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Khan confirms he was again refused permission to attend a Cobra meeting on Covid on Thursday 12 March. “To say I was frustrated is an understatement,” he says.

At the inquiry Sadiq Khan is being questioned by Andrew O’Connor, counsel for the inquiry.

O’Connor has presented email exchanges showing that in early March Khan was asking to be invited to the Cobra meetings where Covid was being discussed. He showed emails showing that No 10 twice refused to let him attend.

In one exchange, on Monday 9 March, Edward Lister, Boris Johnson’s chief of staff, argued that Khan should not be invited because, if he came, other metro mayors, like Greater Manchester’s, would have to be invited too.

Khan told the inquiry that he thought London was a special case, because of its large population, the number of people travelling by public transport, its role as a transport hub, and the fact that virus seemed to be spreading there faster than in other parts of the country.

But he also said he did not see why other mayors could not attend too. They could participate by Zoom, he said.

At the Covid inquiry Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, said that he was not getting information from the government in February about Covid. He said he was “disappointed” by that.

In late February and early March he was getting information from other cities around the world instead, he said. He said this happened even though his foreign affairs team consisted of just three people.

In his speech at the global investment summit Rishi Sunak claimed that the government was cutting taxes. He said:

When I say that this country can be the best place in the world to invest in to do business you should believe me because of three big competitive advantages that we have – our low tax approach, our culture of innovation, and our people.

The purest expression of this government’s economic philosophy is that people and businesses make far better decisions about their own money than any government could.

And I believe that allowing you to keep more of the return on your capital, our country becomes more competitive as a place to invest, grow and create jobs.

And make no mistake, we are cutting taxes. Not only do we have the lowest corporation tax rate in the G7.

Last week, we announced that we would make full expensing permanent. That means you can write off the cost of many capital investments in full. It makes our capital allowances regime one of the most generous in the world and it was the biggest business tax cut in modern Britain.

The government did announce significant tax cuts in the autumn statement. But those won’t be enough to compensate for the impact of previous tax rises announced since 2019 that will take the tax burden to a post-war record high.

Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, will not appear to the Covid inquiry this year due to an ongoing health problem, PA Media reports. PA says:

In a ruling published this morning, inquiry chairwoman Heather Hallett formally excused Case from giving evidence in 2023 “due to ill health”.

Hallett said she would receive an update on Case’s ability to give evidence at the end of January 2024 or on his return to work from sick leave, and is expected to convene a special hearing to receive his evidence.

She said in her ruling: “It very much remains my intention that Mr Case should give oral evidence to the inquiry.”

At the Covid inquiy Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has just started giving evidence. I will be covering the highlights, and there is a live feed at the top of the blog.

Rishi Sunak has just delivered a speech at the opening of the global investment summit. Mostly he focused on what he described as the strengths of the UK economy, but his speech also illustrated why immigration is such a difficult topic for the government. While people worry about high immigration numbers because of the pressure on housing and services, there is also a strong economic case for more immigration, and Sunak told his audience that the UK wanted to see high-flyers move to Britain. He said:

We don’t have a monopoly on talent in this country. And we recognise that nearly half of our most innovative companies have an immigrant founder. So if you’re an innovator and entrepreneur or researcher, you should know that the most competitive visa regime for highly-skilled international talent is right here in the UK.

And let me just give you one example. Our new high potential individual visa means that, if you’re a young person who’s graduated from a global top 50 university, you can just come to the UK and stay here with your family for two years to just explore, work, study, invent. Nothing like that exists anywhere else in the world, and it tells you everything about our pro-innovation, pro-growth, pro-business philosophy.

In her interviews this morning Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, gently delivered a reprimand to Boris Johnson over his record on immigration. Asked about his column in the Daily Mail, in which he called for the minimum salary threshold for work visas to be raised to £40,000 (see 9.23am), she said she had not read what he had written. But she told LBC:

I certainly will be pushing for the strongest measures possible. The migration figures that we’ve seen [last week] were from last year. That was under Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Many of us had reservations about the policy then. So I think that you will be seeing much, much tougher measures going forward.

