At least half of the steel used in Britain should be made in the country, the government has said as it launched its new strategy for the struggling industry.

This is a “watershed moment”, said Sky News, and, in “economic and historical terms”, it’s “dynamite”.

What are they?

The strategy is an attempt to save Britain’s beleaguered steelmakers. At its heart is a new tariff on many steel imports and a reform of quotas on those imports. Imported steel quotas will be reduced by 60% and anything brought in above that level will be subject to a 50% tariff, said the Department for Business and Trade.

The government’s “ambition” is to raise the proportion of domestically produced steel to 50%, from its current record low of 30%.

Up to £2.5 billion will be given to steel producers that have effectively been nationalised and to support private steelmakers around the UK in their quest to produce lower carbon metal.

Why are the tariffs so important?

This is a “significant” moment, said Sky News, because these are “probably the biggest increases” in trade barriers imposed by a British government in “at least a generation”.

Other countries, “most glaringly” America under Donald Trump, have raised many of their tariff barriers, but Britain had “held firm”. For many ministers it was a “matter of national pride”, because they “felt that to raise tariffs, even in an environment where everyone else was, would be an abomination”. But now Britain is “dipping its toes into the waters of protectionism”.

Will they work?

A leading HS2 contractor has warned that raising tariffs on foreign steel imports will “exacerbate” cost pressures for the UK construction industry. Mark Reynolds, chair of construction company Mace, told The Guardian that with energy costs rising and an already depressed construction sector, the move is “ill-timed and unhelpful”.

But Gareth Stace, director general of UK Steel, said this was a “crucial moment” because “with global markets distorted by overcapacity and subsidy, a clear and ambitious domestic strategy is exactly what is required to ensure steelmaking not only survives in the UK but thrives”.

The Conservatives’ shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith described the measure as “red tape” and said that raising the cost of imported steel “means more cost for the construction industry, less infrastructure investment and is a further blow to the diminishing number of firms making things in the UK”.

The government’s approach to the industry has “always looked like a cross between inveterate, unshakeable optimism and the panicked thrashings of a drowning man clutching for a flotation aid”, said Eliot Wilson on CapX.

The tariffs are “not so much a strategy as a sticking plaster”. If the UK’s steel sector is “unable to compete on the world stage” we shouldn’t have a policy of “allowing it to survive financially” without “some notion of the limits of that”.

High drama continues in Westminster, as Keir Starmer ordered the release of files relating to his government’s appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador.

Mandelson was sacked from his US posting last September after emails emerged showing him continuing his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein as the American faced charges of soliciting a minor. This week, newly released Epstein files revealed that, when Mandelson was business secretary in 2008, he leaked Downing Street emails containing market-sensitive information to Epstein. The Metropolitan Police has formally launched a criminal investigation.

These latest revelations have left many Labour figures “seething with disappointment and boiling with betrayal”, said the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason. The “gravity of what is alleged” could build “to perhaps one of the biggest” political scandals “for a generation”, and calls into question Starmer’s judgement in sending Mandelson to Washington a year ago.

What is in the files?

Starmer has said he will release emails, documents and messages relating to Mandelson’s appointment – as long as they do not prejudice national security or damage diplomatic relations. The decision pre-empts the Conservatives’ plan to use a House of Commons debate today to try to force the publication of the records, including details of what Mandelson told the prime minister and his powerful chief of staff Morgan McSweeney about the nature of his relationship with Epstein.

“Attention will turn swiftly” now to that proviso for exempting documents and “which ones aren’t in scope”, said Politico. There will no doubt be “debate about whether WhatsApp messages sent on private phones will be included”. And it’s not yet clear “who is in charge of the process” and “which senior officials” have oversight.

The government has signalled its “intention is to be transparent”, while avoiding a situation where every single piece of communication is published, said The Guardian. The documents identified for release will also need to be assessed to check if they first need to be seen by the police. This process will take time and, as has been seen with the release of the Epstein files in the US, will inevitably lead to further political wrangling and accusations of a cover-up. Expect this story to run and run.

