A Tory minister has been forced to deny that Rishi Sunak will resign before the general election amid the row over his D-Day snub.
The prime minister is under mounting pressure following his decision to leave Normandy early during the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Allied invasion of mainland Europe during World War 2.
Sunak cancelled media interviews yesterday – a virtually unprecedented move during an election campaign – as the row continued.
That led to speculation that the PM might even quit in order to try to prevent a Conservative wipeout on July 4.
Former cabinet minister Nadine Dorries last night posted on X (formerly Twitter): “Rumours around tonight that Sunak’s about to fall on his sword.”
On Sky News this morning, work and pensions secretary was sent out to defend Sunak, despite admitting he had not spoken to him since the D-day row broke.
Presenter Trevor Phillips asked him: “Would it not be a courageous and moral act for him to announce that he knows he is leading his party to defeat, partly because of his own actions and his own shortcomings, and that he will not step aside to save seats which won’t be saved if he stays for the next four weeks?
“Is he going to lead you into this election?”
Stride replied: “Absolutely, and there should be no question of anything other than that because what matters now is there’s a clear choice for the British people.”
Colburn, who is fighting to retain the Carshalton and Wallington seat he won as a Tory in 2019, made his feelings clear by responding to the Conservatives’ official account on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday.
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The Conservatives posted: “We know what a woman is. Keir Starmer doesn’t.”
Colburn replied: “Here we go again, wondered how long it would take.”
His comments will likely frustrate those in CCHQ considering the party is attempting to promote its plans to alter the Equality Act today.
If the Conservatives are re-elected, they have promised to allow organisations to ban transgender women from entering single-sex spaces and to rewrite the definition of sex to be confined to biological sex.
The Tories have tried to turn trans rights into a wedge issue by repeatedly claiming Keir Starmer has been unclear when it comes to defining sex.
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The Labour leader hardened his stance last summer by condemning gender self-identification and claiming a woman is an “adult female”.
Tory candidate Colburn has pleaded with his party in the past to stop “demonising trans people”.
Last October, while speaking at a fringer event at the party’s conference in Manchester, he said; “I want to make one thing perfectly clear to our Conservative colleagues. We will not win the next general election fighting with the LGBT+ community.
“I do not meet people on the doorsteps that say: ‘you know what, I am struggling with the most of living right now, my mortgage has gone up, I am worried about heating this winter, but I will forget all of that, as long as you stop trans people playing sport’. No one is saying that to me.”
He added: “The Conservative Party has come so far.
“We are the party that was responsible for Section 28. We have rightly apologised for that. We have tried so hard. David Cameron in particular tried to detoxify this party.
“We have to drop this hardcore rhetoric and we have to drop it now.”
Rishi Sunak vowed at the start of 2023 to cut NHS waiting lists – but he admitted only in February that his government has failed with that pledge.
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On Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC host presented Atkins with a graph showing just how much waiting times have actually increased since the Conservatives took over in 2010.
It shows that even before Covid and before the NHS strikes, the waiting lists for hospital treatment in England were already rising.
Kuenssberg’s chart showing how waiting times for hospital treatment in England have increased
Kuenssberg said: “As our viewers can see, since the Conservatives have been in charge, waiting lists have gone up and up and up.
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“Are you proud of that?
“Because to many of our viewers, everybody knows in their real life somebody who is waiting, somebody who is in pain.”
The health secretary replied by saying how Covid made waiting times worse, but Kuenssberg hit back: “This was happening before the pandemic!”
The BBC journalist added: “The point is people do not feel reassured by statistics.
“They feel upset that they are waiting longer.
“They feel upset that over a year of many years, many believe the level of healthcare that they can expect to get has declined despite record amounts of cash going in.”
Kuenssberg also pressed the health secretary over GP services and pharmacies.
She said: “Today you’re announcing 100 new GP surgeries.
“But we’ve checked the figures and you’ve shut 450 since 2013, so aren’t you trying to fix your own mistakes?”
Atkins said that government is funding new GP surgeries, refurbishing 150 others and expanding pharmacy services to free up doctor appointments.
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But Kuenssberg noted that funding for pharmacies is down a third on 2015 and more than 1,000 of them have shut.
She continued: “In both of these cases, it might be all very well that you’re promising this now but I think it’s going to sound to a lot of people like you’re just trying to unpick the mistakes the Tories have already made.”
