Kwarteng apologises to standards commissioner for suggesting she should resign – as it happened

Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, has apologised to Kathryn Stone, the parliamentary commissioner for standards, for suggesting in an interview she should resign.

He also suggests his comment may have broken the ministerial code.

And this is what Keir Starmer told MPs about why he thought the PM’s “boosterism” had undermined Cop26.

The task of Glasgow was to set out credible plans for delivering that and whilst the summit has made modest progress, we cannot kid ourselves. Plans to cut emissions still fall way short. The pledges made at Glasgow for 2030 – even if fully implemented – represent less than 25% of the ambition required.

Rather than the manageable 1.5 degrees, they put us on track for a devastating 2.4 degrees.

That’s why – according to the UN secretary ggeneral – the goal of 1.5 degrees is now left on “life support.”

So now we need to deliver intensive care. That starts by being honest about what has gone wrong. The summit was held back by guileless boosterism which only served to embolden the big emitters.

The prime minister praised inadequate net zero plans. Australia was called heroic, even though their plan was so slow that it was in line with 4 degrees of global warming.

By providing this cover we had little chance of exerting influence on other big emitters and we saw many more disappointing national plans.

The prime minister dressed up modest sectoral commitments as transformational. Earlier in Cop, the Government claimed that “190 countries and organisations” had agreed to end coal.

On closer inspection: only 46 of them were countries, of that only 23 were new signatories, of those 23, 10 do not even use coal!

And the 13 that remained did not include the biggest coal users – China, the US, India, and Australia.

With no public pressure, the big emitters were emboldened and they clubbed together to gut the main deal’s wording on coal. Only someone who thinks words are meaningless could now argue that an agreement to phase down coal is the same as an agreement to phase it out.

And there was the long-overdue $100 billion in climate finance. It has still not been delivered even though this money was promised to developing countries over a decade ago.

Failure to deliver has damaged trust and created a huge obstacle to building the coalition that can drive climate action between the most vulnerable developing countries and ambitious developed countries.

This is what Boris Johnson said in his opening statement to MPs summing up what he thought Cop26 achieved.

It was a summit that many people predicted would fail. A summit that I fear some quietly wanted to fail. Yet it was a summit that proved the doubters and the cynics wrong. Because Cop26 did not just succeed in keeping 1.5 alive. It succeeded in doing something no UN climate conference has ever done before by uniting the world in calling time on coal. In 25 previous Cops, all the way back to Berlin in 1995, not one delivered a mandate to remove so much as a single lump of coal from one power station boiler.

For decades, tackling the single biggest cause of carbon emissions proved as challenging as eating the proverbial elephant. It was just so big that no one knew quite where to start. But in Glasgow we took the first bite. Because we have secured a global commitment to phasing down coal – and as John Kerry has pointed out, you can’t phase out coal without first phasing it down as we transition to other, cleaner energy sources – and we have, for the first time, a worldwide recognition that we’ll not get climate change under control as long as our power stations are consuming vast quantities of the sedimentary super-polluter that is coal.

That alone is a great achievement, but we haven’t just signalled the beginning of the end for coal. We’ve ticked our boxes on cars, cash and trees as well. The companies that build a quarter of the world’s automobiles have agreed to stop building carbon emission vehicles by 2035 – and cities from Sao Paulo to Seattle have pledged to ban them from their streets.

We’ve pioneered a whole new model, an intellectual breakthrough, that sees billions in climate finance, development bank investment and so forth,being used to trigger trillions from the private sector to drive the big decarbonisation programmes in countries like South Africa.

And we’ve done something that absolutely none of the commentators saw coming by building a coalition of more than 130 countries to protect up to 90 per cent of our forests, those great natural soakers of carbon.

Keir Starmer starts by paying tribute to Alok Sharma, the Cop26 president, saying “his diligence, his integrity and his commitment to the climate” have been clear for all to see.

He says the world is on track for global warming of 2.4c. The 1.5C target is “on life support”, he says.

The summit was held back by the PM’s “guileless boosterism”, he says.

As an example, he cites the PM describing the Australian plan as “heroic”, when it was inadequate.

He says the agreement announced on coal was misleading, because only half of the countries featured were new names.

Only someone who thinks that promises are meaningless could now argue that an agreement to phase down coal is the same as the agreement to phase it out. [See 12.09pm.]