Michael Gove has claimed that the UK will not lower its environmental or wildlife standards after Brexit but expressed concerns about the possibility that no deal will be struck with the EU.

The environment secretary told a fringe event at Conservative party conference that it was an advantage for Britain to be known for quality food products and that the government would announce a food strategy later this year.

Asked by World Wildlife Fund CEO Tanya Steele if he worried about ‘no deal”, Gove said:

Well I do worry about it. I think that a deal would be much, much better. I think if we left without a deal, we and the EU would put in place all sorts of arrangements to make sure that the impact was mitigated. But it’s certainly not my favourite option.

We’ve been talking about some of the things that we would need to do both constitutionally and in other respects in order to make sure that the ambitions that we have for the environment are met. I don’t think intrinsically a no deal Brexit with the right policies is harmful to the environment. I think we can do the right thing with our own legislation and the international commitments that we make, but it would certainly be the case that it would be disruptive initially and that would be a difficult period.

We in government are seeking to be prepared for every eventuality, but it’s certainly not something I would contemplate with a glad heart.

And here are two more lines from Jeremy Hunt’s speech about Brexit.

• Hunt said the UK would “fight” if the EU did not compromise in the Brexit talks. He said:

And let me say one more thing about these talks.

Never mistake British politeness for British weakness.

Because if you put a country like Britain in a corner, we don’t crumble. We fight.

Hunt did not explain what he meant by “fight” - although obviously he was not talking about deploying the new HMS Birmingham. (See 4.30pm.)

(Hunt has used the line about not mistaking politeness for weakness before, although arguably the misunderstanding is his, not the EU’s. The UK has compromised more than the EU in the Brexit negotiations so far; Hunt’s words imply that that is because of politeness, but it more realistic to attribute it to the weakness of the government’s position.)

• He said the EU was failing to respond to the causes of Brexit.

Punishing Britain for Brexit is dealing with the symptoms of the problem and not the cause, which is the failure of political elites across Europe - including people like me in Britain - to deal with people’s concerns about migration.

That is the heart of the problem - and if you’re worried about the EU’s future that is also the solution.

Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary, is speaking to the conference now. He had some firm things to say about Brexit.

In a passage where he said he was addressing the UK’s “European friends” directly, he said if they tried to punish the UK for leaving the EU, other countries who leave too.

At the moment you seem to think the way to keep the club together is to punish a member who leaves.

Not just with economic disruption. But even by breaking up the United Kingdom with a border down the Irish Sea.

What happened to the confidence and ideals of the European dream? The EU was set up to protect freedom. It was the Soviet Union that stopped people leaving.

The lesson from history is clear: if you turn the EU club into a prison, the desire to get out won’t diminish it will grow …

… and we won’t be the only prisoner that will want to escape …

If you reject the hand of friendship offered by our prime minister …

… you turn your back on the partnership that has given Europe more security, more freedom and more opportunities than ever in history.

… and a setback for the EU will become a wholly avoidable tragedy for Europe.

Gavin Williamson, the defence secretary, has not delivered his speech to the conference yet, but the party has already sent out a press notice about it, with no embargo, so here are the announcements he is making.

• Williamson announces an overhaul of welfare support for members of the armed forces, including ensuring that personnel get their own career development plans and ID cards to allow veterans to prove they have been in the forces when they enter civilian life. There will also be a new fund “dedicated to supporting the careers of the spouses and civil partners of those who serve, in recognition of the vital role of families within the military community”, Williamson will say. The press notice says:

By the end of 2020, all serving personnel will have access to their own Professional and Personal Development Plan – a new scheme that will enable them to hone the skills they need to succeed throughout their service, and equip them for the next stage in their careers.

Providing an extra layer of care for those preparing to leave the military, the new Defence Transition Service will deliver specialist support for serving personnel who are most likely to face challenges as they adjust to civilian life. These individuals will be offered unique solutions to the challenges they face, including help with housing or employment.

To further support the transition to civilian life, the Defence Secretary also announced that new ID cards will be available to military service leavers shortly. The ID cards will initially be given to everyone leaving the Armed Forces, and will give them instant recognition for their service to the country.

• Williamson says he is setting up a scheme to train cadets in cyber warfare. The press notice explains:

The Cadets CyberFirst programme, delivered by Ministry of Defence cadet organisations and the GCHQ National Cyber Security Centre, will equip over 2,000 cadets a year with the skills and expertise to become future leaders in this emerging industry.

