Theresa May has just announced that she is going to, ‘with regret’, vote against the government today on aid spending. It will be the first time she has voted against a three-line whip (previously she has abstained on crunch votes).
The former Prime Minister recalled with some force her own dealings with Conservative rebels when she was the first backbencher to speak in the debate on the cut from 0.7 per cent of gross national income to 0.5 per cent this afternoon. ‘As Prime Minister, I suffered at the hands of rebels,’ she said.
But she was even more forceful on the way this government had broken its promise, on how this would mean, in her words, that ‘more of the poorest people in the world will die’ and that she didn’t believe that the tests for restoring the spending commitment to 0.7
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