By Andrew Sparrow (now); Ben Quinn (earlier)
Follow all today’s political developments as they happen
- Boris Johnson’s BBC Breakfast interview – Summary and analysis
- Johnson: Huawei critics ‘must tell us what’s the alternative’
- Johnson says he wants to see county lines drugs gangs ‘totally wound up’
1.37pm GMT
In his BBC interview Boris Johnson also spoke about the considerations he will take into account when deciding whether or not to allow the Chinese firm Huawei a role in building the UK‘s 5G network. (See 10.03am.) Australia banned Huawei from its 5G networks in 2018 and, in an interview on the World at One, the former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said the UK would be potentially vulnerable if it used the Chinese firm for this work. He said:
5G means it isn’t possible to separate the sensitive parts of the network with the bulk of it, so we concluded that it wasn’t acceptable for high-risk vendors to provide 5G infrastructure in Australia.
The five eyes countries have been asleep at the switch in allowing China to own most of the companies that possess the capability to provide 5G networks.
1.25pm GMT
In his BBC interview this morning Boris Johnson said President Trump should work on a replacement for the the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the deal with Iran that ensured it abandoned work on acquiring a nuclear bomb. (See 10.03am.) His comment coincided with the UK, France and Germany – the E3, the three individual EU states that were party to the JCPOA – issuing a statement accusing Iran of not meeting its obligations under the deal, and triggering the dispute mechanism.
Here is the text of the statement from the E3. And here is my colleague Patrick Wintour‘s story on this.
Related: European states trigger dispute mechanism in Iran nuclear deal
So, in the space of two or three days, the prime minister has gone from signing a joint statement with France and Germany calling for the retention and restoration of the JCPOA to calling for it to be scrapped and replaced by some mythical Trump deal.
