The first speaker of the day on the platform at the Conservative party confernce is Thérese Coffey, the health secretary and deputy prime minister.

After a tribute to Andy Street, the Tory mayor of the West Midlands, she urges the party to “come together to tackle the issues that we have long faced”.

I will post a summary of the highlights once I have seen the full text.

Eric Pickles, a Tory peer and former party chair, told the BBC that it was “almost certain” that Tory MPs would fail to support the government if it tries to uprate benefits just in line with earnings. He said:

The next big issue is with regard to the uprating of benefits, and I obviously I’m out of it – I don’t know what’s happening in the Commons – but I was just recently talking to somebody who does know what’s happening, and it was her estimation that the numbers against not uprating were greater than those that were against the 45% income tax [cut].

Asked if he thought the government could not get sufficient backing if it decided against uprating benefits in line with inflation, Pickles said: “Yeah, I think that’s almost certain.”

As our fresh splash reports, Sir Robert Buckland, the Welsh secretary, has joined fellow cabinet minister Penny Mordaunt (see 8.02am) in signalling that he wants benefits to rise in line with inflation. Mordaunt said so explicitly. Buckland was a tiny bit more circumspect, but it is not hard to work out what he means.

He told Newsnight’s Nicholas Watt:

I’ve worked very closely with this prime minister for many years. She’s an extremely effective team player, she’s a great leader. And she’ll continue to listen and act accordingly. I have full confidence in that. I’m a one nation compassionate Conservative. I believe in enabling the most successful in our society to succeed, and I believe in the safety net as well.

Asked if he wanted to see benefits rise in line with inflation, Buckland replied:

Every Conservative government that I’ve been part of has maintained the safety net, and I’m sure this one will do the same.

My colleagues Rowena Mason, Jessica Elgot and Rajeev Syal have filed a story summing up the state of play at the Conservative party conference so far today. The intro is harsh – but not wrong.

Liz Truss’s government is in chaos after the chancellor refused to confirm he would bring forward his budget to calm the markets and the home secretary accused fellow MPs of a coup against the prime minister.

Braverman tells Gove to avoid media and not to air Tory ‘dirty linen’ in public

Rajeev Syal

At the fringe event where Suella Braverman, the home secretary, claimed Tory MPs “staged a coup” against Liz Truss when they forced her to abandon the 45% top rate of tax (see 1.18pm and 2.30pm), she named Michael Gove as a key culprit.

Braverman told Chopper’s Politics podcast that the former cabinet minister was “airing dirty laundry” and called for him to stop. She said:

Ultimately I’m very disappointed that members of our own party staged a coup, effectively, and undermined the authority of the prime minister in an unprofessional way.

We are one party, the prime minister has been elected. She has got a serious mandate to deliver. She did talk about tax cuts all through the summer in a pretty exhausting process.

She is doing what it said on the tin.

Asked about Gove’s recent criticisms of the now scrapped 45p tax rate, she said:

Michael is a friend of mine but I do think he has got this wrong and it is incumbent on him to try and corral support and encourage the new administration to succeed, because ultimately we are on the same team and we should be focused on being united and delivering to the British people.

Asked what she would say to Gove, she said:

Michael, if you have got concerns, if you have disagreements raise them in private … You don’t air your dirty linen.

Kemi Badenoch, the international trade secretary, has also urged Tory MPs unhappy about government policy to air their grievances in private, not through the media.

And here are some more lines from the round of TV interviews that Liz Truss recorded this morning.

I would like to see the higher rate lower. I want us to be a competitive country but I have listened to feedback, I want to take people with me.

• She claimed that spending cuts would not involve cuts to frontline services. The government has said departments will have to stick within existing budgets, even though inflation has gone up by more than was expected, meaning they face cuts in real terms. Talking about her plans for public spending, Truss said:

There will be some areas where there are projects the government is doing that we don’t think should go ahead, but what I’m not talking about is reducing frontline services.

Critics say it is very hard to cut departmental budgets without frontline services being affected.