What does it mean for Starmer?

With most political scandals, “there is an agreed full stop, a time for the circus to move on” but, for Downing Street, Mandelson “risks being a headache that simply will not end”, said The Guardian’s senior political correspondent Peter Walker. How on earth did “the team around Starmer” think it was such “a good idea to appoint a tarnished, if well connected, figure to be the ambassador to Donald Trump’s court”?

Some Labour MPs are focusing their anger on McSweeney, “a former protégé of Mandelson”, who is believed to have pushed for his appointment as ambassador. But, as we have seen in previous administrations, “changing the team around the leader will buy you only a small amount of time if” most of your backbenchers, “and the electorate more widely”, think that “the problem is not the team but the person they advise”.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting, seen by many as a potential challenger for Starmer’s leadership position, today defended the prime minister’s decision to appoint Mandelson, and rejected the idea that it could cost the PM his job. That would “let Mandelson off the hook”, Streeting told LBC. “This is his misjudgment, his misconduct, his irresponsibility.”

One factor that could play in Starmer’s favour, said Politico, is that he has never got involved with the Labour dinner circuit, like Streeting or McSweeney, and he has never been as close to Mandelson as McSweeney. “You could suggest that the PM has less to lose than others in government if cosy Labour texts to Mandelson end up in the public domain.”

Why is China clearing out its generals? Can the Conservatives win back the centre? And what’s gone wrong with Britain’s hearing aids?

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“The struggle for control of the British right” has taken a “dramatic turn”, said The Economist.

Robert Jenrick’s switch from the Conservative Party to Reform UK is “by far the most significant in a string of recent defections”, coming just 72 hours after Nadhim Zahawi made the same move.

“I am proud to be Reform’s 270,000th member,” said Jenrick in The Telegraph. “Both main parties broke Britain” and “the truth is Britain has been in decline for decades”.

But what does it mean for the party he left behind, the party he has now joined, and all political parties at the next election?

What does it mean for the Tories?

The Conservatives, often called the “most successful political party in the democratic world”, have a genuine fear of being “usurped by Reform UK”, said Henry Zeffman on the BBC. It is “inarguable” that the party is in a “massive mess”, but it will take time to tell whether its leader “triggering this mess was preferable to the alternative”.

Kemi Badenoch’s “swift manoeuvre” to oust Jenrick showed strength of leadership, sending out a message that the “embattled Tory leader is still up for the fight”, said The Economist. “If you squint” you can see her emerging well from this: “unencumbered by a troublesome rival” and with a “freer hand” to shape the party in her own image. Arguably, Jenrick could have been the victim of Badenoch’s growing stock in the party. “Or she might preside over the death of the world’s oldest and most successful political party.”

The Tory leader undoubtedly “projected strength”, but Nigel Farage “had the last laugh”, said Patrick Maguire in The Times. Jenrick’s defection once again raises existential questions for Britain’s oldest political party: should individual MPs “stick or twist”, and should the party “resist or reconcile?”

What does it mean for Reform?

Though bringing a sense of credibility, Jenrick also brings a “different dynamic” to the Reform/Farage “one-man band”, said Stephen Pollard in The Spectator. Not all members of the party will be “offering a welcome mat” to the former shadow justice secretary.

Jenrick’s move could lead to more defections and Farage has set a deadline of 7 May for those considering the move. “Reform has welcomed into its arms a politician who thinks nothing of changing his views overnight and stabbing his colleagues in the back and front,” said Pollard.

We may need to brace for infighting. “To say there is no love lost between Zia Yusuf, Sarah Pochin and others in the upper echelons of Reform and Jenrick” does a disservice to “the levels of pure hate displayed”. Given that representatives in the nascent party are jostling for positions of authority, “is Robert Jenrick really welcome in Reform?”