Over £1m will be invested in the programme each year, giving cadets the opportunity to learn how to protect systems connected to the internet from cyber attacks. Cadets will be able to choose from introductory courses covering the tools, knowledge and skills to protect small networks, to more advanced courses where they will be fully immersed in cyber security issues.

• He says the UK will maintain a military presence in Germany beyond 2020. “Around 185 British Army personnel and 60 Ministry of Defence civilians will remain in Germany, once the withdrawal of British Army units to the UK has been completed,” the party says.

• He announces that a new navy frigate will be named HMS Birmingham.

If Digby Jones is unhappy about Conservatives who don’t take the concerns of business seriously (see 3.28pm), he probably need to widen his list of targets. There has been more evidence today of how Brexit pushing a wedge between the Conservative party and corporate Britain it used to represent.

In an article for the Sunday Telegraph (paywall), Steve Baker, the former Brexit minister, describes the CBI (Jones’s former employer) as “a grave menace to the political stability and economic prospects of the UK”. He writes:

Today, the CBI is a grave menace to the political stability and economic prospects of the UK. I choose that term deliberately. When Hayek attacked economists for making the intellectual error of concentrating on superficial short-run effects at the expense of the long-term forces of economic life, he called them “a grave menace to our civilisation”. So it is with the CBI.

The CBI is to blame for the Brexit talks being in a dire state, Baker claims.

Eventually came the catastrophe of Chequers. Timid and afraid, a terrified Establishment who never understood the demand for independence have clung too close to EU institutions. With Marxists opposite, hungry for power and all the ruin that would bring, the Tory party is riven and a rule-bound EU has inevitably rejected a proposal incompatible with their legal order.

This grave threat facing our country is the triumph of the CBI. It is the product of the CBI’s conservatism and willingness to grasp passing expedients.

More anti-business sentiment has surfaced in the conference this afternoon. So far here have been two moments when speakers have attacked a newspaper, to the delight of the audience. Not the Guardian. (We probably get booed more by the hardcore Corbynistas.) The jibes, which came from Jones and Liam Fox, were directed at the Financial Times - the house journal of FTSE-world.

Michael Gove, the environment secretary, thinks a bit like this too. We have not heard from him today, but in Tom Baldwin’s excellent new book about politics and the media, Ctrl Alt Delete, he quotes Gove as saying:

My view is that the Sirs and Dames and the captains of industry more often than not tend to be complacent … If you are the chairman of a FTSE company, then I tend to think you’re probably wrong.

The most blunt (public) response to Boris Johnson so far was delivered by Digby Jones, the former CBI general secretary, who gave a speech welcoming members to Birmingham in his capacity as a peer from Birmingham.

Jones kept stressing that he was not a member of a political party, but his speech was strongly pro-Brexit (he once addressed a Ukip conference) and he sounded - well, quite at home with his audience.

The anti-Johnson jibe came when he was speaking about the importance of business. He said he “took exception” to the reports that Johnson had said “fuck business” when asked about business concerns about Brexit earlier this year. He went on:

Business is so important that when I heard a former foreign secretary f-business, it showed him up for the irrelevant and offensive person he really is.

Here are the main points from Brandon Lewis’s speech to the conference.

• Lewis, the Conservative chair, said that he wanted the Tories to become “the natural home for ethnic minority communities within a generation”. He said:

Our greatest challenge still lies ahead: winning more support from black, asian and minority ethnic communities.

I don’t underestimate the size of this task. Our vote among ethnic minority voters is stalling. Yet we can be their natural home.

Because these are the people who have done so much to build Britain.

100 years ago, in the first world war, at least 1.3m Indians volunteered to fight for the British army.

70 years ago, many travelled from around the world to make their home in this country and help build our fantastic NHS.

Today, Muslim communities in Britain give more to charity than any other group – donating around £100 million to charities every year, a stunning example to us all.

And the values that these things speak to – country, aspiration, self-reliance, hard-work – are our values too. They are Conservative values.

So I want us to become the natural home for ethnic minority communities within a generation.

• He announced a mentoring fund for people under-represented in the Conservative party.

Today I can announce that we are establishing a dedicated mentoring fund to support those who are under-represented in our party. A fund to provide guidance and training to help them pursue a life in public service, and to encourage more people from diverse backgrounds to stand for parliament, become MPs and help us truly represent the face of modern Britain.