She claimed that the Tories are replacing services in the UK which have “disappeared” and added: “Voters know that, they see that in their own communities, so why should they trust the promises you’re making to them now?”
The minister said the Tories have already exceeded their target from the 2019 general election with 62 million GP appointments made in the last year.
Kuenssberg then cornered the minister over Boris Johnson’s previous promise to open 40 new hospitals.
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The journalist said only 11 of them would be deemed new hospitals, and only a handful of those have actually opened.
She added: “So why would people believe your promises now when that huge promise that Boris Johnson used to get the crowd to chant, that has not been kept?”
Atkins replied: “That promise was made in 2019, the pandemic hit us pretty much immediately after that.”
She added that they got building as soon as they could, with 18 currently in construction.
According to the Best for Britain’s Scandalous Spending Tracker – which monitors suspect government spending – the government has spent more £6 billion of that total in just the last two months.
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The news, first reported by The Mirror, is yet another blow for Rishi Sunak because he has been at the top of government for the majority of last four years.
He served as chancellor between February 2020 and July 2022, and has been prime minister since October 2022 – amid a cost of living crisis, no less.
Some of this wasteful spending includes the £32,000 bill the taxpayer paid to cover the legal costs after the science secretary, Michelle Donelan, wrongly accused an academic of being a Hamas sympathiser.
The government also spent £33 million on delaying the general election by two months.
Brexit checks brought in at the end of April, meanwhile, cost £4.7 billion.
Best for Britain calculated that the Tories have wasted, on average, £26 billion per year since being re-elected in 2019.
That is 30 times the estimated cost of the Liberal Democrats’ proposal to increase GP appointments, said to cost £800 million per year, and more than the total cost of the Green Party’s plan to insulate 10 million homes, said to cost £25 billion per year.
All that wasted cash from the last few years is also enough money to carry out Keir Starmer’s six key pledges more than five times.
Chief executive of Best for Britain, Naomi Smith, and founder of tactical voting website, GetVoting.org, said: “Rishi Sunak has presided over years of delinquent government spending and while his reign of egregious waste may soon be over, we cannot risk the Tories getting their hands back in the public piggy bank in five years time.
“That’s why we’re asking people to vote tactically at the next election and get it right with GetVoting.org.”
The Tories are heading for wipeout after a new mega poll predicted they are on course to win just 66 seats at next month’s general election.
The survey of more than 10,000 people suggests Keir Starmer is on course for power with a Commons majority of 336.
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Among the big-name Tories who would lose their seats are deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden, home secretary James Cleverly and defence secretary Grant Shapps.
According to the poll, by Electoral Calculus and Find Out Now for GB News and the Daily Mail, Labour is on 46% – a staggering 27 points ahead of the Conservatives, who are on just 19%.
Converted into seats, that would leave Labour on 493 – nearly 300 more than they won at the 2019 election.
The Tories would plummet to just 66 seats, leaving them with just seven more MPs than the Lib Dems on 59.
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The SNP is also on course for a bad night, dropping more than 20 seats to 26.
Electoral Calculus said: “Our figures indicate a substantial Labour landslide, with Keir Starmer gaining a majority of over 300 seats at Westminster.
“The Conservatives would have fewer than 100 seats. They would be the official opposition, but they would have less than half of the opposition MPs – 72 out of 157.”
The result would be even better than Tony Blair achieved in the New Labour landslide of 1997, when the party won 419 seats.
By contrast, the Tories would suffer their worst result since at least 1900.
Other cabinet members on course to lose their seats are potential leadership contenders Penny Mordaunt and Kemi Badenoch, as well as Claire Coutinho, Mel Stride, Gillian Keegan and Mark Harper.
It is perhaps fitting that the Conservative Party is ending this parliament just as it has spent much of the previous five years: bitterly divided.
Reactions to Rishi Sunak’s shock decision to call a snap election range from astonishment to anger to grim resignation.
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“No one sees the reason for the rush and feel like he has lost the plot,” one senior Tory told HuffPost UK. “None of us are ready for this.”
Support was also far from unanimous as the prime minister told his cabinet on Wednesday afternoon that he had decided to go to the country on July 4.
But the PM’s mind was made up, despite the fact that Labour remain 20 points ahead in the opinion polls and election experts all agree that the Tories are heading for a historic defeat.
