule-breaking events during coronavirus restrictions.

Their evidence will heap further pressure on the prime minister ahead of the publication of the Sue Gray inquiry into “partygate”, which No 10 expects on Wednesday.

Party debris was left overnight for people arriving at work the next day to discover after staff crowded together and sat on each other’s laps at parties, according to the attendees.

One said they felt they had the permission of the prime minister as he was not telling them to break up the scenes when returning to his flat.

“No, he wasn’t telling anybody that. He was grabbing a glass for himself,” they said.

Days after ordering England’s second national lockdown, the pictures obtained by ITV News yesterday showed the PM giving a toast for departing communications chief Lee Cain on November 13 2020.

One witness described the party that night: “There were about 30 people, if not more, in a room. Everyone was stood shoulder to shoulder, some people on each other’s laps … one or two people.”

“Unforgivable” scenes were described at the party on 16 April last year, which was the eve of the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral.

They described a “lively event… a general party with people dancing around” that became so loud that security guards told them to go into the No 10 grounds.

Laura Kuenssberg, who made the programme for Panorama, has a much longer and more detailed account of the revelations on the BBC website here. It includes this account of how No 10 staffers reacted when Johnson told MPs that the rules had been followed at all times. Kuenssberg writes:

One staffer describes what happened when they watched the prime minister denying, in the House of Commons, that anything had gone wrong.

“We were watching it all live and we just sort of looked at each other in disbelief like – why?” they say.

“Why is he denying this when we’ve been with him this entire time, we knew that the rules had been broken, we knew these parties happened?”

And here is a full summary of the lines from the Downing Street lobby briefing.

• The prime minister’s spokesperson played down, but would not firmly deny, reports that Boris Johnson floated with Sue Gray the idea of shelving her Partygate investigation. (See 12.46pm.)

• The spokesperson did not offer a justification for Johnson’s attendance at the Lee Cain leaving event where he was photographed drinking. This morning Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, sought to justify it as a work event. (See 9.14am.) But the spokesperson did not use this argument. Instead he just stressed that Johnson would be making a statement to MPs following the publication of the Sue Gray report. “That’s where you’ll hear more from him,” the spokesperson said.

• The spokesperson suggested that public sector workers may have to accept “limited” pay restraint to avoid the risk of inflation spiralling. This was one of the topics discussed at cabinet today. (See 12.46pm.)

• Government lawyers have been told to be less risk averse in their advice for ministers, the spokesperson revealed. This was another item that came up at cabinet today. The spokesperson said:

The attorney general [Suella Braverman] updated cabinet on a review of the government legal department. She said overall performance was high, however there were incidences where advice was too risk averse or took a computer says no approach to dealing with challenging policy areas. Following the review the government legal department has received revised guidance to ensure they are more attuned to the government’s desire to tackle difficult and longstanding issues.

The spokesperson said Braverman did not give details of over-cautious legal advice, but she did say departments were getting legal advice that was “more risk averse than was needed and didn’t reflect the sort of risk appetite that ministers had”. Braverman may have been thinking in particular of legal advice relating to Brexit. The head of the government legal department resigned in 2020 when the government introduced legislation that would ignore parts of the Northern Ireland protocol, contrary to international law. Those clauses were later dropped from the internal market bill but the government has recently revived its threat to abandon parts of the protocol. Braverman told No 10 that this would be legal, but other lawyers take a different view.

• Government spending on rail services is due to be cut over the long term, the spokesperson signalled. This was the third item of substance raised at cabinet and briefed to the lobby. The spokesperson said:

Turning to reforming our railways, the transport secretary [Grant Shapps] set out a summary of the proposed changes that will improve services, protect timetables and ultimately reduce the burden on taxpayers.

He added that railways have lost a third of its passengers and without reform, we cannot maintain the current service and would have to raise fares and taxpayer support to levels that the public cannot bear.

He reminded cabinet that, on average, railway workers had enjoyed higher pay increases and higher median pay than the majority of other public sector workers, including nurses. And he said salaries of rail workers had increased by 31% in 10 years.

The PM concluded cabinet by saying that there is no justification for the proposed industrial action that would cause major difficulties for many people across the country and he urged all ministers to plan now to minimise disruption this summer

• The spokesperson said Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, was the person who authorised the evacuation of staff from the Nowzad animal charity from Kabul last summer. He was responding to a journalist who said the foreign affairs committee report said there was no plausible explanation for this happening, other than Johnson getting involved, which No 10 denies. The report says:

Amid intense media attention, [Nowzad] staff were called for evacuation at the last minute, despite not meeting the FCDO’s prioritisation criteria, after a mysterious intervention from elsewhere in government. Multiple senior officials believed that the prime minister played a role in this decision. We have yet to be offered a plausible alternative explanation for how it came about.

Asked if he could provide a plausible alternative explanation, the spokesperson said:

The prime minister had no role in authorising individual evacuations from Afghanistan during that operation, that includes Nowzad staff and animals. At no point did the prime minister instruct staff to take any particular course of action. As the defence secretary and many others have said, he was the one who made that decision.

• The spokesperson said the government was “actively looking at what more could be done” to help people with energy bills. Asked about the Ofgem warning about the price cap going up in October (see 12.57pm), the spokesperson also said that some of the support already announced would be rolled out in the autumn.