8.47am: David Cameron is in Afghanistan today. He's holding a press conference now with President Karzai. My colleague Nicholas Watt is travelling with Cameron and he will be filing for us today, but I will be blogging about the visit too. Otherwise, back in the UK, there is no big political story running this morning. Here are some of the announcements in the diary.
11am: Tim Loughton, the children's minister, will launch a review of child protection. It will be headed by Professor Eileen Munro. She has already been giving interviews.
11.30am: John Bercow will announce the results of the election for select committee chairs.
12.25pm: David Willetts will be giving a speech on higher education in Oxford. He has already given an interview about it to the Guardian, in which he gave his clearest indication yet that students could soon be forced to pay higher tuition fees.
I'll also be writing more about the Labour leadership contest. Ed Miliband is giving a speech late this afternoon. He will deliver it after this blog has gone to bed, but his team has released some extracts in advance. As usual, I'll also be looking at the papers, covering breaking political news and scouring the web for any political posts worth sharing.
9.01am: At the press conference in Kabul, Karzai has just been asked about Liam Fox, the new defence secretary, describing Afghanistan as a "broken 13th-century country" in an interview in the Times recently. Karzai gave a diplomatic reply.
Afghanistan has suffered for the past 30 years. Afghanistan has lost nearly 2 million people in the past 30 years. Afghanistan has lost the cream of its society through migration to the rest of the world ... In that sense Afghanistan has become a broken country. Perhaps that is what Mr Fox was referring to ... Perhaps he was describing the factual situation in Afghanistan which unfortunately Afghanistan has suffered so massively.
9.03am: David Cameron has just told the press conference in Kabul that sending more British troops to Afghanistan "is not remotely on the UK's agenda".
9.28am: At the press conference in Kabul, David Cameron and Hamid Karzai were both asked about reports that the Taliban executed a seven-year-old boy accused of spying for the government. Cameron and Karzai both stressed that the report was unconfirmed, but they said that, if the story was true, it was appalling. Karzai said that, if the story was true, it was a "crime against humanity. He went on:
A seven-year-old boy cannot be a spy. A seven-year-old boy cannot by anything other than a seven-year-old boy ... If this is true, then we condemn it in the strongest possible terms.
And Cameron echoed his words. The prime minister said:
If this is true, it's an absolutely horrific crime. I have a six-year-old daughter and the idea of someone believing that a six-year-old or a seven-year-old can be spying and has to be treated in that way is just without any justification. As the president said, it is a crime against humanity. And, if true, says more about the Taliban than any book, than any article, than any speech could ever say.
9.53am: David Cameron's press conference with Hamid Karzai in Kabul is now over. Here are the main points.
• Cameron insisted that Afghanistan was his top foreign policy concern. He told the press conference:
For me, the issue of Afghanistan is the most important foreign policy issue, the most important national security issue facing our country and it is that national security approach I want to stress here today. That's why I was so pleased to welcome President Karzai as my first visitor to Chequers.
• He insisted that British troops would not remain in Afghanistan indefinitely. He said that he supported Barack Obama's approach to Afghanistan, involving a military and political surge. But Cameron said that the idea of sending even more British troops to Afghanistan was "not remotely on the UK's agenda". He said that he wanted a "very clear focus" on Britain's national security interests, which meant stopping the return of al-Qaida. He said that he wanted to be able to hand power over to the Afghans.
No one wants British troops to stay in Afghanistan for a day longer than is necessary. The president doesn't, the Afghan people don't, the British people don't.
• He promised more regular statements about progress in Afghanistan. He said that he would be making a statement in the Commons on Monday, and that ministers would be making quarterly statements about developments in Afghanistan so that people could see the progress being made, "particularly on this important issue of how we are building up the Afghan capacity for taking care of its own security". He said he did not want to be in a situation "where people are thinking one thing about what is happening in Afghanistan, whereas the facts reveal something else".
• Cameron and Karzai said that if reports that the Taliban killed a seven-year-old boy for spying were true, that would constitute "a crime against humanity". (See 9.28am.)