Reform could now have a leadership pairing similar to that in Washington, said Tom McTague in The New Statesman. “Reform’s latest recruit could be Nigel Farage’s answer to J.D. Vance.” Farage, like Trump, is a “formidable” politician who has captured the attention of the right, guided by “instinctive reactionary populism” rather than ideology. What Jenrick brings is a “project”, or a more “coherent plan” to reinvent the British state, because at the moment “there isn’t one”. Farage, much the same as Trump, may have “found an ideological foil”.

Farage was quick to thank the Tories for handing their “most popular figure” to him “on a plate”, but the jury is out on whether Jenrick will be a “help or a hindrance to Farage”, said the Financial Times.

The image of Reform may change. It could lose its cutting-edge or momentum, and instead become a “receptacle for disillusioned Tories” who are “relics of failed Conservative governments”. Farage will have to sacrifice some of his “decision-making” authority, now having to work “side by side” with a figure who has “made no secret of his desire to one day run the country”.

What does it mean for the right’s electoral prospects?

My defection will help “unite the right”, Jenrick told the BBC, attempting to quash the rumours that the move was motivated by personal ambition.

“In switching allegiances, Jenrick is helping to reshape British politics”, especially for the right, said the FT. Most significantly, he is “redrawing the battle lines over who will lead the right into the next general election”.

Jenrick’s defection “all-but ended the chances of any deal to unite the British right”, said Bloomberg. In all likelihood, this will lead to the “most widely contested” general election in years, as the traditional two-party system falls away. It is now increasingly unlikely that the Tories could “forge a pact with the insurgent Reform Party”, which has since “rapidly eclipsed” them in opinion polls.

Nigel Farage could barely contain his glee on Monday when he unveiled former Tory chancellor Nadhim Zahawi as his latest high-profile recruit to Reform UK.

Things were not always so collegiate between the two men. Farage once described Zahawi as having no principles and only being interested “in climbing the greasy pole”. And, in a now-deleted series of tweets from 2015, Zahawi called Farage’s words “offensive and racist” and said he would be “frightened to live in a country run by” him. And, even as they buried their differences, the defection of yet another senior Tory to the Reform ranks (bringing the total to 22) “is not without risk” for the populist party, said BBC political correspondent Nick Eardley.

‘Creating Conservatives 2.0’

Lack of experience is one of Reform’s “biggest hurdles in looking like a credible party of government”, said The Guardian’s political editor, Pippa Crerar. Farage’s solution clearly is to enlist former Tory ministers but this presents the would-be PM with a quandary: “pack the ranks with too many former Tories and you end up creating Conservative party 2.0, not long after the original version was booted out of office”.

“One of the key reasons people back Reform is because they consider them different to the other parties,” said Charlotte Henry in The Spectator. By welcoming figures so closely associated with the failed governments of the recent past, the “danger” is that Reform “increasingly risks” looking like “a receptacle of Tory rejects, not the upstart movement they try to portray themselves as”.

Tory party faithfuls “point out privately” that adding Zahawi to a list of defectors that includes Nadine Dorries and Jake Berry is making Reform “look awfully like Boris Johnson’s version of the Conservative Party”, said Sam Coates, political editor of Sky News. Or, as one former Tory cabinet minister put it: “same team, new badge”.

‘Outsider appeal’

Farage, in his many incarnations over the years, has carefully cultivated “a brand built on being outside the system”, said Loic Fremond in UnHerd. “But as he inches closer to power, it seems that he has become what he once denounced.” If Reform is to ride its anti-establishment credentials to No. 10, “it cannot rely on Tory defections” to fill its upper echelons or it will lose its “outsider appeal”.

Reform could resolve instead to fill ministerial posts from outside the Commons, forming a US-style Cabinet – an idea that Zia Yusuf, the party’s head of policy, has already suggested. That “would allow Reform to appoint figures from a much wider experience pool, but also provokes questions about parliamentary accountability and democratic norms”, said Ben Riley-Smith, The Telegraph’s political editor.

There are “obviously downsides to this approach”, said Fremond, but “to maintain any credibility as an alternative,” Reform “must demonstrate that it can stand apart from the same failures it claims to oppose”. If it cannot maintain that separation, Farage’s party “risks becoming little more than a repackaged version of the establishment it criticises”.

