Nick Candy, the honorary treasurer of Reform UK and a major donor, has sold his mansion in the Chelsea district of London for a reported £275m, Rowena Mason reports.

Simon Dudley was a Conservative before he defected to Reform UK. Commenting on his sacking today, Kemi Badenoch said the controversy about his Grenfell Tower comment showed why were party was better off without some of the people who have gone over to Nigel Farage.

Describing Dudley’s remark about the Grenfell Tower tragedy as “disgraceful”, she said:

I said at the beginning of this year that Nigel Farage was doing my spring cleaning, a lot of these people who have gone to Reform are problematic people.

All of these defectors, they are his problem now. They are flip-flopping all over the place on all sorts of policies. I think people can see that the Conservative party is the only serious party …

Dealing with issues like Grenfell requires a composure and a professionalism that is simply lacking with Reform. All we’re seeing from them seeing them is chaos.

The Scottish Greens are standing on the verge of an “historic result” in the forthcoming Holyrood election, the co-leader of the party has said. The Press Association reports:

Speaking at the launch of the party’s campaign in Edinburgh this morning, Gillian Mackay said “bold solutions” are needed to tackle problems like the rising cost of living and climate change.

She said her party’s policies will help deliver a “fairer, kinder and more equal Scotland”, which “works for everyone and where everyone is given a fair chance to live a better life”.

These include, she said: a fair wage for care workers; a national rollout of mental health support centres; curbs on how much land any individual or company can buy; and “the biggest expansion of free childcare for a generation”.

“There are more than 10,150 of us, to be exact, with more people joining us every day from all parts of our country,” she said.

“In every community across Scotland, there are people who are planning to vote Green for the very first time.

“That is why we stand on the verge of what could be a historic result and a major breakthrough for our movement.”

She added: “If you want a fairer, greener and better Scotland, if you want green policies that will save you money and tackle the climate emergency, if you want to keep Reform’s politics of hate out of Scotland’s parliament, then you have to vote for it,” she said.

Here is some reaction from other parties to the decision by Reform UK to sack their housing spokesperson, Simon Dudley, over his Grenfell Tower comment.

For Labour, Steve Reed, the housing secretary, said Nigel Farage should apologise for appointing Dudley in the first place. Reed says:

Simon Dudley’s disgusting comments about those who died in Grenfell Tower show what a shameful failure of judgment it was for him to have been appointed as Reform’s housing spokesperson. Reform’s first instinct was to defend him, not sack him, and they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into finally doing the right thing. Nigel Farage should apologise to the victims’ families for putting Dudley in such a senior position in the first place.

One rule of politics is that, if you can no longer call for someone to be sacked because they have been sacked, you can always say it should have happened earlier. But “dragged kicking and screaming” is not really very accurate. Most people at Westminster were unaware of what Dudley had said until the i published a story about his interview at 6.45pm last night. By 11am today Dudley was gone. That is a relatively swift response to a controversy of this kind.

For the Conservatives, Kevin Hollinrake, the party chair, says this shows a Reform UK goverment would be chaotic. He says:

Simon Dudley’s comments were shocking and ill-informed. It was right he was sacked.

But this episode shows exactly why Reform isn’t fit to govern. Farage runs a one-man band where policy and personnel decisions are made on the hoof. That’s chaotic. As their shambolic councils already show a Reform government would be no different.

And the Greens are calling for an assurance that Reform UK will not water down safety regulations. The Green MP Siân Berry says:

It is absolutely right that Simon Dudley has been sacked following his truly disgusting comments on Grenfell.

It was deregulation and the cutting of red tape that was ultimately responsible for the 72 deaths at Grenfell, so it is beyond alarming that Reform wants to drag us back to that.

Nigel Farage should heed the outrage and pledge his party will not water down the key building safety regulations that are still needed in high-rises across the country.

At his press conference this morning, Farage broadly backed the point that Dudley was making in his Inside Housing interview about regulation. (See 11.50am.)

And this is what a Reform UK spokesperson told the i when asked about Dudley’s original comments.

Homes must, of course, be built safely. However, overly burdensome building safety regulations can stifle housebuilding, meaning targets are missed, and the waiting list for homes grows longer at a time when we need more.