• Cameron announced an extra £67m to help British troops deal with roadside bombs. The Ministry of Defence is doubling the number of teams dealing with these explosives. Cameron also announced extra aid to help Afghanistan build up its army, police and civil service.
• And he welcomed last week's Kabul peace meeting – or jirga – at which Karzai discussed proposals to encourage elements of the Taliban to rejoin the political mainstream.
10.10am: Niall Paterson, the Sky journalist travelling with Cameron, has posted a picture of their entry to Kabul on a Chinook.
10.18am: Back to the UK. Simon Hughes, who was elected deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats last night, was on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning. He said that not being in government meant he would be able to speak out.
There's a particular benefit I hope in having a leader who's in government and a deputy leader who's not a minister so the whole of the Liberal Democrat party, our message and our views, can be heard clearly. There will be an ability to say things that are about the position of the Liberal tradition of the Liberal Democrats, which by definition Nick can't do in the same way because he is in a coalition government, of which we are of course supporters.
11.11am: In the Commons Eric Pickles is taking questions for the first time in his role as communities secretary. He's on combative form. He said Labour policies did more damage to Britain's housing stock "than the Luftwaffe did".
11.23am: I've just been having a look at the other papers. Here are some of the key political stories of the day.
• The Financial Times says BP's share price has been falling following President Obama's attack on the company. "The severe market reaction came as UK industry expressed alarm at the 'inappropriate' and increasingly aggressive rhetoric being deployed against BP by Barack Obama, US president, and warned that the attacks on the oil company could damage transatlantic relations."
• The Daily Telegraph says that Obama has been accused of having his "boot on the throat of British pensioners" because of what is happening to the BP share price.
• And the Daily Mail says Lord Tebbit has described Obama's stance as "despicable".
• The Times says that the Americans warned the British in 2006 that they were going into Helmand with too few troops. "A senior member of the Bush administration delivered a warning in early 2006 to Ministry of Defence officials preparing the plan for Helmand.
'I remember going to London and saying it would be good to have more troops, but I was told that Britain couldn't add more until they were out of Iraq,' said Eric Edelman, the under secretary of defence for policy during George Bush's last term in office."
• The FT says Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, will announce "the early termination of more than £2bn of welfare-to-work contracts".
11.35am: The New Statesman held a hustings for the Labour leadership candidates last night. My colleague Allegra Stratton has reported some of the exchanges in her story in the paper today, and there is more on LabourList, which was blogging the event live. Alex Smith, the LabourList editor, says Diane Abbott and Ed Miliband received the best reception. According to Labour Uncut, Abbott easily got the most laughs.
11.39am: John Bercow has just announced the winners of the elections for select committee chairs. I'll post the full list in a moment, but the two most important are probably:
Public accounts - Margaret Hodge
Treasury - Andrew Tyrie
11.45am: Here is the full list of select committee chairs.
These are the chairs were were elected:
Business, innovation and skills: Adrian Bailey
Children, schools and families (education): Graham Stewart
Communities and local government: Clive Betts
Defence: James Arbuthnot
Energy and climate change: Tim Yeo
Environment, food and rural affairs: Anne McIntosh
Environmental audit: Joan Walley
Foreign affairs: Richard Ottaway
Health: Stephen Dorrell
Home affairs: Keith Vaz
Political and constitutional reform: Graham Allen
Public accounts: Margaret Hodge
Public administration: Bernard Jenkin
Science and technology: Andrew Miller
Treasury: Andrew Tyrie
Work and pensions: Anne Begg
And here are the chairs who were elected unopposed:
Culture, media and sport: John Whittingdale
International development: Malcolm Bruce
Justice: Sir Alan Beith
Northern Ireland: Laurence Robertson
Procedure: Greg Knight
Scottish affairs: Ian Davidson
Transport: Louise Ellman
Welsh affairs: David TC Davies
11.51am: At the Downing Street lobby briefing this morning the prime minister's spokeswoman declined to comment on Barack Obama's anti-BP rhetoric (see 11.23am). She said that David Cameron and Obama would have a "routine" telephone call this weekend.