If 2024 was the year of the Labour landslide, 2025 was the year that the smaller parties were on the rise with potentially huge ramifications for the next election.

Polls say that voters are “deserting Labour and the Tories” so talk of election deals is “becoming more urgent”, said The i Paper. The two main parties are losing supporters to smaller ones like Reform UK and the Green Party, fuelling predictions that tactical voting “may decide the next general election, due in 2029”.

Green Party leader Zack Polanski is among the few apparently willing to formalise a pact. Here are some of the possible options.

Tory-Reform

Nigel Farage has denied claims from unnamed Reform UK donors in the Financial Times that he expects an electoral pact or a merger between his party and the Conservatives before the next general election.

Such a move would represent a historic realignment on the right of British politics, but Farage said he is in fact aiming for a “reverse takeover” of the Conservatives. “A deal with them as they are would cost us votes,” he said.

Kemi Badenoch has also ruled out the idea. But “there are posh Southern seats where Reform can’t win, and working-class seats where the Tories can’t win”, said The Telegraph. While there is unlikely to be any “formal arrangement”, each party “quietly standing aside” in certain constituencies “makes sense”.

Green-Labour

The Greens are eyeing a “pact” with Labour to “shut out Farage”, two senior party officials told Politico. The arrangement, which would “stop short” of a “formal” deal, would be “tapping into tactical voting”. The Greens are “discussing the prospect of informal, local prioritisations of resources so the best-placed progressive challenger can win”.

But Labour is “keen to tamp down talk of working together”. A senior government adviser said Labour is “not even thinking about” working with Polanski. There’s “scepticism” that a “non-aggression deal” would work, because the Greens will be “vying for the kind of urban heartlands Labour can’t afford to back down from”.

Lib Dem-Labour

The Liberal Democrats and Labour have teamed up in the past, in 1903, 1924, 1929 and 1977. The question of them uniting again for a “common national project” has been “asked repeatedly, in various guises and circumstances, for more than 100 years”, said Martin Kettle in The Guardian.

But what about now? Would Lib Dem leader Ed Davey work with Labour? “Everyone knows he would,” said The Independent, but “everyone also knows he can’t say so”.

There are “very few” Commons seats where the two parties “compete directly these days”, said Emma Burnell on Labour List. A “judicious use of resources at the next general election (from both sides) will probably keep it that way".

Nigel Farage reportedly expects an electoral pact or even a merger between Reform UK and the Conservatives before the next general election, a shift which would represent a historic realignment of the right.

A Reform donor said Farage told them that an agreement on cooperation between the two parties could help his party’s path to electoral success, according to the Financial Times. Another associate said that Farage described a pact or merger as “inevitable”, although the party leader said he “felt betrayed after the pact he made with the Tories at the 2019 election”.

“They will have to come together,” the donor said. “The Conservatives have been a successful political party forever because the left was always divided…If the right is divided, it can’t win.”

What did the commentators say?

I have long been sceptical of such a pact, said the newspaper’s Stephen Bush in his Inside Politics newsletter. Farage is a “polarising figure” who could unite the left and centre against him. Reform may be the “stronger party” in the polls, but the Tories have far more MPs – any deal would have to involve a lot of Tory losers, with many serving MPs “shunted out of plum seats”. But talk of a pact is “no longer far-fetched”. Kemi Badenoch’s lacklustre leadership has “made the Tory party such a marginal bit-part player that I am no longer so sure”.

Farage dismissed the accounts of his alleged remarks, telling the FT that “sometimes people hear what they want to”. After next May’s devolved elections and local polls, the Conservatives “will no longer be a national party”, he said. “I would never do a deal with a party that I don’t trust. No deals, just a reverse takeover. A deal with them as they are would cost us votes.”