Simon’s comments on Grenfell reflected his broader point that the regulatory pendulum has swung too far in response to the tragedy. As he explained, there is a fine balance between over-regulation – which can slow the delivery of new homes – and ensuring that more homes are built safely without too much red tape.

Prospect, a union representing public sector workers, has dismised Reform UK’s plan to get rid of final salary pensions in the public sector as “economically incoherent”.

Mike Clancy, the union’s general secretary, said:

Reform’s plan for public sector pension is economically incoherent and would end up costing taxpayers tens of billions of pounds in the years to come, blowing a gaping hole in all of their spending promises, and casting doubt on their ability to honour their pledge on the triple lock.

Public servants are not punchbags for Reform politicians, and their pension pots are not piggybanks that can be raided. This is yet another example of Reform’s war on working people, with people’s pensions and rights at work at risk from their anti-worker policy agenda.

The Office for Budget Responsibility has been clear that public sector pensions are not a risk to our fiscal sustainability, the real risk would be a Reform government with no understanding of how the public finances work.

In a briefing note explaing why it thinks the plan is flawed, the union says:

Public sector DB [defined benefit – also known as final salary] schemes are unfunded. That means today’s contributions pay for today’s pensions. The full cost of paying for current pensions is carried on the Treasury’s balance sheet. Even if a new DC [definned contribution – also known as money purchase] scheme is introduced those payments will be made.

Member contributions as well as employer contributions to public sector DB schemes go straight into the Treasury pot and register on the balance sheet. Moving to DC would mean a loss to the Treasury of all those member contributions.

Under a DC scheme, payments today pay for the pension which will be ultimately drawn in future. These payments must also be costed by the OBR. So the public finances would be paying for all of: DB pension payouts, DB member contributions, DC employer contributions.

This represents an additional cost to the public finances of: Current DB member contributions plus DC employer contributions.

The union also estimates that, if 20% of public sector workers were to transition from DC to DB, that would leave a fiscal hole of between £4.4bn and £6.4bn by the end of the first term of a Reform government.

Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, has been chairing the online meeting of countries interested in exploring ways of reopening the strait of Hormuz. The US is not participating.

As Sky News reports, in her opening remarks Cooper said the ongoing closure of the strait was “hitting our global economic security”.

She said:

In today’s meeting we are focusing on the diplomatic and international planning measures, including collective mobilisation of our full range of diplomatic and economic tools and pressures, reassurance work with industry, insurers and energy markets, and also action to guarantee the safety of trapped ships and seafarers, and effective coordination that we need across the world to enable a safe and sustained opening of the strait.

A further meeting of military planners would consider what could be done to “marshal our collective defensive military capabilities, including looking at issues such as de-mining or reassurance once the conflict eases”, she said.

Cooper went on:

We have seen Iran hijack an international shipping route to hold the global economy hostage. This is hitting the trading routes for Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi, Oman, Iraq, but that means liquid natural gas for Asia, fertiliser for Africa, and jet fuel for the world.

That Iranian recklessness towards countries who were never involved in this conflict, which we and 130 countries across the world have strongly condemned at the United Nations, is not just hitting mortgage rates and petrol prices and the cost of living here in the UK and in many different countries across the world, it is hitting our global economic security.

Simon Dudley posted this on social media this morning before he was sacked as the party’s housing spokesperson.

Grenfell was an utter tragedy and quite rightly prompted a wholesale review and tightening of fire regulations. I said it was a tragedy in my interview with Inside Housing and in no shape or form am I belittling that disaster or the huge loss of life. It must never happen again. I reiterate that, and am sorry if it was not sufficiently clear.

Within the last 24 hours, the Berkeley Group, one of Britain’s biggest housebuilders, has paused new land purchases and announced a hiring freeze. They blame ‘an unprecedented surge in costs and regulation.’ These concerns are felt across the industry. The result? The UK’s long running housing crisis is getting worse.

To address the national housing crisis, we must ensure that regulation remains safe, sensible and proportionate. My concern is the introduction of numerous measures that do nothing to protect life and are throttling housebuilding.

For the record, here is the full quote from Dudley’s interview with Jess McCabe from Inside Housing that led to his sacking. McCabe writes:

I ask, was Grenfell not an awful warning about insufficient regulation?

