Former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson mocked Sunak’s campaign gaffes,suggesting tongue-in-cheek there must have been internal sabotage.
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“Is there a double agent in CCHQ[Conservative Campaign headquarters],and were they a headline writer in a previous life?” she wrote of the social media platform X.
All this came as the running count of Conservatives declaring they will not stand again for Westminster reached 78,nearly a quarter of all serving Tory MPs. That’s more than in 1997 when,ahead of Tony Blair achieving a 179-seat majority for Labour,72 Tory MPs stood down.
Some of the names to announce they were stepping down on Friday included Housing Secretary Michael Gove,a huge figure in Tory politics.
An energised Liberal Democrats party is targeting Gove’s seat of Surrey Heath in the south-east of England,part of the so-called Tory “blue wall”.
Gove’s departure marks the end of a tumultuous political career,which included him leading the Leave campaign during the 2016 Brexit referendum and standing for the Tory leadership against Boris Johnson in the same year.
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He was followed out of the race a few hours later by Andrea Leadsom,who also stood for the Tory leadership in 2016,losing out to Theresa May.
Sunak has continued to face internal criticism of his campaign launch,which involvedsurprising the party with his rainswept announcement of the July 4 poll date and holding the vote before showpiece policies on migration and a smoking ban had been enacted or legislated.
But given the dire state of their polling — the Conservatives trail Labour by more than 20 per cent in most polls — some believe that Sunak opted to go now because this was about as good as it was going to get.
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A new YouGov poll forThe Times taken since the election was called has Labour on 44 points and the Tories on 22 – three points down since the start of the week. Reform,the popular party targeting the Conservatives’ right flank,is up two points on 14 per cent despiteBrexiteer Nigel Farage’s decision to rule himself out of the campaign.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer,still relatively unknown to the public,cautiously backed the creation of a Palestinian state in a round of media interviews but stopped short of saying whether a Labour government would follow the examples ofSpain,Ireland and Norway in recognising Palestine immediately.
Speaking on the BBC,Starmer said:“I absolutely believe in it... we need a viable Palestinian state as well as a safe and secure Israel”.
Labour has attempted to straddle the divide on the issue in recent months,with wounds still raw from the antisemitism crisis under Starmer’s predecessor Jeremy Corbyn.
In a day of high drama,Corbyn was finally expelled from the Labour Party after announcing his intention to stand as an independent candidate in his long-time seat of Islington North.
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