In 2019, when Johnson was PM and fighting the election, the Tory manifesto said that overall immigration numbers “will come down”. Instead net migration figures are now more than three times as high as they were four years ago, leading to widespread complaints – most notably from Tory MPs – that a promise has been broken.

In his Mail column Johnson refused to accept this argument, While he did not contest the facts, he claimed that it was the anti-Brexiteers who had been proved wrong. He said:

Look carefully at those immigration figures, and you can see much that reflects well on the UK. The numbers show, most obviously, that the anti-Brexit brigade were totally wrong about the attractions of post-Brexit Britain.

They said we would become a kind of global leper, reeking of xenophobia, and that the world’s talent would stay away. Well that was always rubbish — and these figures prove it.

What the numbers also show is that after Brexit we under­estimated the magnetic pull of the UK; and the numbers show that the British labour market is ­continuing to inspire large ­numbers of low-skilled people to want to come to work here — and for low incomes. That is a mistake.

Johnson said Brexit gave the UK government the power to impose tougher restrictions. And, in so far as he explained why he had not introduced the £40,000 minimum salary threshold for workers he now wants when he was actually in power himself, he suggested it was the fault of the migration advisory committee, which had recommended a threshold of £26,000.

Rishi Sunak has brushed aside reports that Reform UK, the fringe party challenging the Conservatives from the right, might be trying to poach his MPs.

As he arrived at Hampton Court this morning, Sunak was asked if he was worried about defections following the revelation that Lee Anderson, the deputy Tory chair, was approached by Reform UK.

In response, Sunak just said he was “focused on delivering for the British people”.

In her interview on Today this morning Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, complained that the programme was ignoring good news from the government. She was referring to the investment in the UK worth £30bn announced to coincide with the global investment summit taking place today, and Rishi Sunak said this morning this showed there was “very positive momentum” behind the economy. He said:

My singular focus is driving growth and creating jobs across the UK. So I’m delighted that we’ve secured investments worth around £30bn, three times the amount that was secured the last time this summit was held a little while ago.

And that comes on the back of a very positive autumn statement where we cut taxes for those businesses that are investing in our future growth and also the great announcements from Nissan last week, securing the future of that plant in Sunderland, building three new lines of the next generation of electric vehicles.

So very positive momentum behind the UK economy.

But until now the government’s investment record has not been much to boast about. In a recent Financial Times column Camilla Cavendish, who was head of policy in No 10 when David Cameron was PM, said that since Brexit “Britain has begun a slow, mournful slide down the OECD rankings for foreign direct investment: from 12th place in 2015 to 20th in 2022”. And last week, without much fanfare, the government published as part of the autumn statement a review of foreign direct investment carried out by Lord Harrington, a Tory former business minister. In his report Harrington said he was asked to carry out the review “because of concerns at the highest levels of government that the UK is missing out on potentially transformational investments by multinational companies and foreign investors”. And he concluded:

The evidence we have received reflects a picture of the UK rich in advantages: our language, our open and vibrant culture, our outstanding research base, the deeply embedded rule of law, the pull of London as one of the world’s great financial centres, and many other assets. However, the barriers outlined in this review, and the uncertainty they create, act like a tax on investment. We have heard time and again about government systems that are too often disorganised, risk-averse, siloed, and inflexible when it comes to the needs of modern investors … All too slow and cumbersome to compete in the modern world.

The government has accepted Harrington’s key recommendations in principle.

Rishi Sunak told reporters as he arrived at the global investment summit at Hampton Court that net migration levels were too high and that he would be taking action to bring them down. He said:

I’m very clear that the levels of net migration are too high. They need to come down to more sustainable levels.

It is encouraging that the Office for National Statistics last week said the numbers are slowing but we need to do more.

I have already taken action to tighten the number of dependants that students can bring when they come to study here.

As we need to do more, we’ll look at that and where there are abuses of the system we will of course act.