But even if Reform does as well as current polls suggest, those numbers still wouldn’t give the party a Commons majority, said Sky News’ deputy political editor Sam Coates. Farage would need backing from Tory MPs to get into No. 10. While Badenoch has dismissed the idea, YouGov polling of members before conference season found that 64% supported an electoral pact, and 46% supported a full-blown merger. “The appetite’s there.”

Frankly, there is “already a slow merger going on”, said George Eaton in The New Statesman. Over the past year, 21 current or former Conservative MPs have “defected to Reform” – three this week. Reform’s ratings have also fallen in recent polls, and “waves of tactical voting” saw it lose the Hamilton and Caerphilly by-elections. Under a “more confident” Badenoch, the Tories’ standing is improving. “So is a deal inevitable?” One of Farage’s closest aides told the magazine: “Over my dead body.”

What next?

No pacts or deals will be considered while Badenoch is party leader, a Conservative spokesperson told Sky News. “Reform wants higher welfare spending and to cosy up to Putin.”

Anthony Wells, head of politics and elections at YouGov, told the FT that although Reform was “miles ahead in the polls”, tactical voting by left-leaning voters could block Farage from power. There are also a significant number of Conservative voters who wouldn’t back Farage even if the alternative was Keir Starmer’s Labour. “There are some Tories that really don’t like Reform,” said Wells, “so there will be some leakage from right to left.”

And therein lies “the key point to keep in mind: pact or no pact”, said Eaton. What really matters for the election is “whether the right is more divided than the left”. Labour and the Lib Dems have never needed a pact to “demolish” the Conservatives with progressive tactical voting, such as in 2024. Reform and the Tories don’t need a pact to “do the same to Starmer”.

Net migration in the UK has fallen to its lowest level since 2021 after the “single largest outflow of people in a century as a proportion of the UK population”.

In the year to June, 693,000 people – 1% of the UK’s population – left the country. This was “the highest proportion of the population to leave the UK since 1923”, said The Times.

Overall, net migration stood at 204,000, down by more than two-thirds on the previous year’s 649,000, according to the Office for National Statistics. The provisional figures show 70,000 more EU nationals left the UK than arrived, while 109,000 more British nationals left than arrived.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood spoke last week of the “unprecedented levels of migration in recent years”. “That will now change,” she said. “In fact, it already has,” said The New York Times, but not in the way Mahmood and the government may want, as the “number of people who claimed asylum in the year to September 2025 reached a record high of 110,051”, said the BBC. That figure is more than half of the net migration total.

What did the commentators say?

The Conservatives are “keen to claim credit” for the “sharp fall” in net migration, said Michael Simmons in The Spectator. They say that stronger visa rules and restrictions on dependents introduced under Rishi Sunak are only now “feeding through” into the data.

Labour, on the other hand, can “claim progress” as these official migration statistics cover almost all of its first year in government. But ministers should “tread carefully”, however. The “underlying picture is far less clear-cut” and there is no evidence yet that the fall in migration can be maintained.

The exodus of young people in particular should “trigger alarm bells about the UK’s demographic conundrum”, said City A.M. Around 91% of British nationals who left the country were of working age, “scuppering” the idea that it was mainly pensioners leaving for Europe. If anything, this suggests that younger people are “ditching the country to boost living standards”.

The numbers themselves aren’t at the forefront of most people’s minds, but the optics of the government’s “handling of illegal migration and related issues” are, said UnHerd. To date, ministers have made “little progress” on delivering tangible results, and “show no sign yet of making any more”.

A mere “promise” to end the use of migrant hotels – such as the Bell Hotel in Epping – will “pay no political dividends” and save no money, if the government resorts to social or privately rented housing. If the government wanted to make a difference, it could change the “state’s legal obligation to house asylum seekers”: no such move has been made.

What next?

We must look at these figures in a wider context, especially if the government is considering applying arbitrary migration targets, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times.

The influx of people entering the UK is not a standalone issue, but an “outgrowth” based on other decisions. Instead of jumping to “targets” – “the kind of thing that states tend to do badly” – answering the questions over housebuilding, university funding, or economic advantages is the way forward. “Trying to work backwards” by reverse-engineering the problem and starting with migrant controls, “is a fool’s errand”.

