General election live: Nigel Farage trying to destroy Tory party, says David Cameron

As Nigel Farage swaggered into a Chelsea townhouse on Wednesday night for the biggest Donald Trump fundraiser this side of the Atlantic, he was ebullient about the night ahead. “It’s a Holly party – you can guarantee it’s going to be enormous fun,” he told reporters.

The Holly in question, the former actor and pop star Holly Valance, has rapidly risen to become radical-right royalty.

Valance, 41, and her property tycoon husband, Nick Candy, 51, are increasingly influential in British and American politics. The couple’s recent social life reads like a Who’s Who of the populist right. They have stayed with Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort, attended Liz Truss’s “PopCon” convention for rightwing conservatives and made frequent visits with close friends Boris and Carrie Johnson.

Valance is credited with encouraging Farage to stand for MP and said she had been “whispering in his ear for a long time”.

British audiences were first introduced to Valance as a teenager when she played the right-on schoolgirl Felicity “Flick” Scully in the Australian soap opera Neighbours. The character’s friends thought she would end up working for Amnesty and she was said to be “too busy saving the world to have hobbies”.

Valance’s politics are a little different. At PopCon in February, she told GB News: “Everyone starts off as a lefty and then wakes up at some point” and realises “what crap ideas they all are”. In the same interview, she said of Jacob Rees-Mogg: “Jacob for PM.”

You can read more on this story by Ben Quinn and Emily Dugan here:

The Guardian’s senior political correspondent, Peter Walker, has put together a very handy guide to what each party promises voters in its UK general election manifesto.

You can see how Labour, the Conservatives, Lib Dems, Greens and Plaid Cymru compare on key issues, such as health, economy, environment, education, immigration, housing and policing, here:

In an interview with the Times, the foreign secretary, David Cameron, has said that Nigel Farage is trying to destroy the Conservatives and has criticised his “inflammatory language” on migration.

Cameron told the Times:

He [Farage] is currently trying to destroy the Conservative party by standing for Reform. I want to be as sure as we can that we get no Reform members of parliament and the Conservative party can move forward.”

In the interview, published on Friday, Cameron objected to Farage’s “inflammatory” rhetoric on migration. While immigration is an “important issue”, Cameron said the Conservatives don’t want the “incredibly divisive” approach Farage brings to the topic.

“I think with these populists what you get is inflammatory language and hopeless policy,” Cameron told the Times. He also warned that a vote for Reform or any other party would make “Britain less safe”.

Cameron said:

I see these twin issues of security and prosperity as absolutely key to this election. And I think only the Conservatives have got the sort of plan and the team and the leadership to properly tackle them. Voting for anything else, I think, will make Britain less safe.”

Questioned by the Times about comments Farage had made that Rishi Sunak “doesn’t understand our culture”, Cameron responded: “You don’t have to watch sheepdog trials to hear a dog whistle.”

Labour candidate Rosie Duffield has announced she has withdrawn from hustings events due to safety concerns.

In a statement posted on X, Duffield said she had made “the extremely difficult decision not to attend local hustings events during this general election campaign”. She said a “few fixated individuals” had now made her attendance at husting events “impossible”.

Duffield, who hopes to be re-elected in the Canterbury constituency, blamed “constant trolling, spite and misrepresentation from certain people”, which she said was “being pursued with a new vigour during this election”.

Duffield said the trolling has been affecting her sense of security and wellbeing.

In the statement, Duffield said that although she had withdrawn from local hustings events, she would still be holding “several secure local events” in the coming weeks so that constituents could put their questions to her.

Shadow work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall has defended Labour’s claim that NHS waiting lists could rise to 10 million despite a thinktank saying that was “highly unlikely”.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) economist Max Warner has said that Labour’s claim that NHS waiting lists would hit 10 million under the Conservatives was “highly unlikely” and their manifesto “provides no detail about the overall funding the NHS will receive in the next parliament”.

Responding to the IFS’ criticism, Kendall told Sky News:

We’re saying that if there’s another five years of the Conservatives, you could see 10 million people waiting in pain or feeling they have to try and pay to go private to deal with their problem.”

She said it was a “reasonable assumption” that was based on what had already happened under the Conservatives and “if the trend continues in the future, as it has done in the past, that’s what we’re likely to see”. The Tories have dismissed the Labour attack as “scaremongering”.

Rishi Sunak has committed to staying on as an MP for the full five-year term if the Conservative party loses the general election.

Speaking to journalists in Puglia, Italy, where he is attending the G7 summit, the prime minister said he intended to serve a full parliamentary term regardless of the overall result on 4 July.

Asked whether he would stay in the Commons for the next five years as prime minister if the Tory party won, or as an opposition MP if it lost, Sunak said: “Yes and yes.”