"The prime minister's view is that clearly this is an environmental tragedy, understandably many people are very angry about what has happened and very emotional as well," she said.
"But clearly this is a matter for BP the company to do what it can to try and bring an end to this problem."
12.11pm: Tom Watson, the Labour former minister, has just asked about BP during business questions in the Commons (see 11.23am and 11.51am). Sir George Young, the leader of the Commons, said that there were more American BP shareholders than British BP shareholders, implying that therefore the fall in the BP share price would do more damage in America than it would in the UK.
12.21pm: The Commons authorities have just released the full voting figures for the select committee chair elections (pdf). Here are some of the interesting ones.
• Clive Betts beat Nick Raynsford by just three votes - 279 to 276 - to become chair of the communities committee.
• Patrick Mercer, a former soldier, came close to getting the defence committee, but he was beaten by James Arbuthnot, who chaired the committee in the last parliament. On the first round of voting, Arbuthnot got 210 votes, Mercer 176, Julian Lewis 115 and Douglas Carswell 72.
• Stephen Dorrell, a former health secretary, won health quite comfortably. In the final round of voting he got 283 votes, beating Nadine Dorries (a former nurse), who got 143, and Sir Paul Beresford (a dentist), who got 130.
• Keith Vaz beat Alun Michael quite easily for home affairs. Vaz, who chaired the comittee in the last parliament, got 336 votes. Michael, a former Home Office minister, got 242.
• Graham Allen, a former whip with a keen interest in parliamentary reform, easily won the contest to chair the new political and constitutional reform committee.
• But voting for public accounts went through five rounds (with votes being redistributed). In the final round Margaret Hodge, a former minister, beat Hugh Bayley, another former minister, by 227 votes to 221.
• Andrew Tyrie beat Michael Fallon for the Treasury by 352 votes to 219. Fallon, who was deputy chair of the committee in the last parliament, was well qualified to do the job. But Tyrie, who was also a member of the committee in the previous parliament, may have been seen as more likely to cause trouble for the government.
12.33pm: Tens of thousands of people have been stopped in the street and searched unlawfully under controversial section 44 anti-terrorism powers, the Home Office revealed today. My colleague Alan Travis has the full details. Here's an extract from his story.
Fourteen police forces are urgently trying to find the individuals involved to apologise after being told by the Home Office that "errors" had been found in the way 40 separate stop-and-search operations were authorised since the powers came into force in 2001.
The police minister, Nick Herbert, said in a Commons statement that the mistake was discovered after a freedom of information request triggered a review of the Metropolitan police's section 44 records.
"The Met identified an authorisation from April 2004 which had not been confirmed by a Home Office minister within the statutory 48-hour deadline for confirmation," Herbert said. "Subsequent investigations revealed that approximately 840 were stopped and searched in the relevant area during the period of the invalid authorisation."
The Met is urgently considering what steps to take to contact those involved so they can apologise.
12.36pm: Grant Shapps, the housing minister, has scrapped plans to introduce new regulations for private landlords. In a news release, he said: "I am satisfied that the current system strikes the right balance between the rights and responsibilities of tenants and landlords."
According to the Press Association, the previous administration proposed new regulation last year in response to the Rugg review of the private rented sector, published in October 2008. A spokeswoman for the Department for Communities and Local Government said the new coalition judged the introduction of a national register of landlords, regulation of letting and managing agents and compulsory written tenancy agreements would introduce too much additional red tape.
The Association of Residential Lettings Agents (Arla) said it was "extremely disappointed" by Shapps' decision. "This move risks seriously hampering the improvement of standards in the private rented sector, the sector's reputation, and the fundamental role it plays in the wider housing market as well as failing to protect the consumer who has nowhere to go when there is service failure or fraud," Arla said.
12.52pm: David Willetts, the universities minister, is deliving his speech in Oxford now. The text isn't available on the department's website yet, but I'm told that a version should be going up later. I'll report more on it when it pops up in my inbox.