“That was a tragedy. It was a failure,” Mr Dudley says. But he doesn’t believe the current regulatory regime is proportionate. “Sadly, you know, everyone dies in the end. It’s just how you go, right?” he says.

“Extracting Grenfell from the statistics, actually people dying in house fires is rare,” he argues. “Many, many more people die on the roads driving cars, but we’re not making cars illegal, so why are we stopping houses being built?

“Think about all the human suffering of not having a home, not being able to have children, being stuck with your parents, in your childhood bedroom,” he continues. “You can’t stop tragic things happening. You can try to minimise excesses, but bad things do happen.”

The press conference has finished.

Farage wrapped up with a comment about the local elections, saying he expected Keir Starmer to do so badly that he would be forced out by the end of May.

Farage said:

If you start to look at the West Midlands. and the north-west and the north-east and South Wales, the Valleys in particular, you are looking at parts of this country that have been Labour heartlands since the end of world war one.

And all the evidence, all the data, all the campaigning that we’re doing is we are going to diminish their base in local government and in the Welsh parliament to a very significant degree.

Farage said Labour was also facing a challenge from the Green party, and from what he described as “the strange alliance between the Islamist movement and the trans lobby – quite how that works, I’m not sure”. He said in some places the Greens were taking “some real chunks” from the Labour vote.

So you’ve got a prime minister looking down the barrel of a cataclysmic result on 7 May.

If that happens, I’d be very surprised if he’s still there at the end of May.

And I think that will begin the disintegration of this government that will lead us to having a general election next year.

Farage says he does not think Donald Trump will take the US out of Nato. He says he has had many conversations with Trump about this. He says Trump has been expressing a frustration about Nato, but this is one that other US presidents have also shared. He goes on:

If Trump was to leave Nato, that would take America into an isolationist position.

Now, there are some in the Republican party who do take that view, absolutely.

But I don’t for a minute believe Trump to be one of them.

Trump wants the rest of Nato to act in concert with him.

Farage and Jenrick are now taking questions.

Q: [From Christopher Hope from GB News] What is your reaction to the comments from Simon Dudley, your housing spokesperson. Will you sack him, as Keir Starmer is calling for? [See 8.51am and 9.12am.]

Farage says “that’s already happened”.

Dudley is no longer a party spokesperson, he says.

In response to a follow-up question, Farage says Dudley’s comments were “deeply inappropriate” and “frankly rather shocking to many people”.

Asked if he sacked him himself, Farage says Dudley worked under Richard Tice, the deputy leader and business spokesperson, and Tice dealt with it.

Farage cites this as an example of how the party is not a one-man band.

Jenrick confirms that Reform UK would cut the benefits bill. He gives a series of example of areas were he things government spending could be cut back drastically.

And he announced that Reform UK is launching a review of the case for blocking new entrants to defined benefit (final salary) pensions schemes in the public sector.

He says these pensions were removed in the private sector decades ago.

Robert Jenrick, Reform UK’s Treasury spokesperson, is speaking now.

He says pensioners who have paid into the system for 30 or 40 years are genuinely worried about the future.

He says:

[Pensioners] look at the debt that successive governments have racked up. They look at Labour borrowing left, right and centre, just like the Conservatives did, and they know, they fear, something’s got to give.

They fear this government may be soon led by Angela Rayner or Ed Miliband, backed up by Zack Polanski [and it] will pull the rug from under them, will erode, chip away, at the pension that they’ve worked and paid into for their whole life. And they’re right to be worried.

Under reform it will be different. We will protect pensioners. Today I can announce that a Reform UK government will keep the triple lock for state pensions.

Under Reform and Nigel Farage, your pension will always rise each year with either inflation, average earnings or by 2.5%, whichever of those three figures is the highest.

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is speaking at his press conference now.

He confirms the party are keeping the pensions triple lock. (See 8.51am.)

He says that, when he previously said the jury was out on this, he genuinely meant that he was undecided.

He says he decided the party should keep it because he thinks there are pensioners who need it. And he backs the principle that people who pay into the welfare system should get something out of it.

But, he says, there is another reason. He says within the next two week Reform UK will announce “the biggest cuts to the benefits bill ever seen in the history of this country”.