The Conservatives are languishing 20 points behind Labour in opinion polls and are widely expected to lose the election in less than three weeks’ time.

Despite his repeated and frustrated denials, there has been speculation in Westminster that Sunak will leave politics if the Conservatives lose, and move with his family to California. He met his wife, Akshata Murty, at Stanford University and the couple still own an apartment in Santa Monica.

Last month, Sunak said the claims were “simply not true”, after Zac Goldsmith, a Tory peer and ally of Boris Johnson, claimed he would “disappear off to California” if he lost.

Veterans minister Johnny Mercer acknowledged the Tory campaign had been “up and down” but warned voters against giving Labour “unchecked” power, reports the PA news agency.

On Sky News he said:

This election is tough, right? And it was always going to be tough after 14 years in power, and clearly the campaign’s been up and down as well.

But I don’t see those polls reflected on the doorsteps. I think people are focusing in and as we get closer to that election, they’re really starting to see that clear choice, if you like, between [Keir] Starmer, who every time he goes on TV just refuses to rule out serious things like capital gains tax, like he did last night, and Conservatives, who are dealing with a tricky situation, but actually if you look at the manifesto, there’s a real bold plan there.”

In a message to would-be supporters of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK he said:

If you vote for Reform, you’re going to get a Labour government, you’ll get unchecked power from a Labour government to come in and change the face of this country into something that I don’t believe it is, I don’t think it is a left-wing country.”

Conservative leadership hopefuls are already lobbying for support to take over from Rishi Sunak amid widespread fears the party is heading for a disastrous defeat on 4 July, the Guardian has learned.

The manoeuvring comes as one poll put the Conservatives behind Reform UK for the first time, on 18%; a position that would lead to a historic wipeout for the Tories at next month’s election.

The Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, claimed on Friday the poll showed he was now in effect the leader of the opposition, though that job is likely to fall to one of up to a dozen senior Conservatives after the election.

The early favourites for leader include former secretaries of state Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch, Penny Mordaunt and Grant Shapps. Several of those, however, are fighting to retain their seats, leaving their contention highly uncertain.

One Tory adviser said: “There is quite a bit of manoeuvring going on already. Members of the cabinet are texting candidates regularly just to ‘check in’, while others are already lining up their leadership teams.”

They added: “It can be quite annoying – sometimes you wish they would focus more on the general election campaign.”

A senior party member said: “There is a sense now that a Labour victory is inevitable. We went into the campaign hoping for a hung parliament, but now the central assumption is we are trying to minimise their majority.”

You can read the full piece by Kiran Stacey and Rowena Mason here:

Good morning, and welcome to our continued coverage of the 2024 general election campaign.

Rishi Sunak has committed to staying on as an MP for the full five-year term if the Conservative party loses the general election.

Speaking to journalists in Puglia, Italy, where he was attending the G7 summit, the prime minister said he intended to serve a full parliamentary term regardless of the overall result on 4 July.

Meanwhile, Tory leadership hopefuls are already lobbying for support to take over from Sunak, the Guardian has learned.

With three weeks to go before the general election, candidates and advisers had begun lining up behind their preferred contenders, sources said, with some Tory campaigners complaining they were being inundated with messages from potential leaders.

The manoeuvring comes as one poll put the Conservatives behind Reform UK for the first time, on 18%; a position that would lead to a historic wipeout for the Tories at next month’s election.

In other news, here are some of the events we can expect politicians to be attending today, according to the PA news agency:

• Prime minister Rishi Sunak will be attending the trooping the colour to celebrate the official birthday of King Charles.

• Later in the day Sunak will be jetting off as he is billed to attend a Ukraine peace summit at a lakeside resort in Switzerland. He will be joined by the foreign secretary, David Cameron, at the event that will be hosted by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

• Labour leader Keir Stamer will join shadow health secretary Wes Streeting, in the East Midlands to discuss Labour’s plans to clear the NHS backlog, with 40,000 extra appointments a week at evenings and weekends.

• Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey will be on the campaign trail in Surrey as he continues his party efforts to chip away at the “blue wall”, a collection of typically safe Conservative seats in southern England. Davey has pledged to scrap elected police and crime commissioners (PCC) to unlock money which he says could bolster frontline policing.

• Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar and deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner will be on campaign visit in Livingston.

• Deputy Scottish Conservative leader Meghan Gallacher will be joined by the party’s candidate for the Argyll, Bute and South Lochaber seat, Amanda Hampsey, on the campaign trail today. They will be showing their support for the UK’s nuclear deterrent.

• Deputy first minister Kate Forbes will be on the campaign trail with the SNP candidate for Hamilton and Clyde Valley, Ross Clark. Forbes will join the local candidate at DFDS Logistics in Larkhall.

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