UK general election live: Sunak was ‘bullied’ into taking action over betting scandal, says Starmer in final debate

Kevin Hollinrake, the business minister, has revealed that he put a bet on the Tories winning the general election. As Eleni Courea reports, Hollinrake told LBC the odds were 9:1 and, although he said people might think the bet was foolhardy, he argued: “Victory is always possible if you don’t stop fighting.”

Sadly for the Tories, there is no suggestion that Hollinrake was privy to any inside information that made this bet a wise choice.

More in Common poll suggests Starmer won BBC debate, by 56% to 44%

Andrew Sparrow

Good morning. I’m Andrew Sparrow, taking over from Helen Sullivan.

As reported earlier, a YouGov snap poll, released almost immediately after last night’s BBC debate was over, said viewers felt it was a dead heat. Asked who did best, the result was 50/50.

But later in the evening More in Common released polling suggesting Starmer was seen as the winner, by 56% to 44%. These are from Luke Tryl, More in Common’s UK director.

Who won tonight’s debate? @Moreincommon_ snap poll finds 44% saying Rishi Sunak and 56% say Keir Starmer

But some good news for Rishi Sunak, people were slightly more likely to say that he did better than they expected than said the same about Keir Starmer.

Impossible to know how much is partisan lean and how much is objective judgement of performance, but one crude comparison with general public’s choice of preferred PM shows Sunak outperforming that on “won the debate” by 8 points and Starmer under by 8.

A similar pattern emerged after the ITV debate near the start of the campaign. The immediate YouGov poll had Sunak as the winner, but only just, by 51% to 49%. But a subsequent Savanta poll had Starmer as the winner by 44% to 39% (or 53% to 37%, if don’t knows are excluded).

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According to MRP models, the Conservatives will win about 50 seats at next week’s election. Then again, some pollsters using the same method believe they are heading for closer to 200 seats. The same models show Labour heading for somewhere between 375 and more than 500 seats.

One reason for the huge variation in seat predictions is that people are preparing to vote tactically in historic numbers, encouraged by two opposition parties that have all but abandoned campaigning in each other’s target constituencies.

A poll by Ipsos on Wednesday showed that nearly one in five voters say they are planning to vote for a certain party not because they support it but because it is the one most likely to defeat the Conservatives where they are. That is more than any other general election campaign on record, when the numbers doing so tend to be between 10 and 12%.

Keiran Pedley, a pollster at Ipsos, said: “Tactical voting is set to be more widespread than normal, which is why the Conservatives are doing so badly in some seat projections. If you want to predict the scale of the Conservative defeat, you have to understand the impact of tactical voting.”

Kiran Stacey and Aletha Adu report:

Labour’s shadow education secretary said she did not support David Tennant’s comments after the actor told equalities minister Kemi Badenoch to “shut up” in a row over trans rights.

Bridget Phillipson told Times Radio:

I personally don’t like that kind of language that was used.

And I believe that where we discus these issues – and it is right that we can have an open discussion about them – that we do so in a way that is absolutely frank but respectful, tolerant, and in keeping with the best traditions within our country.

And I know that politicians, particularly female politicians, receive an awful lot of abuse sometimes and do frequently face that kind of language being used against them and I don’t think it advances a more tolerant and respectful discussion.”

Business minister Kevin Hollinrake says the timing of the latest junior doctors’ strike is “interesting”.

Asked whether striking in the final week of an election campaign was “deliberately provocative”, Hollinrake told Sky News:

It’s interesting timing, it really is. There’s not been a strike for some time.

I don’t know, I’m not going to judge somebody’s motivation for a decision but it’s interesting timing and I regret the decision to strike because we know this doesn’t help waiting lists, which we want to bring down.”

Labour strives to reconnect with disengaged voters

Daniel Boffey

Even during a general election campaign with projections of historic – even unprecedented – results, people cannot always be relied upon to give their full attention.

“We met a guy who said he was going to vote Labour but wouldn’t now because he had just heard that we were taxing condoms,” said Labour’s Karl Turner, who was first voted in as the MP for Hull East in 2010 and is standing for re-election this time.

“I said, ‘condoms?’ ‘Yeah,’ he said: ‘I just heard on that [pointing to the TV] that you are taxing condoms, and I’m not having it. You’re not getting my vote.’ It was Terence [Turner’s parliamentary assistant] here who worked it out.

“‘We’re taxing non-doms, not condoms,’ I said. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Like the prime minister’s wife? Ah.’ He calls out: ‘Margaret: they’re taxing non-doms, not condoms.’”

It was one vote saved for Labour in East Yorkshire – but as the general election moves from what observers have described as the “air war”, where messaging is all-important, to the “ground war”, where mobilising the voters to actually visit the ballot box is key, it is the significant tranche of voters who have entirely switched off that worries Turner.

Hull East was the only constituency at the last general election where under half (49.3%) of the electorate turned out to vote. Within Turner’s constituency is the ward of Marfleet, which has a strong claim to be the most politically disillusioned place in Britain. Turnout was 11.6% in the last local elections.

Disillusionment and distrust when it comes to politics and politicians is a UK-wide phenomenon, and is strong in Hull East.

Last night’s debate: snap verdict

Andrew Sparrow

At the start of the election, the Tories said Rishi Sunak wanted to debate Keir Starmer every week for all six weeks. It was a daft proposal that was never going to be accepted, and at time it felt like a clumsy ploy to make Starmer looked scared when he said no. After tonight, you start to wonder whether there were people in CCHQ who genuinely felt that, with a campaign entirely focused on debates, Sunak might actually have turned things around a bit.

That is because, when the history of Labour’s election-winning campaign gets written up, the two head-to-head debates will stand out as Sunak’s best moments. Almost nothing else has gone right for him. But in the first debate he used a (fairly spurious) tax claim to keep Starmer on the defensive for the whole encounter, and tonight he was just as persistent and unrelenting. In some of the policy areas, like small boats and welfare, he was clearly winning the argument on points. And in terms of landing his message, he was probably more successful than Starmer too – even though, with the constant references to “surrender”, his message has become more alarmist and hysterical than when the election started.

And while technically the YouGov snap poll is a draw, the YouGov sample is weighted (not like the studio audience, which being 50/50 Labour/Tory, was in reality disproportionately Tory) and so if Sunak is drawing neck-and-neck with Starmer, in relative terms he is doing well. Debate snap polls often just reflect how the public feel about leaders generally, and on all those normal measures Sunak and his party are miles behind.

There are two caveats. While Sunak may have done well in terms of scoring debating points, he sounded increasingly like the sort of oddball that you would least want to be standing next to at a party. When he seemed nervous, or was facing challenge, his speaking rate starting speeding out and he began to get shouty and a bit monomaniac. Even if he had a point, it was not endearing.

And the other caveat, of course, is that it is too late for any of this to make any difference – which may be why there was a thread of desperation running through the Sunak performance.

If Sunak won on policy, Starmer won, very easily, on demeanour. He was more effective than he was in the first debate at pushing back at Sunak’s propagandist claims, and he delivered what was probably the best put-down of the night: Starmer said if Sunak listened to people around the country, he would not be so out of touch. He was not afraid to accuse Sunak of lying, but he managed to come over as less petty than his opponent, and more authoritative and likable.

Sunak may have won in that he outperformed expectations. But Starmer presented as the next prime minister, and all he needed was a draw anyway; in that sense it was a win for him too.