Good morning. After Suella Braverman was sacked as home secretary, her allies told the Daily Express she had a “grid of shit” ready to unleash on Rishi Sunak. The latest instalment from this media planning schedule landed on the front page of the Daily Telegraph last night, and in his story for the paper Charles Hymas publishes details of what Braverman claims is the deal she agreed with Sunak when he offered her the Home Office in response for her backing in the Tory leadership contest last autumn. Hymas says:

Mr Sunak agreed to a four-point migration plan as he sought her support during his leadership bid last year, allies of Mrs Braverman say.

Chief among them was a pledge to raise the minimum salary threshold required for a foreign skilled worker visa from £26,000 to £40,000, a proposal that was publicly backed last week by Boris Johnson, the architect of the post-Brexit points-based migration system.

A copy of the agreement on migration, seen by the Telegraph, showed that they proposed to close down the graduate visa route, restrict the number of dependants that legal migrants could bring and prioritise Russell Group university applicants when evaluating student visa applications.

This is embarrassing for Sunak because it implies he has been slow and complacent. Last week, after the ONS published figures showing net migration reached a record 745,000 in 2022, Sunak said he would act to bring these numbers down – but he refused to say what he was considering.

Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, is reportedly urging Sunak to introduce a minimum salary threshold for foreigners coming to the UK on work visas of £35,000. No 10 has not embraced this idea, but Braverman’s intervention means that, even if Sunak were to accept the Jenrick plan, it would look a bit modest compared to her proposal. In his Daily Mail column on Saturday Boris Johnson, the former PM, also said the salary threshold should be set at £40,000 (something he never did during his three years in office). He said:

You will remember that after Brexit everyone was wailing about the thought of EU workers fleeing Britain, and business was worried about shortages. So the Migration Advisory Committee put the ­minimum at only £26,000 – not much more than the living wage.

The effects of this were perhaps masked by the Covid pandemic, when migration was largely ­suppressed. But it is clear from these numbers that the Migration Advisory Committee pitched it way too low.

It turns out that they had ­massively underestimated the number of EU nationals still living in Britain – by at least a million; and they underestimated the ­continuing attractions of the UK to all migrants, EU and non-EU.

The minimum income for most types of migrant worker coming to the UK should now go right up to £40,000 or more – because it is the right thing for migrant workers, and for the entire British workforce.

Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secetary, has been doing a media round this morning. Badenoch and Braverman are expected to be the lead candidates for the right in the next Tory leadership contest (Badenoch is the favourite) and, even though Badenoch said it was not for her to say what the minimum salary threshold for work visas should be, she said that she was in favour of “much, much tougher measures”. She suggested that this was what Sunak was planning anyway.

She told LBC:

I am certainly in favour of us doing whatever it takes to bring the numbers down to a sustainable level. This is not something that I’m being mealy-mouthed about. But what I don’t want to do is go into the specifics when I don’t know what the plan is, but I certainly will be pushing for the strongest measures possible.

The migration figures that we’ve seen were from last year … I think that you will be seeing much, much tougher measures going forward.

Certainly this prime minister has said that we need to do whatever it takes on the boats, to get those planes flying, deporting people who shouldn’t be here. And when it comes to the people who we do let into this country, we need to make sure that they’re not undercutting our workforce, and that they are people who are coming to the UK to contribute and actually to help make our country better.

Sunak spoke to reporters as he arrived at Hampton Court this morning for the global investment summit, but did not say any more on this topic than he said last week. But James Cleverly, the home secretary, is taking questions in the Commons this afternoon, and he may give more details of what the government might do.

And immigration is not the only “grid of shit” problem for Sunak. He probably feels much the same way about the timetable of witnesses at the Covid inquiry. Three Labour metro mayors are giving evidence this week, but things could get even more embarrassing for the government later this week when four cabinet ministers are questioned.

Here is the agenda for the day.

10am: Rishi Sunak gives a speech at the opening of the global investment summit at Hampton Court.

10.30am: Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, gives evidence to the Covid inquiry. Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester is due to give evidence later in the morning and in the afternoon, after Bunham has finished, Steve Rotheram, mayor of Liverpool city region, is appearing.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

2.30pm: James Cleverly takes questions in the Commons for the first time in his new post as home secretary. He is expected to confirm that the government is considering further controls on legal migration.

Also, the government is publishing its leasehold and freedhold reform bill today.

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