Labour leader and deputy Angela Rayner hail parts of former prime minister’s flagship domestic policy priority and say Sunak ‘killed it at birth’ while chancellor

Official figures have confirmed that the UK economy went into recession at the end of last year, after the latest estimate found it contracted in the last two quarters of 2023, Phillip Inman reports.

Good morning. Keir Starmer is launching Labour’s local elections campaign this morning, and to mark the event he has discovered his inner Boris Johnson. He has written a joint article with Angela Rayner , Labour’s deputy leader, praising the ambition behind levelling up, Johnson’s flagship domestic policy priority.

Where you are born often dictates where you end up. That people from Blackpool have a life expectancy of ten years fewer than those in Westminster is a travesty. Instead of pitting areas against one another and relying on the square mile of the City of London to keep the UK economy afloat, we’ll tackle Britain’s regional divide and match the ambition people have for their community. It will be at the heart of our mission-led government.

It’s understandable that working people might have become disillusioned or cynical, because one of the biggest tragedies of the past 14 years is the sense that things can’t change. But they can and they will.

Whitehall under the Tories has become too passive and overly centralised. We will turn that on its head, delivering a far more active central government willing to give local leaders the levers needed to turbocharge their areas. We will change the relationship. Partnership in pursuit of common national missions, not buck-passing and division.

Our Take Back Control Act will entrust power to local leaders, who know their area best and have skin in the game. We will widen English devolution so that every community is taking advantage of the opportunities it brings. We will deepen devolution so combined authorities have a path to gaining powers over transport, skills, housing and planning, employment support, energy and can get a long-term integrated funding settlement in return for exemplary frameworks for managing public money. This will enable local leaders to develop powerful local growth plans that attract specialist industries and enhance their local strengths.

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Christopher Geidt asked to write apology letter after joining an MoD meeting on behalf of a US satellite firm that was paying him

A crossbench peer and former ethics adviser to Boris Johnson has been found to have broken House of Lords rules by joining a meeting with Ministry of Defence officials on behalf of a US satellite company that was paying him.

Christopher Geidt, a former royal aide to the Queen, was asked by the House of Lords conduct committee to write a letter of apology after the standards commissioner found he “provided a parliamentary service in return for payment or other reward”.

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They laugh more than adults, have no fear and are experts at drawing boundaries. But we may not want a world full of them ...

What would really make you happy? More money, more fulfilling work, more time to spend with your loved ones? All good, but have you considered a box of raisins, a few episodes of Bluey and a nap? That’s what Dr Hasan Merali is suggesting (well, sort of). He’s the author of Sleep Well, Take Risks, Squish the Peas: Secrets from the Science of Toddlers for a Happier, More Successful Way of Life and man, am I torn by his thesis that the toddler life philosophy offers valuable adult wellbeing lessons.

There is plenty to admire in the toddler Weltanschauung. In a New York Times article on his book, Merali highlights their talent for positive self-talk and insatiably asking questions. So many questions (up to 107 an hour, according to a study he quotes), from “Why?” until your brain liquefies to frank curiosity about a stranger’s nasal hair. But it’s true, there is value in a candid lack of embarrassment: a high-powered scientist I talked to recently said that her seniority let her shamelessly ask “basic” questions that often advanced her research; mostly, we lose that.

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With such a roll call of gargoyles, women would surely refrain from joining the exclusive London club anyway

How are they taking it at the Garrick? Does tradition still mute responses to revelations about its membership by my Guardian colleague Amelia Gentleman, which led to the departure from the club of the heads of MI6 and the civil service, followed by demands for scores of lawyers, judges and cultural names to do the same?

While a haughty resistance to reform is practically written into the club’s constitution, this may be the first time the Garrick has been confirmed as, above all, ridiculous. Until last week, it could hope, benefiting from a general ignorance, to be taken by outsiders at its own estimation, as a gracious and discriminating space, strictly inaccessible to the sort of bores welcome at inferior clubs. The membership publicity has changed all that. It is one thing for the Garrick’s traditionalists (whenever convenience requires denial of its unique status) to assert, however risibly, the harmlessness of their single-sex association – another for it to appear, courtesy of the Guardian story, as substantially a guild, with a generous contingent of, to borrow from Boris Johnson, tossers. Some nights, it must make the average local sound like the Algonquin.

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Ex-UK PM was required to seek permission for paid role with Merlyn Advisors, for whom he spoke to Venezuela president

Boris Johnson did not seek permission from the post-ministerial jobs watchdog before taking a role as a consultant to a hedge fund, on whose behalf he met the Venezuelan president.

As a former minister, Johnson is required to seek the advice of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba) for two years from September 2022, when he left office. The committee’s advice typically comes with restrictions on lobbying and contact with the UK government. It was writing to Johnson on the matter, a source said.

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Well-intentioned moves are afoot to ‘overhaul the machinery of government’. But it’s the policies that are the problem

It was Dr Johnson, not Boris Johnson, who declared “patriotism is a last refuge of the scoundrel”. Some years have passed since Johnson, Shirley Williams and I were guests of an institute outside Moscow. We were there to explain what we hoped were the wonders of western democracy – the freedom, the politics and the economic policies – to Russian politicians and academics who were glorying in having shaken off the constraints of the Soviet Union.

Alas, the glory days were not to last. Along came the so-called oligarchs, and then Putin. The ancient Greek word oligarkhía meant “rule by the few”. But in the post-Soviet world it came to denote a group of people who stripped the nation of its prime economic assets and became very rich – more plutocrats than oligarchs. We all know the consequences: the collapse of the Soviet Union evolved into rule by dictatorship, with the plutocrats fleeing abroad from Putin.

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Public accounts committee report shows hardly any of 71 projects due to be completed this month are on track

Rishi Sunak’s levelling up agenda is beset by an “absolutely astonishing” level of delay, and the government cannot give “any compelling examples” of what it has delivered, parliament’s spending watchdog has found.

The public accounts committee (PAC) said barely any of the 71 “shovel-ready” projects due to be completed this month were on track.

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Mark Drakeford criticises UK ministers and says there is ‘plausible case’ Welsh government should have acted sooner

The Welsh first minister, Mark Drakeford, has launched a scathing attack on the UK government’s handling of the Covid crisis but admitted his own administration should have taken “more stringent action” sooner as the pandemic swept the world.

Appearing at the Welsh leg of the Covid inquiry, Drakeford likened Boris Johnson to an absent football manager at the start of the pandemic. He also claimed it was Johnson’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings who at one point blocked the banning of mass gatherings such as sporting events and concerts.

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