• He said he had set a target for 50% of people on the candidates’ list to be women.

Sajid Javid, the home secretary, has joined those mocking Boris Johnson for his latest bridge proposal.(See 10.16am.)

Presumably the Boris Johnson bridge to Northern Ireland is in addition to the one he wants to build to France.

During his interview with Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday, David Davis, the former Brexit secretary, predicted that there would be a Brexit deal - but that things would get “very scary” before then. He explained:

I think it is 80, 90% likely there will be a deal and I think actually the deal with end up as something like what Boris calls “SuperCanada”, what somebody else called free trade bluff – basically a free trade [deal], but we are going to have a very scary few months, between now and about November is going to be really scary. Everyone is going to be calling each other’s bluff, there is all sorts of brinkmanship going to go on. That’s normal, that’s the European Union’s daily bread and that’s what we’ve got to be ready for.

Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, was on Radio 5 Live’s Pienaar’s Politics this morning. Here are some of the key points he made.

• Fox claimed that the way the EU has treated Theresa May has been “beyond the pale”. He said:

Under article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, they have a duty to help us deal with that future relationship. Taunting the prime minister in the way that they did post-Salzburg, which I have said was beyond the pale, is not an appropriate way to proceed.

Fox seemed to be referring to this Donald Tusk instagram post.

• He said Brexit would cause a “short-term blip” in investment in the UK. He said:

I have just come back from Canada, talking to pension funds in Canada about their investments in the UK and they say that Brexit is a short-term blip in terms of a long-term investment portfolio.

• He said he would be willing to serve under Boris Johnson if Johnson became party leader. “I would have no problem with serving under any duly-elected leader of the Conservative party,” Fox said.

When Andrew Marr interviewed Jeremy Corbyn in Liverpool last week, he devoted much of it to antisemitism and invited Corbyn (without much success) to deliver some form of mea culpa on air to the Jewish community. Today the most interesting part of his interview with Theresa May came when he asked her to give own apology to the Windrush migrants. Again, he did not get a proper apology, but it made for compelling TV. Perhaps it says something about the state of our politics that both main leaders are having to spend so much of their time finding off calls to say sorry. I’m sure it wasn’t always quite like this.

Overall, it was a very defensive interview. The general assumption is that you are supposed to use these opportunities to announce something newsy. But the housing announcement put out by the Tories overnight (see 9.17am) got just a minimal reference, and otherwise it was mostly Windrush and Brexit, on both of which May was on the back foot.

Here is the main line on Windrush.

• May refused to apologise for introducing the “hostile environment” immigration policies that led to Windrush migrants losing jobs or benefits or worse. Marr played a clip featuring Sarah O’Connor, one of the Windrush victims who recently died. Responding to this, May said:

I can only apologise for what Sarah went through, and for what her family have gone through. This shouldn’t have happened. We are doing everything we can to ensure that we are supporting those who have found themselves in difficulties as a result of being part of the Windrush generation, of not having the documents that guaranteed their status.

May also stressed that some of the problems started before she came to office.

If you look at what has happened to the Windrush generation, actually there are people who found themselves in some difficulty without documents before we came into government.

But Marr pressed her to explain what she was actually apologising for. For the fact that something bad happened? Or for the fact that her own policy was to blame? (This question should be compulsory whenever a politician apologises in an interview.) At this point May made it clear that she was not apologising for the “hostile environment” measures she introduced. She said:

For most people, they do want to know that the government is taking action against those people who come to this country illegally or who stay in this country illegally. What we need to do is make sure that, in doing that, we don’t find people who have every right to be here being caught up in it.

And, when pressed as to whether she was apologising for what she did, she replied:

The purpose of the policy was - and we maintain a compliant environment policy - is to ensure that those people who are here illegally are identified and appropriate action is taken.

I apologise for the fact that some people who should not have been caught up in that were caught up in that with, in some cases, tragic results.

• May refused to say how many Windrush migrants had lost their homes, lost access to NHS treatment or lost their jobs as a result of the government’s “hostile environment” immigration policies.

And here are the main lines on Brexit.

May did not have anything particularly new to say on Brexit, although that in itself was noteworthy. On the basis of her remarks, the prospect of there being a no deal Brexit does not seem to be decreasing. It’s probably a good job that foreign exchange traders have got the day off.