But David Lammy, the shadow higher education minister, has criticised Willetts for describing students as "a burden on the taxpayer" in his Guardian interview today. According to PoliticsHome, this is what Lammy told BBC News.
What we have in this country is a partnership between the taxpayer, between students and parents, students when they graduate, and the universities. In a matter of weeks, David Willetts has torn up that agreement and I think offensively labelled students a burden and I think he should apologise ... This is a Conservative minister intent on a war with students and parents in this country.
1.06pm: Paul Goodman, the former Tory frontbencher who stood down at the election and now writes for ConservativeHome, thinks the select committee election results are a victory for the Conservative establishment. He has explained his thinking in this post.
I wondered earlier this week here whether Labour MPs would use the select committee elections to make life difficult for David Cameron.
They didn't. Instead, they lined up behind the Conservative establishment candidates. Andrew Tyrie took the Treasury select committee; Richard Ottaway, foreign affairs (a big, big consolation prize, after his defeat in the 1922 committee chairmanship election); James Arbuthnot, defence; Stephen Dorrell, health; Tim Yeo, climate change. Anne McIntosh, who won the environment committee, leans towards the left of the party.
I didn't, of course, see anyone cast a ballot paper. But unless Conservative MPs turned out en masse to vote against the party's right - an unlikely course of action, given the '22 executive results - Liberal and Labour support for less spiky candidates provides the only comprehensible explanation of the results.
I think Goodman is wrong about Tyrie. I would not describe Tyrie as a more establishment figure than Michael Fallon, his rival for the Treasury post. But it's an interesting thesis.
2.01pm: I've just read the David Willetts speech (see 12.52pm). Here are the main points:
• Willetts wants universities to separate "teaching and examining". As my colleague Jessica Shepherd explains in this story, based on an interview Willetts gave to the Today programme, this would involve students being able to live at home and study at a local further education college, but take an exam validated by a more prestigious university. "This is what actually delivered the expansion of universities in England and Wales for a century. In fact, all English and Welsh universities founded between 1849 and 1949 offered University of London external degrees, before they received charters to award degrees of their own," he said.
• He wants apprenticeships to be seen as a route into university. He would be talking to Ucas to see "what more we can do to make sure good vocational qualifications are reflected in the university entry system", he said. One of the strengths of Silicon Valley in California was that people there were more likely to go to university when they were 25, having gained some practical experience, he said.
• He described the current system of tuition fees as "in effect a capped graduate tax".
• He will be urging universities to publish "employability statements". He explained: "These statements, written directly for a student audience and readily accessible online, will summarise what universities and colleges offer students to help them become job-ready in the widest sense and support their transition into the world of work. Many universities already provide detail about what students on particular courses can expect in terms of job placements or other types of skills training, but these statements will set a minimum requirement for such information."
Willetts also made one interesting non-education point: he suggested that coalition government was better than one-party government. Several ministers have been saying that the coalition has forced the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats to work together in a way that has been good for politics as a whole and you would expect them to be positive about the coalition. But Willetts suggested that being in coalition improved the quality of decision-making.
The path-breaking experience of coalition is changing British politics for the better. Sharing power has required us to work in new ways, and I believe it has actually strengthened cabinet government as more issues are debated between colleagues. You have to have evidence and analysis to back your assertions. And that's not only true around the cabinet table. It is true for individual departments too – certainly in [the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills], where I hope policy is already better for the lively discussions which Vince Cable and I enjoy.
2.29pm: Here's a lunchtime summary.
• David Cameron has arrived in Afghanistan, where he has said that Britain and America need to move "further and faster" in stabilising the country. At a press conference with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, Cameron said that nobody in Britain or Afghanistan wanted troops to remain a day longer than they were needed. (See 9.53am.)
• Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor now employed as David Cameron's spin doctor, earns £140,000 a year, the Cabinet Office has revealed. It revealed the figure when it published a list of special advisers, political appointees allowed to work as civil servants and paid by the taxpayer. I'll post more on this later.