I don’t want to see numbers going up, what I want to see is the right people coming in with the right skills that can contribute to Britain.

• She rejected suggestions that Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the Commons, should be sacked for saying benefits should rise in line with inflation (see 8.02am) – a comment that seemed to breach collective cabinet responsibility, because Mordaunt was pre-judging a decision not yet taken. Asked if Mordaunt had to go, Truss replied: “No, she doesn’t. This is about a decision that we are taking later on this year.”

• Truss rejected a suggestion that her first month in office had been a disaster. “I don’t agree with that analysis,” she said, when it was put to her.

(Alert readers will have noticed a pattern in the blog today. With ministers sounding off about policy, regardless of what the government line is, unity and message discipline is breaking down.)

• Truss refused an invitation to apologise to people who lost mortgage deals, or who are paying higher mortgages, as a result of the market turmoil triggered by the mini-budget. And she also said she had no shame over this. She told Sky News:

I think there’s absolutely no shame in a leader listening to people and responding and that’s the kind of person I am.

I’ve been totally honest and upfront with people that everything I have done as prime minister is focused on helping people get through what is a very difficult winter.

Liz Truss has been doing a series of interviews with broadcasters today. Speaking to Sky’s Sam Coates, she twice refused to say she trusted Kwasi Kwarteng, her chancellor. (See 12.09pm.) But in a subsequent interview with Talk TV she said that, of course, she trusted him. She said:

I do trust the chancellor, absolutely. The chancellor is a very close colleague of mine, we work very closely together.

Simon Clarke, the levelling up secretary, has joined Suella Braverman, the home secretary, in criticising the Tory MPs who persuaded Liz Truss to abandon the plan to cut the 45% top rate of income tax. (See 1.18pm.) He has posted this on Twiter.

This is fascinating, because there is a lot going on in these nine words.

Ostensibly, Braverman and Clarke are having a go at Michael Gove. Gove (Clarke’s predecessor-but-one as levelling up secretary) was the MP who led the attack on the decision to abolish the 45% rate at the conference on Friday. All three were hardline Brexiters, but on this issue they are at loggerheads.

Gove’s views were shared by many, and probably most, Conservative MPs. The two cabinet ministers are not just attacking a maverick colleague; they are dismissing a large chunk of the parliamentary party as disloyal. This is the sort of language that emerges when a party is sliding into civil war territory.

And, most interestingly, Braverman, and Clarke with his endorsement of her comments, are implicitly criticising Liz Truss for giving into pressure on the 45% issue in the first place. In interviews, Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, the chancellor, have accepted that trying to abolish this tax rate now was a mistake (although they have implied they still believe in principle it would be good for the 45% rate to go at some point). But Braverman and Clarke seem to be saying Truss should have stuck to her guns, echoing criticism of her in the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph.

Andrew Mitchell, the former Tory chief whip, has joined those calling for benefits to be uprated in line with inflation, and not just earnings. He told the World at One:

I didn’t come into politics to make poor people poorer. It seems to me that it will be very strange to have dealt with and addressed this issue of terrifying rising costs on the one hand, and then not to maintain the real value of the benefits and support that the poorest in society really needs.

Mitchell said government whips were talking to MPs to find out how much support there would be for a decision to uprate benefits just in line with earnings.

Torsten Bell, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, has posted an interesting thread on Twitter countering arguments that benefits should only be uprated in line with earnings, not inflation. It starts here.

And this is his conclusion.

Andrew Sparrow

Good afternoon. I’m Andrew Sparrow, taking over from Ben Quinn.

This is from Pat McFadden, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, responding to Liz Truss refusing twice in a Sky News interview to say she trusts Kwasi Kwarteng. (See 12.09pm.) McFadden said:

The fact that the prime minister can’t even say she trusts her chancellor tells you all you need to know about the architects of the economic chaos into which they have plunged the country.

Instead of disowning the problem and blaming one another they must put the country first and abandon their discredited trickle-down approach.

Tory MPs “staged a coup” against the prime minister over the 45p tax rate, Suella Braverman has said.