• May could not give a firm guarantee that there would be no hard border in Ireland in the event of a no deal Brexit. When it was put to her that, in these circumstances, there would have to be a hard border, she replied:

If we leave with no deal, we as the United Kingdom government are still committed to doing everything we can to ensure there is no hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.

• She refused to rule out agreeing to alter aspects of her Brexit Chequers plan, but she stressed that she wanted to hear what the EU was saying first.

• She implied that she did not fully understand the EU objections to Chequers. She said:

The point is very simple. Until we know what their [the EU’s] problem is - that’s what we need; we need to know what their concerns are.

This was curious because the EU says it has been telling the UK in private for weeks what it finds unacceptable about Chequers.

• She brushed aside Boris Johnson’s description of her Chequers plan as “deranged”, but did not comment specifically on his languge.

Q: What happened to the Windrush generation was a burning injustice, wasn’t it?

May says she has apologised for it.

Q: How many Windrush migrants lost their homes?

May does not answer, but says help is available.

Q: How many lost their jobs, and were unable to get benefits?

May does not answer this one either. She says the government has apologised. It is making every effort to help.

Marr quotes the case of Sarah O’Connor, who recently died. He plays a clip from O’Connor talking about her experience.

May says she can only apologise for what happened.

• May restates her apology to Windrush migrants.

Q: What are you apologising for? For what you did?

May says some people were in difficulty before the Tories came into government.

She says the point of her policy was to ensure that people here illegally were identified.

But what went wrong was that Windrush migrants, who were here legally, got caught up in this.

She says the public want to know the government is taking action against people here illegally.

Q: Will you apologise for the “hostile environment” policy?

May says she apologises for the fact that some people were caught up in this wrongly. But she won’t apologise for the policy per se.

• May refuses to apologise for introducing a ‘hostile environment’ policy for illegal immigrants.

The Andrew Marr interview with Theresa May will start shortly.

Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Conservative leader, and David Davis, the former Brexit secretary, were both interviewed on Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday. And both of them criticised Boris Johnson for what he has been saying to the Sunday Times. (See 10.16am.)

Davidson said Johnson was attacking plans that he supported when he was in government. She said:

What I think is strange about some of the attacks in the newspapers today is that this is someone who was praising what the prime minister brought home in terms of moving on to the next stage last December, someone who was in one of the great offices of state who was sitting around the Cabinet table, who now says he was in some ways deceived.

She also pointed out that, in his interview, he seemed more keen to talk about his record as London mayor than his record as foreign secretary. She said:

He seems to be spending an awful lot of time talking about his London mayorship and very little time, in fact he hasn’t even mentioned the fact that he was foreign secretary for two years and was in the room helping to influence this and, indeed, was praising it as soon ago as December.

And David Davis said the policy idea Johnson floated in the interview were flawed. He said:

Take what he said this morning in the papers. He wants to cancel HS2 and spend it on a bridge to Northern Ireland. I don’t want to do that.

I think one of the blights of British politics is politicians having fantastic ideas that cost a fortune and don’t do much good. If you’re going to use that money, use it for broadband or something else ...

Boris is a great mate of mine, we have a very knockabout friendship, but quite a lot of his ideas, I think, are good headlines but not necessarily good policies.

The criticism from Davis is more significant, because Johnson and Davis were both leave voters (unlike Davidson) and Davis and Johnson both resigned around the same time over Chequers. But since then they have not been working together in trying to get Theresa May to think again.

One of the signs that Boris Johnson is running a quasi-covert bid for the Conservative party leadership is that he has started to propose alternative domestic policy. There is more of that in his Sunday Telegraph interview, which goes well beyond calling Chequers “deranged”. (See 8.43am.) Here are some more lines from the interview.

• Johnson said the Conservatives should do more to defend the principles of free market economics. He said:

I think we need to make the case for markets. I don’t think we should caper insincerely on socialist territory. You can’t beat Corbyn by becoming Corbyn. I believe that the best way to pay for great public services is to have a strong market economy, and I think that we should be proud of being Conservatives, proud of what we stand for, believe in ourselves and believe in our ability to create the wealth to pay for fantastic mental healthcare services, a fantastic social care, a fantastic NHS.

• He said HS2 should be shelved in favour of a trans-Pennine high-speed rail link. He said:

There are projects we should have on transport in the north of the country that ought to take precedence over HS2. It’s crazy how long it takes to get east–west across the country.