One minister said most Tory MPs are simply resigned to their fate, and hit out at his malcontented colleagues.
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He said: “In the tearoom I see cheerful stoicism all round. I suppose the whingers are the ones who prefer a leadership contest to a general election.”
Another MP was happily laying bets that the Conservatives will still emerge as the largest party in the Commons.
“I’m glad the phoney war is finally over and we can get on with the election,” the MP said. “We will fight for every vote.”
A senior Tory aide summed up the schizophrenic nature of MPs’ response to Sunak opting for a summer poll.
“A week ago they all wanted it over and done with and now they are furious it hasn’t gone longer,” he said. “I strongly suspect vast majority are resigned to fate and don’t feel that strongly about it.”
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The sight of a bedraggled Sunak announcing the election date in the pouring rain outside No.10 has summed up the Tory campaign so far.
That gaffe was further compounded on Friday when the PM inexplicably visited Belfast’s Titanic Quarter, thereby linking him in voters’ minds with the world’s most famous sinking ship.
Nevertheless, Tory bosses want to run a presidential campaign, urging voters to stick with the man who bankrolled the government’s response to the pandemic rather than take a risk with the untried Keir Starmer.
The problem with that approach, however, is that voters already seem to have decided that they want Sunak and the rest of his government ejected from office as soon as possible.
Chris Hopkins, political research director at pollsters Savanta, said: “The prime minister already had a mountain to climb in this election, with a massive polling deficit and Labour leading them on every policy issue.
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“On top of this, Sunak himself is hugely unpopular with the public, and based on our research, so are his most senior ministers.”
Polling done by the More in Common think-tank in the wake of the election announcement, shared exclusively with HuffPost UK, shows that only 29% of voters see Sunak as an asset to his party, compared to 46% who don’t.
Jenna Cunningham, More in Common’s research and data analyst, said: “There’s no doubt that Rishi Sunak was a popular Chancellor, especially after the furlough scheme, but questions remain about the effectiveness of the current presidential campaign strategy when only three in ten voters think he is an asset to the Conservative Party.
The general feeling among senior Labour figures is one of bafflement at Sunak’s decision to call an election now rather than wait until the autumn.
“I don’t understand the logic,” one adviser to Starmer told HuffPost UK. “If he’d gone for May he could at least have masked the local election results. Summer seems to be the worst of all worlds for them.
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“It could be that the economic conditions are much worse than they thought they were and Rwanda isn’t going to work as well, so he’s decided they couldn’t hang on any longer. But you can see why Tory MPs are furious about it.”
One word we are all going to be sick of hearing over the next six weeks is “change”. It was on Starmer’s lectern as he responded to the PM’s announcement and will be emblazoned on thousands of Labour posters on the run-up to polling day.
Labour want voters to think that only Keir Starmer represents “change”.
Gareth Fuller – PA Images via Getty Images
“It’s very important that voters know that the only way to end the chaos of the last 14 years is to vote Labour,” said one party stretegist.
“The fact that the Tory campaign has so far been so chaotic – his ludicrous speech in the pouring rain and their MPs all saying he shouldn’t be doing it – just helps us to reinforce that message.”
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At the moment, Labour’s main opponent seems to be complacency.
“We’re going to fight this campaign as if it’s still neck and neck,” said one insider. “We will be fighting to win day by day, week by week
Rishi Sunak’s bold decision to call a general election in the middle of yesterday’s downpour has opened the floodgates on social media.
The prime minister stood outside No.10 Downing Street, in the pouring rain, and declared a general election would be held on July 4.
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He then immediately tried to rally voters with a few digs at Labour over the party’s campaigns and policies.
But, no one really focused on that. Most of the attention was on Sunak’s suit, which became completely sodden within minutes.
While all the journalists there to capture the historic moment were sensibly wearing coats or carrying umbrellas, the PM’s bizarre decision to go without for such a pivotal moment, has been demolished by everyone, including today’s newspapers.
Protesters also blared Labour’s 1997 election theme tune – D:Ream’s Things Will Only Get Better – throughout the PM’s speech.
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And so critics were quick to coin the phrase “Things Will Only Get Wetter” in a scathing take on Sunak’s announcement.
Considering the Conservatives are around 20 points behind Labour in the opinion polls right now, the image of a downtrodden Sunak standing in the rain was seen as an apt metaphor by many people on social media.