• William Hague, the foreign secretary, has sought to play down claims that the anti-BP stance taken by Washington would hurt the UK. "No one has used an anti-British tone in anything I have detected," Hague told the BBC. "The important thing here is actually dealing with the problem that has arisen from that oil spill, dealing with it out at sea and making sure that everything possible is done. I think that is more important than any rhetoric that any of us may indulge in about it." He was responding to claims that the fall in BP's share price would damage the interests of pensioners and others with money invested in BP. (See 11.23am, 11.51am, and 12.11pm.)
• Margaret Hodge, the former Labour minister, has been elected chair of the public accounts committee. Hodge won by just six votes. Another 15 select committee chairs were also elected. (See 11.45am and 12.21pm.)
• David Willetts, the universities minister, has said that students should be able to study for university degrees without having to attend the university awarding the degree in person. He made the suggestion in a wide-ranging speech on higher education. (See 2.01pm.)
• The Home Office revealed that tens of thousands of people have been stopped in the street and searched unlawfully under controversial section 44 anti-terrorism powers. (See 12.33pm.)
3.16pm: David Cameron revealed Andy Coulson's salary when he published a list of all the special advisers working for government. There are currently 61 of them, and those earning more than £58,200 have their salaries revealed.
Coulson is earning only slightly less than Cameron, who is being paid £142,500. But Coulson is earning more than Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister. Clegg is paid the same as other cabinet ministers – £134,565.
Two other special advisers – Ed Llewellyn and Kate Fall, who both work for Cameron – are paid more than £100,000. Llewellyn, Cameron's chief of staff, gets £125,000 and Fall, Llewellyn's deputy, gets £100,000.
Gabby Bertin, Cameron's press secretary, earns £80,000, and Steve Hilton, Cameron's most influential policy adviser, is paid £90,000.
The number of special adviser posts has also cut from 78 – the number under Gordon Brown – to 68, which includes seven vacancies. It is thought this could reduce the pay bill by as much as £2m. Last year's bill was £6.8m.
The full list does not seem to be available on the internet, although PoliticsHome has put up a chart with some of the figures.
3.30pm: In the comments owencoco said I should have been paying more attention to the exchanges in the Commons during communities questions. He's right. I've just been reading the Press Association story, and at one point Bob Neill, the communities minister, said: "Those in greatest need ultimately bear the burden of paying off the debt."
The row erupted after Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, announced details of how the government will cut £1.2bn from local government spending this year. John Denham, the shadow communities secretary, said these cuts would hit the poorest hardest. Here's an extract from the Press Association report.
Denham said: "Why is it the impoverished northern mill towns, the ex-coalfields and the struggling seaside towns that will take the largest share of the cuts? Why is it the big cities, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Birmingham that will take the largest cuts? Why will impoverished Newham have a cut of £4.6m and wealthy Richmond just £900,000?"
Neill said Denham was a member of a cabinet which "left this country record levels of debt".
Labour's former home secretary David Blunkett said: "It is inevitable that if you cut external funding to authorities based on the fact that they received it specifically because of their levels of deprivation ... those in greatest need will inevitably take the biggest cuts."
Neill was drowned out by uproar from Labour benches as he replied: "Those in greatest need ultimately bear the burden of paying off the debt ... "
Speaker John Bercow was forced to intervene in what he called "high octane exchanges" to allow Neill to continue.
3.54pm: Barack Obama is not the only figure under fire today for comments he has made about BP (see 11.23am). Boris Johnson was been criticised too, for saying that BP "cannot be faulted". He made the comment in an interview on the Today programme this morning.
It starts to become a matter of national concern if a great British company is being continually beaten up on the international airwaves when, OK, it has presided over a catastrophic accident, which it is trying to remedy, but ultimately cannot be faulted because it was an accident that took place and BP is paying a very, very heavy price indeed.