• He cast doubt on Theresa May’s commitment to Brexit. He said:

Well, unlike the prime minister, I campaigned for Brexit. Unlike the prime minister, I fought for this, I believe in it, I think it’s the right thing for our country and I think that what is happening now is alas not what people were promised in 2016.

• He claimed that, in continuing to press May to adopt his alternative to the Chequers Brexit plan, he was like a “loyal and faithful labrador”.

I am like a loyal and faithful labrador that is relentlessly returning to her an object that she has mistakenly chucked away in the form of her own first instincts about how to do this.

(Johnson’s capacity to use language to mask the truth never ceases to amaze. “Loyal and faithful”? You have to laugh ...)

• He claimed he wants Theresa May to stay on as prime minister for as long as she wants. He said:

The prime minister said she is going to serve for as long as her party wants her, and I certainly think she should.

• He restated his call for a bridge to be built to Ireland. As my colleague Peter Walker reports, Johnson’s record with bridges is not a good one.

• Johnson denied having met Steven Bannon, President Trump’s former adviser, this summer. He said:

That is total cobblers. This whole thing about Steve Bannon is a load of the biggest . . . I have met him in the White House. He wanted me to be on his show and I said no, he wanted me to meet him and I couldn’t. It is total balls, total utter balls.

• He described himself as a “one-nation Tory”.

I remain an absolutely solid one-nation Tory, I believe totally in the duty of our society to care for everybody in society as equals. I believe that we should be welcoming and generous towards people of talent who want to come to this country, and I always felt that.

• He mocked the Guardian for overstating his unpopularity.

Ten years ago when I first ran to be mayor of London, The Guardian ran a whole G2 section in which various prominent Guardianistas and others said they would leave the country — I think Max Hastings was one of them — if I became mayor of London. I think Max is still here, knocking around somewhere. They’ll always find something to take offence at.

• Johnson mocked Sir Alan Duncan, his deputy when he was foreign secretary, who criticised him in an interview with the Times (paywall) on Saturday. Duncan told the paper:

[Johnson’s] an enormous character but not a team player, not intellectually focused. He’s got a very untidy mind. And he doesn’t know if he’s a journalist or a politician — but he does know it’s all about him ...

The more he repeats what everyone can see is not credible the more his own credibility disappears. His supposed solution is neither workable nor on offer. If he thinks he can go into the conference and undermine [Mrs May] I think he’s kidding himself. I think the party will be for her and not for him.

Asked about these comments, Johnson said:

He should pick on someone his own size.

It was a joke about Duncan’s height; he’s not tall.

In an article for the Sunday Telegraph (paywall) Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general and one of the key pro-Europeans in the party (he led the revolt in the Commons demanding a “meaningful vote” last year), claims that a “significant group” of Conservative MPs now favour a referendum on the final Brexit deal. He strongly backs the idea himself, saying it would be a “pragmatic” way of resolving the deadlock on this issue.

Here is an extract:

I believe the time has come for a polite rebellion by pragmatic Conservatives.

Including myself, it is now clear that there is a significant group of Conservative MPs who think that a People’s Vote- a vote on the final form Brexit will take, is absolutely indispensable for the future wellbeing of our country ..

A no deal Brexit is a proposal so damaging to our future that it cannot be accepted. Apart from around 40 of my colleagues linked to the ERG, none I have come across believe that such an outcome could be acquiesced to with a clear conscience.

So the only possible response must be to return to the British electorate and ask them what they want. That, it seems to me, is good pragmatic Conservative position. It presupposes nothing as to the outcome of a referendum. It responds to the clear evidence of a shift of public mood on the consequences of Brexit. It can and should be couched in honest terms which provide a choice that reflects the options now on offer and are capable of being implemented thereafter.

Such a referendum cannot be categorised as undemocratic. We are after all the party which insisted in enacting legislation requiring the trade unions to ballot their members on the outcome of any pay negotiations because we considered it essential members should have the option to express a view before rejection or acceptance.

This argument, about Brexit being like a pay negotiation, is one that has been used by union leaders like the GMB’s general secetary Tim Roache, although Grieve may be the first person to point out that the Tories have already legislated for votes on final deals.

Grieve says a “significant group” of Tory MPs now back a second referendum. It is not clear from this whether he thinks the number of MPs involved is significant, or that it is just who they are that is significant. Until now only a handful of Conservative MPs have explicitly backed a second referendum.