The home secretary told the Chopper’s Politics podcast:

Ultimately I’m very disappointed that members of our own party staged a coup, effectively, against the prime minister.

She added that former minister Michael Gove “got it wrong”, saying it was “incumbent on him to try and corral support” for Liz Truss and he should have raised his concerns “in private”.

She said:

I’m very disappointed to say the least by how some of our colleagues have behaved.

Government may stick to 23 November for fiscal plan after all

Rowena Mason

Kwasi Kwarteng’s medium-term fiscal plan is in confusion. He told GB News his fiscal plan “will be on the 23rd” of November in an interview on Tuesday.

However, government sources are still saying that they are considering bringing it forward, and on Monday night, there were briefings from the sources close to the leadership that it would be this month.

Liz Truss also said: “We’ve got the date of November 23. This is when we are going to set out the OBR forecast as well as the medium-term fiscal plan.

Lisa O’Carroll

Michael Gove, the former education secretary, has said free school meals could be extended to all families on universal credit for just £500m.

I think it needs to be stressed that interventions by the state at critical moments in order to improve the welfare of all its citizens are not socialists. Conservative care about the community and care about public health interventions, he told an Onward panel on school food and poverty.

It seems to me this is a more than worthwhile intervention considering some of the other police choices in front of us.

Duncan Smith says benefits should rise in line with inflation

Richard Partington

Iain Duncan Smith has said it would be wrong for the government not to increase benefits in line with inflation.

In a warning to Liz Truss’s government as she considers increasing the value of universal credit benefits from April by less than the rate of inflation for September this year, he said putting more money in lower-income households’ pockets would help grow the economy.

“If you do want growth the group that is most likely to spend the money that you give to them is the group we’re talking about [lower-income households].”

“If you want the economy to grow… the money you give to people through their benefits will end up almost certainly back in the economy in double quick time. So there is a positive to this.”

Duncan Smith said he resigned in 2016 because he believed the government had “lost the plot” on the balance between support for working people and those out of a job, and that it would be best for the government to look at support for households in the round.

The former Conservative leader said the government needed to provide extra support for those in the most difficult circumstances during the cost of living crisis, and that it made little sense to offer a real-terms cut in the value of support for the poorest.

Shell boss says further taxes on energy companies ‘inevitable’ to help fund fuel bills support

Alex Lawson

The chief executive of Shell has said governments may need to tax energy companies further to fund efforts to protect the “poorest” people from soaring bills.

Ben van Beurden, the outgoing boss of the oil and gas company, told an energy conference in London: “One way or another there needs to be government intervention. Protecting the poorest, that probably may then mean that governments need to tax people in this room to pay for it.

“I think we just have to accept as a society – it can be done smartly and not so smartly. There is a discussion to be had about it but I think it’s inevitable.”

Last week EU ministers agreed to tap windfall profits of companies and redirect them to customers and businesses as part of an initial energy package. The EU executive hopes to raise €140bn (£121bn) through the levies. The bloc also set a goal to reduce power consumption.

Tory members have been using a meeting with their party’s chairman to vent their frustration at MPs affecting their local campaigning efforts.

One Conservative member told Jake Berry they are “sick and tired” of having to answer questions about MPs’ actions while canvassing for local votes.

Another said that “what was going on down in London” – hinting at the scandals which brought down Boris Johnson’s government – had turned a previously safe seat in their area into a marginal one.

At a Conservative party conference fringe event where members were able to meet the new party chairman, Woking borough councillor Melanie Whitehand said: “I am sick and tired, when we go around canvassing, every time what gets pulled up is what is happening in government.”

“Although we say local issues for local politics, it absolutely gets drowned out by whatever the MPs are doing in the chamber.”
She added that MPs were “selfish” and “not paying mind” to the Tory party members who helped get them elected.”

Berry replied that “every member of parliament should be canvassing regularly with their council team”, as he does.

He said: “I don’t have to rely on my council colleagues coming to me and saying: ‘Do me a favour, will you? Just shut up in Westminster and will you let us get on with winning our local election’, because I hear it directly from the voters.”