That means Reform UK would be able to afford to keep the pensions triple lock “many, many times over”, he says.

Grenfell United, which represents survivors and bereaved families from the Grenfell Tower tragedy, has issued this statement about the comments from Reform UK’s housing spokesperson about the fire.

This afternoon I will be setting aside an hour or two specifically to answer questions from readers. People post questions BTL (below the line) anyway, but I don’t always have time to address them and so today we are trying a new approach, prioritising the Q&A. It means comments will be open for a bit longer than usual too.

Please post questions BTL, on any subject related to British politics. I will try to answer as many as I can, but I will be focusing on a) the ones that seem most interesting, and b) the ones where I may be able to give a decent answer.

If you include Q&A in the questions BTL, that will make it easier for us to see them, but don’t worry if you leave those out.

I will be answering the questions from about 3pm until about 5pm. Until then, I will be blogging as usual.

Ed Davey is speaking now.

He starts by referring to the rise in petrol prices as the “Trump/Farage/Badenoch tax”, because Donald Trump started the Iran war and Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch “cheered” the war.

He says people need help now.

On petrol, he says the Tories and Reform UK are calling for the fuel duty increase to be abandoned. But that rise is not going to take effect until September, and so that would not help now, he says.

He says the Lib Dems are calling for fuel duty to be cut now by 10p a litre. This would save drivers £6.60 every time they fill up an average tank, he says.

He says the Lib Dems are also proposing measures to cut the costs of other forms of travel.

Rail fares should be cut by 10%, he says.

And he says the Lib Dems would reduce the cap on bus fares from £3 to £1.

He claims the Lib Dems have a plan to fund all these measures.

UPDATE: See 10.49am for more details.

Ed Davey must be going soft. Normally the Lib Dems are the first to call the recall of parliament. But, judging by the Lib Dem press releaese (see 9.50am), he seems to be happy to wait until the Commons returns, as scheduled, on Monday 13 April.

Instead, it is the SNP leader and Scottish first minister John Swinney who is calling for parliament to be recalled to debate the energy crisis. In a statement he says:

We are facing an unprecedented energy crisis with motorists being hammered at the petrol pumps and households facing unaffordable energy bills while the UK fovernment is doing nothing.

Labour are sleepwalking into a crisis and it will be ordinary people who pay the price.

Our European neighbours like Ireland and Spain have already taken action to protect their people from the crisis and have stepped up with billions of pounds in support. Yet the prime minister stands by like a rabbit in the headlights doing nothing.

I am calling today for the House of Commons to be recalled from its recess, so that the UK government can be forced into taking action to support people.

The Conservatives have pledged to fully axe the carbon tax if they get back into power, the Press Association reports. PA says:

The party had already proposed removing the tax as it applies to electricity generation, but now say they would go further and fully scrap the carbon tax regime, the cost of which they say is burdening British industry.

But Labour said such a move would be “wrong” and “hammer” industry.

The Conservatives said they would get rid of the UK emissions trading scheme (ETS), which was brought in under the Tories in 2021 and sets a carbon limit on certain sectors, meaning they must minimise emissions or fund measures to offset them.

It currently applies to the heavy industry, power and aviation sectors and is set to extend to the maritime industry from July.

Keir Starmer has committed to linking the UK emissions trading scheme with the EU’s as part of his government’s reset with the bloc.

The Tories have said they would also scrap the carbon price support, a levy paid by fossil fuel electricity producers, as well as the carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) due to come into force in January next year.

The CBAM is a carbon levy on imported goods that aims to stop UK firms being undercut by overseas manufacturers and also goes back to Tory government policy from 2023.

Such a mechanism could give industry a boost but that requires a UK carbon price, according to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) thinktank.

Jess Ralston, head of energy at the ECIU, said: “A well-designed, carbon border adjustment mechanism could help rejuvenate British industry, helping make it more competitive with other cheaper countries, and many businesses have been calling for one for years.

“But it’s predicated on a UK carbon price and, if we don’t have that, revenues that would have been going to Treasury will instead by transferred into EU coffers when British industry exports to the EU, our largest trading partner.