In her Sunday Times interview Theresa May also announced plans for a festival to celebrate Brexit Britain, due to take place in January 2022, just months before the next scheduled general election. She told the paper:

We want to showcase what makes our country great today. We want to capture that spirit for a new generation, celebrate our nation’s diversity and talent, and mark this moment of national renewal with a once-in-a-generation celebration.

Describing what’s planned, the paper reports (paywall link):

The event, called the Festival, is designed to pump billions of pounds into the economy and has conscious echoes of Queen Victoria’s Great Exhibition in 1851 and the Festival of Britain in 1951 ...

Ministers are to set aside £120m to plan the event and hire a creative director.

Neil MacGregor, the broadcaster and former director of the British Museum, and senior figures from the London 2012 Olympics are in the running to take charge.

The festival will be one of a number of celebrations already due to take place that year — including the 75th anniversary of the Edinburgh International and Fringe festivals, the 100th birthday of the BBC and the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.

One of Theresa May’s goals as prime minister has been to show that she has a domestic reform agenda that goes beyond Brexit. By and large this has been an uphill struggle - most of the government’s energies are focused on Brexit, and media coverage reflects this - but the party will be using the conference to announce non-Brexit policy and in her Sunday Times interview May announced a plan to increase stamp duty for foreigners buying property in the UK. As Tim Shipman reports (pdf),

This time [May] is focusing on a crackdown on foreign buyers of British properties. Those who do not pay tax in the UK will face a stamp duty surcharge of up to 3%, on top of the higher levels of stamp duty introduced in 2016 on second home and buy-to-let purchases. The money raised, expected to be tens of millions of pounds, will pay for a scheme to tackle rough sleeping.

On Sky News a moment ago, Brandon Lewis, the Conservative chairman, said the government would consult on the level at which the stamp duty surcharge would be set. It would probably be around 1%, he said.

Interestingly, at their conference Labour also announced plans for a new tax affecting second homes, with the revenues being used to help tackle homelessness. But Labour is proposing a new council tax levy, specifically aimed at holiday homes. And its policy seems predominantly aimed at British owners, not foreign owners.

Theresa May has also given an interview to the Sunday Times (paywall). In it, she argued that Tories should back her Chequers plan for Brexit because it was in the national interest. She said:

My message to the Conservative party is going to be that people voted to leave the EU. I believe it’s a matter of trust in politicians that we deliver on that vote for people. We’re the party that always puts country first and puts the national interest first. And that’s what I want us to be doing.

The only proposal on the table at the moment that delivers that is the Chequers plan.

The Conservative party conference starts today and, as is traditional, they are fighting like ferrets in a sack over Europe. But even by the standards of the Tories, this week’s political internecine warfare may turn out to be particularly severe.

It could also determine the fate of Brexit.

The Sunday Times has probably the most dramatic scene-setting headline.

Given that just two days ago Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary, published a 4,600 word article in the Daily Telegraph rubbishing Theresa May’s Chequers plan for Brexit and proposing his own “SuperCanada” plan instead, this might not seem very new.

But Johnson has ramped up his rhetoric. In an interview with the Sunday Times (paywall), he described the customs aspects of the Chequers plan as “deranged”. He told the paper:

The idea that we could ask customs officers in Dubrovnik and Santander to charge British-only tariffs is deranged, and nobody thinks it can work. There will be economic and political damage to the UK if we go with Chequers. It surrenders control.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, Mr Johnson said the UK should build a bridge to Ireland and put the High Speed 2 rail line on hold to focus on a high-speed link in the north of England.

In remarks that will fuel speculation about Mr Johnson’s leadership ambitions, he highlighted a key distinction between himself and Mrs May: “Unlike the Prime Minister, I campaigned for Brexit.”

Claiming he may be able to strike a better deal than Mrs May, he told the newspaper: “Unlike the Prime Minister, I fought for this, I believe in it, I think it’s the right thing for our country and I think that what is happening now is, alas, not what people were promised in 2016.

We’ll get May’s response in about two hours, when she gives an interview to Andrew Marr.

I’ll post more from the Johnson’s Sunday Times interview soon.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9am: Brandon Lewis, the Conservative chairman, and David Davis, the former Brexit secretary, are among the guests on Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday.

10am: Theresa May is interviewed on the Andrew Marr Show.

2pm: Brandon Lewis formally opens the conference. Then there will be speeches from Andy Street, the West Midlands mayor, Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, Penny Mordaunt, the international development secretary, Gavin Williamson, the defence secretary and Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary.

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