Others pointed out that the Conservatives actually set up an expensive press conference room within No.10, which is warm, dry and available to use.
Either way, the impact that image of a soaked Sunak has had among his online critics – and the newspapers – is clearly significant.
Here’s a round-up of social media’s best jokes about the embarrassing PR gaffe…
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I wonder if he thought addressing the nation in the rain, facing down the elements, would make him look heroic. But to do so you have to be wearing something from Game Of Thrones, not a Henry Herbert suit.
its how the speaker playing “things can only get better” during todays speech had an umbrella and rishi sunak didn’t. just pure comedy, chaos and shambles. pic.twitter.com/GvkYUxDi9q
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Gullis eating soup with a fork. I watched Braverman try to deport a sofa. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain… Time to die.” pic.twitter.com/6Uzq14BcRa
The Conservatives have been torn apart by a Labour MP after thousands were impacted by a parasite in their water supply last week.
Approximately 16,000 households and businesses in Brixham, Devon, have been urged to boil their water before use after traces of cryptosporidium were found and some people were hospitalised with the bug.
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South West Water has promised to pay £3.5m in compensation to customers impacted by the diarrhoea-inducing parasite – but others are still holding the government responsible.
Speaking in the Commons on Monday, shadow minister Emma Hardy said: “Another day, another example of the depths of failure that this government have taken us.
“I cannot believe that I am about to say this, but after 14 long years of Conservative rule, in 21st Century Britain, our water is no longer safer to drink.
“The government will of course be flailing around, desperate for someone else to blame, but this crisis is theirs.”
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She called for the government to take responsibility for the ongoing issue, blaming them for weakening regulations around the UK’s Victorian-era sewage system.
“They turned a blind eye and left water companies to illegally pump a tidal wave of raw sewage into our rivers, lakes and seas,” Hardy said.
She said: “Is this an example of their plan working? Is this what they think success looks like? And now this, the icing on the cake of failure – a parasite outbreak in Brixham, with South West Water?”
More than 100 people have reported symptoms and two others, including a 13-year-old boy, have been admitted to hospital.
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“This is appalling. Enough is enough,” Hardy said.
She called for the government to put the water companies under special regulations, to make law-breaking bosses face criminal charges and for company bonuses to stop until the crisis is addressed.
Emma Hardy: ” I cannot believe that I’m about to say this, but after 14 long years of Tory rule, in 21st century Britain, our water is no longer safe to drink… is this what they think success looks like…” pic.twitter.com/hchNRpwTEA
Concerns about the cleanliness of UK water has been a pressing concern for some years now.
According to Surfers Against Sewage, there were more than 584,000 discharges of raw sewage into UK waterways last year alone – and 75% of UK rivers pose a serious risk to human health.
The shadow health secretary said that although he personally opposed the policy, he could not promise that an incoming Labour government would end it.
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The two-child cap was brought in by the Tories as part of their efforts to slash the welfare bill.
It means that families only receive Universal Credit or child tax credit payments for the first two children they have.
Welby told The Observer: “The two-child limit falls short of our values as a society. It denies the truth that all children are of equal and immeasurable worth, and will have an impact on their long-term health, wellbeing and educational outcomes.
“Shamefully, children from ethnic minorities and homes where someone is disabled are most affected.
“Children should grow up in families and households where they can flourish and be supported to find their place in the world. Yet the two-child limit prevents many from accessing the resources they need.
“This cruel policy is neither moral nor necessary. We are a country that can and should provide for those most in need, following the example of Jesus Christ, who served the poorest in society. As a meaningful step towards ending poverty, and recognising the growing concern across the political spectrum, I urge all parties to commit to abolishing the two-child limit.”
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Appearing on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips on Sky News this morning, Streeting said he “really welcomed” the Archbishop’s intervention, but could not commit to agreeing to his request.
He said: “One of the consequences of the Conservatives’ disastrous handling of the economy is the public finances are in a mess and there are harder choices to make.
“So unless and until I can sit on your programme and say we will do X by funding it through Y, that’s not a commitment I’m able to make today.”
Streeting added: “I voted against the two child limit, so by definition, I wish it wasn’t there. But as we’ve seen across the board, it’s a lot easier to get rid of stuff that is to put stuff back.
“And that’s the frustrating thing about the vandalism we’ve seen through 14 years of conservative government.”
