Gove defends Boris Johnson over WW2 jibe, saying it's 'witty metaphor' – as it happened

Joseph Muscat, the Maltese prime minister, is currently addressing the European parliament. Malta currently holds the presidency of the EU.

He has just told MEPs that the Brexit deal offered to Britain must be inferior to EU membership.

I will post the full quote shortly.

David Davis has given at least four interviews this morning. Here are the main points.

• Davis said that parliament would not get the option of reversing Brexit. (See 8.53am.) He was clarifying what Theresa May meant when she said MPs and peers would get a vote on the final deal. The supreme court is currently preparing its judgement on whether parliament should have a vote on triggering article 50, the process that would commence Brexit, but there is almost no prospect of an article 50 bill being voted down because Labour has said it would not block it in the Commons or the Lords.

• Davis said transitional arrangements, which could preserve some aspects of EU membership, could still be in place by the time of the 2020 general election. In her speech May confirmed that the government did favour a transitional deal that would apply after Brexit until new post-Brexit trading arrangements and other regulations were ready to come into force. May did not say how long this would last, although she did say different aspects of the deal might last for differing amounts of time. On the Today programme Davis said this “implementation phase” might last “a year or two”. But it would not last as long as five years, he said. On LBC he was asked whether that meant those transitional arrangements could still be in place at the time of the next general election, which is due in 2020. “I could imagine that,” he replied.

• He dismissed criticism of May’s demands from Guy Verhofstadt, the European parliament’s lead Brexit negotiator. He said:

A more important person than Mr Verhofstadt is Donald Tusk, the head of the council, and he said this is realistic. That was the world that he used - ‘realistic’.

It’s quite interesting, it was entirely possible, when you open a negotiation you get a sort of reaction back to push you back a bit. We didn’t get that, we got a serious and reflective look at it from Brussels and I think we’re going to see a really good engagement. Guy is one player of several.

• Davis refused to rule out Brexit resulting in customs checks being imposed on lorries leaving and entering the UK. Asked if the final deal could result in these checks being applied, he replied:

We’ll see, that’s one of the things we want to negotiate. We think it’s possible to have a pretty frictionless arrangement.

• He implied article 50 would be triggered before 25 March. That’s the date set for a summit where EU leaders will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. Speaking about when article 50 will be triggered, he said:

And we will try not to do it on a day which is embarrassing for the Europeans. They have got all sorts of things happening in March. It’s the 60th anniversary [of the Treaty of Rome]. I don’t want to wreck their party.

• He rejected suggestions that the civil service did not have the resources to negotiate Brexit. He said:

Our civil service can cope with world war two, they can easily cope with this.

• He revealed that he made £1,000 betting on the outcome of the EU referendum. He told LBC:

I was in this studio on referendum day with Iain Dale, referendum night, and the polls at that point were telling us there’s going to be a 10-point advantage to Remain. So I put some money on, and it’s still paying my office’s drinks bills. I made a grand.

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Here is the Press Association story on the unemployment figures.

Unemployment has plunged to its lowest total for more than a decade, but the number of people in work has also fallen.

The jobless total was 1.6m in the quarter to November, down by 52,000 on the previous three months to its lowest since early 2006.

The UK now has one of the lowest jobless rates in Europe at 4.8%, the latest data from the Office for National Statistics showed.

But the numbers in work fell by 9,000 to 31.8m, the lowest since last autumn, although the employment rate of 74.5% is the joint highest level on record.

The number of people classed as economically inactive has increased by 85,000 to almost 8.9m - the biggest quarterly rise since 2014.

The figure includes students, people looking after family, on long-term sick leave, or who have given up looking for a job.

The economic inactivity rate increased by 0.2% to 21.7%, the highest since last spring.

Average earnings increased by 2.8% in the year to November, up by 0.2% on the previous month.

David Freeman, senior statistician at the ONS, said: “While employment is little changed on the quarter, the rate remains at an historic high.

“The rate at which pay is increasing continues to pick up in cash terms, though it remains moderate.”

And the Press Association has filed this on how the speech is being covered on the continent.

European newspapers have responded to Theresa May’s speech setting out her priorities as she negotiates the UK’s exit from the European Union (EU) with a series of striking front pages.

The prime minister confirmed on Tuesday that Britain will quit the single market and warned she will walk away from exit talks rather than accept a “punitive” deal.

The front page of German national daily Die Welt features May’s torso with a Union flag in the background, and the words “Little Britain” below.

She is pictured wearing a blue checked blazer and white shirt with matching red lipstick and nail varnish - a nod to her previous “red, white and blue” Brexit reference.

Italian daily La Repubblica leads with the headline “Brexit, London gets its wall, ‘away from the EU and the common market”’ (translated from the original).

The Spanish newspaper El Pais does not top with Brexit, but there is a mention of May’s speech in the top right of the title page.

It references the prime minister’s announcement that Britain will leave the single market, adding that May is hoping for a hard Brexit subject to parliament’s vote.

It calls the announcement her “most important speech” since coming to Downing Street.

A close-up of May’s face set against a Union flag dominates the front of Spanish newspaper ABC.