“A significant amount of UK steel is exported to the EU each year. Market-based policies like carbon pricing and CBAM have long been advocated for by thinktanks and politicians on the right of politics, so there’s a big question around what you do instead to reach net zero emissions, given that is essential to stopping climate change.”

Keir Starmer has also called for Reform UK’s housing spokesperson Simon Dudley to be sacked over his Grenfell Tower comment. (See 8.51am.) The PM (or his team) has posted this on social media.

Good morning. One of the big policy decisions for all parties ahead of the next election is whether or not to keep the pensions triple lock. Most mainstream economists and welfare experts think it is overly generous (pensioners used to be significantly poorer than working-age people, but that is no longer the case), and ultimately unaffordable. But it is popular, and pensioners turn out to vote in elections in much higher numbers than younger people.

The Conservatives at one point suggested they might drop it, but Kemi Badenoch now defends the triple lock quite strongly. Labour has not said what its election plans are yet. Nigel Farage, the Reform UK, says he will take tough decisions to cut welfare spending, and he was thought to be sceptical about the triple lock. But Robert Jenrick, his Treasury spokesperson, is thought to be in favour, and at a press conference later they are expected to confirm Reform UK would keep it.

But they will end up taking questions about the party’s housing spokesperson, Simon Dudley, who is now facing calls to resign over a comment apparently making light of the Grenfell Tower tragedy. The Press Association has the story. PA says:

Reform UK is facing calls to sack its housing spokesman after he said the Grenfell Tower fire was a “tragedy” but that “everyone dies in the end”.

Simon Dudley, a former executive at Homes England and the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation, said the pendulum had “swung too far the wrong way” on regulation after the deadly blaze at the west London tower block in 2017.

The Grenfell Inquiry found that the 72 deaths were avoidable and had been preceded by “decades of failure” by governments and the building industry to act on the dangers of flammable materials on high-rise buildings.

Dudley was appointed as housing spokesman for Reform last month and the party said at the time he would lead an urgent review into “Britain’s building crisis” that would set out reforms to planning, housing delivery and national infrastructure.

In an interview with Inside Housing published yesterday, he said building safety regulations introduced after the Grenfell Tower fire were an example of “regulation which is not working”.

Dudley told the magazine the Grenfell fire was a “tragedy” but said he does not believe the regulatory regime is proportionate.

He went on to say: “Sadly, you know, everyone dies in the end. It’s just how you go, right?”

The Building Safety Regulator, which was set up after the fire and is responsible for regulating the safe design, construction and occupation of higher-risk buildings, has faced criticism for delays in its approval processes.

In June last year, the government announced reforms to tackle delays to building new high-rise homes, including a fast-track process and investment.

Dudley added: “Extracting Grenfell from the statistics, actually people dying in house fires is rare… many, many more people die on the roads driving cars, but we’re not making cars illegal, so why are we stopping houses being built?”

He argued that “You can’t stop tragic things happening. You can try to minimise excesses, but bad things do happen.”

The effect of poor regulation, he said, is that it stops houses being built.

“So the pendulum has just swung too far the wrong way,” he said.

Responding to the interview for Labour, Steve Reed, the housing secretary, said:

If Nigel Farage has an ounce of decency, he will sack his housing chief immediately.

These disgraceful comments about those who died in the Grenfell Tower fire are beyond the pale and it is completely untenable for Simon Dudley to continue in his position.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.45am: Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, holds a press conference, where he will call for tax cuts as a response to rising energy prices caused by the Iran war.

10am: The Scottish Green party launch their Holyrood election campaign.

11am: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, and Robert Jenrick, his Treasury spokesperson, hold a press conference.

Late morning: Kemi Badenoch is on a visit in Redcar and Sunderland.

Lunchtime: Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, hosts a virtual meeting of foreign ministers from the 35 countries interested exploring ways to get the strait of Hormuz open.

12.15pm: Russell Findlay, the Scottish Conservative leader, sets out plans to improve Scottish education.

3.30pm: Scottish political party leaders take part in an elections hustings.

Today we are also be trying something new; I will be spending an hour or two in the afternoon specifically answering reader questions. We would like you to post them BTL and I will be replying ATL, probably from about 3pm. I will post more on this shortly.

In the meantime, if you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.

I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.