This is what Ken Livingstone had to say in response:
It is staggering that Boris Johnson believes BP "cannot be faulted" for presiding over one of the worst environmental disasters in the world. The leak of millions of barrels of oil has put the livelihoods of millions of people at risk and threatens to damage the environment in the Gulf of Mexico for generations and BP have serious questions to answer about their conduct and the handling of the crisis. We have a mayor more interested in BP's share price than people or the environment. It's about time that the mayor of London started to speak up for ordinary people rather than defending the bankers and oil companies.
I have not followed the Deepwater Horizon oil spill story closely, but here's one Guardian story that helps to explains why Livingstone thought Johnson was wrong to say BP had not done anything wrong.
4.14pm: Here's an afternoon reading list.
• Patrick Hennessey (the author and former soldier) writes at Coffee House about ministers visisting solidiers on the frontline in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At times, it did feel like the sole purpose was to allow the politician in question to announce in later speeches that he (it invariably was "he") had just returned from the "front line" like some sort of latter-day Eisenhower. Perhaps the most gratuitous recent example was when Gordon Brown, never the army's favourite public figure, made an ill-advised excursion to Helmand before the election ... What rankled many in the armed forces was when Mr Brown's night stopover was spun as the first night a prime minister had spent in a "war zone" since Churchill. He was in Kandahar Airfield, a base which houses the Pizza Hut and the cinema and is viewed by troops in Helmand as the very apogee of safety and cushy luxury.
• Michael White at the Guardian on Diane Abbott
Arrogant, unpopular, lazy, disloyal, the kind of foolishly leftwing MP who had done Labour so much harm since the 1980s when the future Hackney MP – first elected in 1987, long before any of her leadership rivals – cut her teeth on the destructive politics of London Labour in the Livingstone era's heyday.
These were some of the kinder epithets hurled Abbott's way. They are easy to find among MPs and party officials. Indeed, I heard a former colleague at TV-am roaring with laughter recalling how Diane – already a Westminster city councillor and Livingstone activist – got away with doing very modest amounts of work as a reporter/researcher, but always had the chutzpah to face down management complaints.
She's always had this knack. The clever, confident child of Jamaican immigrants who got to Harrow County school – a good old-fashioned grammar school where her friends included Michael Portillo and Clive Anderson – and on to Cambridge, Diane knows her market value as a black female radical. She always makes me laugh.
• Daniel Hannon on his blog on the Tory MP who praised the Levellers and the Diggers in his maiden speech.
• Alex Barker at the FT's Westminster blog writes about the email Liam Fox has sent to defence officials explaining his priorities.
4.38pm: Update: Tom Watson has published the full list of special advisers and their salaries on his blog.
It's been a relatively quiet day. David Cameron is in Afghanistan, and Nick Clegg has been in Berlin with William Hague. That means George Osborne, the chancellor (and the fourth most senior person in the government) may have been "running the country", although when someone asked about this at the lobby briefing, Downing Street insisted that Cameron was still in charge. I did a round-up of most of the main stories at 2.29pm and not a lot has changed in the last two hours. But here's an afternoon summary anyway.
• David Cameron has intervened in the BP crisis. As my colleague Graeme Wearden reports, he risked the wrath of the City today when he said he sympathised with the frustration of the White House at the "environmental catastrophe" in the Gulf of Mexico. "I completely understand the US government's frustration because it is catastrophic for the environment and obviously everyone wants everything to be done that can be done," Cameron said. This morning my edition of the Daily Telegraph carried the splash headline: Obama's boot on the throat of British pensioners. (See 11.23am) It has provoked a lot of reaction today, but it is not in the interests of Washington or London for this row to escalate and Cameron seems to be trying to calm things down.
• A minister said "those in the greatest need" would bear the burden of paying off the deficit. Bob Neill, a communities minister, made the comment in the Commons when he was trying to defend a £1.2bn cut in local government spending. Officially the government is committed to implementing spending cuts in a way that will protect the poor and the vulnerable as far as possible. Neill's comment - which was said in the heat of the moment, and which did not seem to be intended as a statement of government policy - is an admission that, in reality, the poor will suffer. (See 3.30pm)
I'm finished for today. Thanks for the comments.
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