Its headline translates to: “May threatens the EU with a commercial war.”

It warns that Britain will create a tax haven if the rest of Europe “punishes” it during negotiations.

French regional daily La Depeche du Midi runs the stark headline: “Europe: divorce a l’anglaise”.

Underneath it reads: “The United Kingdom has chosen the path of a hard Brexit by announcing its exit from the single market. What consequences in Europe, France and in our region?”

Meanwhile, French daily Le Monde, like many other European papers, features another leader of a country not its own on the cover.

US President-elect Donald Trump stands can be seen from the back, one hand in the pocket of a navy blue suit, next to the words “Trump contre L’Europe” (Trump against Europe).

It argues that Trump’s backing of Brexit is welcome support for May, as she seeks to strengthen ties with the UK’s “privileged ally”.

Another French national paper, La Croix, put Trump and May side by side against a black backdrop and the headline: “Le Monde Chahute” - the world argues or bickers.

It goes on to say that the British prime minister has announced the details of Brexit, encouraged by Trump, while China’s leader Xi Jinping “poses as a defender of globalisation”.

This is how today’s national papers are reporting Theresa May’s speech. The tweets are from the BBC’s Neil Henderson, one of the figures behind the invaluable #tomorrowspaperstoday Twitter service.

UPDATE: My colleague Roy Greenslade has filed an article on what the papers are saying about May’s speech.

Davis is still on LBC. He says his personal relationships with Michel Barnier, the EU’s Brexit negotiator, and Guy Verhofstad, the European parliament’s Brexit negotiator, are good.

Q: Could the transitional arrangements still be in place during the general election?

Davis says he can imagine that.

• Transitional arrangements may still be in place during the 2020 general election, says Davis.

He also says he made £1,000 betting on the outcome of the EU referendum. He is still using the money to pay his office drinks bill, he says.

And that’s it.

I will post a summary of the key points from all the David Davis interviews this morning shortly.

Davis says the government will try to avoid triggering article 50 at a time that would embarrass the EU. They have got big celebrations at the end of March, he says.

That is a reference to a summit on 25 March celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome.

• Davis implies article 50 will be triggered before 25 March.

Nick Ferrari is interviewing David Davis on LBC now.

Davis starts by saying people on both sides in the referendum said leaving the EU meant leaving the single market. People understood that, he says.

He says leaving the single market is not the same as losing access to it. We can do a deal in everyone’s interests, he says.

On the Today programme Tomas Prouza, the Czech Europe minister, said he did not believe that EU leaders wanted to punish the UK for leaving the EU. It was in the EU’s interests to have as free trade with the UK as possible, he said.

We have never seen any political leaders calling for any sort of punishment. What we want is something that makes sense to both sides.

But he also criticised Theresa May for not guaranteeing the rights of EU nationals living in the UK in her speech yesterday.

We are seeing an increased number of attacks on Europeans in the UK. We all remember, at the Conservative conference, ideas on companies in the UK being required to list foreigners they employ, so there’s a lot of worries I hear from the Czechs in the UK and we expected at least some formal assurances as part of that speech and there was nothing in there.

Baiba Braze, the Latvian ambassador to the UK, was also on the programme, and she also said that she did not think EU countries wanted to punish the UK. She said:

Punishment if we start shooting ourselves in the leg or try to harm each other, that’s the way down, that’s not going to lead anywhere positive. So again, there has to be a way that we still remember that we are friends and allies above anything else, with common friends and common interests in the world.

Britain and Europe are still digesting the meaning and significance of Theresa May’s big Brexit speech and there will be a lot of reaction on today’s blog. May herself will be taking PMQs, so for the first time MPs will get a chance to ask her about it too.

This morning David Davis, the Brexit secretary, has been out giving interviews. And he has ruled out the prospect of parliament getting a chance to vote down Brexit.

Yesterday in her speech May announced that MPs and peers would get a vote on the final deal. This was the moment when sterling shot up, perhaps because City traders thought May was raising the prospect of parliament being able to vote for Britain to stay in the EU. In the Q&A afterwards May implied that this was not the case, and Downing Street firmed this up in the lobby briefing later. On the Today programme Davis made this explicit. Asked about the vote on the final Brexit deal, he said:

The second thing to say here is that parliament, remember, gave the decision on leaving to the people by a vast majority. It decided it was the people who make the decision in a referendum. So it is not for parliament to reverse that.

That means MPs and peers may get a choice between Brexit on the government’s terms or Brexit with no deal. But the government does not intend to give them the option of no Brexit at all.

I will post more from Davis’s interviews shortly.

Here is the Guardian’s overnight splash on May’s speech.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Unemployment figures are published.

10.15am: Justine Greening, the education secretary and women and equalities minister, gives evidence to the Commons women and equalities committee.

12pm: Theresa May faces Jeremy Corbyn at PMQs.

2.30pm: Greening gives a speech on social mobility.

As usual, I will be covering breaking political news as it happens, as well as bringing you the best reaction, comment and analysis from the web. I plan to post a summary at lunchtime and another in the afternoon.

You can read all today’s Guardian politics stories here.

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