Small boats will continue to be a thorn in Labour’s side, especially if the UK remains “incapable” of stringent deportation systems, or an Australian method of “offshore processing”, said UnHerd. That being said, if Mahmood avoids another “Boris-wave” of high net migration, or prevents migrants becoming a “permanent burden on the British taxpayer”, then “she will deserve real credit. But if Labour ministers hope that will be enough to neutralise immigration as an electoral issue, they are surely mistaken.”

The impartiality row that led to yesterday’s dramatic resignation of BBC Director General Tim Davie and his head of news, Deborah Turness, is part of a “strategy by the hard right to replace the truth with propaganda”, said Lib Dem leader Ed Davey.

As the fallout continues today, the BBC board is facing questions about “what exactly led to such a nuclear outcome behind the scenes”, said Politico’s London Playbook, amid “angry claims of a complete institutional failure from some, and a right-wing ‘coup’ from others”.

What did the commentators say?

Given the BBC’s “fraudulent editing of a Donald Trump speech”, it was only right that Davie took “responsibility for an organisation riddled with liberal bias”, said The Sun’s editorial board. Only “new leadership can change its DNA to reflect the opinions of its viewers – not just a liberal metropolitan elite that sneers at concerns about mass immigration, Brexit and the cost of net zero”.

“The ‘Panorama’-caught-lying scandal is as embarrassing, and enjoyable, as the discovery that a puritanical pastor is an alcoholic gambler with a Catholic mistress,” said Tim Stanley in The Telegraph. The recent “litany of errors” at the BBC has been “so great as to indicate a cultural rot from the head down”.

The BBC is “very much a co-author of this story”, said Sonia Sodha in The Times, but that has not stopped many wanting to “lay the blame wholly at the door of dark forces running an organised campaign” to bring the corporation down.

Insiders, and many on the left, are talking of “coup”, said The Guardian’s Michael Savage, blaming Turness’ resignation in particular on “a campaign by political enemies of the BBC” to shift the corporation to the right.

It’s “a national disgrace”, said David Yelland, former editor of The Sun, on X. “The corporation’s board has effectively been undermined, and elements close to it have worked with hostile newspaper editors”, Boris Johnson and “enemies of public service broadcasting”.

“It’s clear that there is a genuine concern about editorial standards and mistakes,” presenter Nick Robinson said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “There is also a political campaign by people who want to destroy the organisation.” And “both things are happening at the same time”.

What next?

A story is now emerging “about the functionality and make-up of the BBC board, and its role in what has happened”, said the BBC’s Katie Razzall. The weekend’s resignations have laid bare “a rift between the board and the news division”, with the board apparently preventing Turness from putting out an apology.

All this could not have come at a worse time for the BBC. It is about to begin negotiations on renewing its charter, due to expire in 2027, and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has already refused to rule out scrapping the licence fee altogether from 2028.

Continued BBC funding goes “hand in hand” with the question of “erosion of trust”, Caroline Dinenage, chair of the House of Commons Culture, Media & Sport Committee, told Playbook. “It’s all about the public having faith that the BBC is a trusted broadcaster that they’re happy to pay the license fee for.”

The BBC is “caught in political and economic headwinds”, said Jane Martinson in The Guardian. The corporation should have stood up to the attacks from The Telegraph and Donald Trump. Now, it simply looks “weak and cowardly, just when it needs to be robust and brave”.

The politician and former chancellor chooses five favourite books. He will be speaking about his book “Can We Be Great Again?” at the St Andrew’s Book Festival in London on 25 November.

Peak Human

Johan Norberg, 2025

If you’re worried that Western civilisation and democracy is in decline, this is for you – in fact, it’s the best book I have read this year. Johan Norberg looks at civilisations from Athens to the Anglosphere, and traces the reasons for their rise and fall. His conclusion: all is not lost.

Super Agers

Eric Topol, 2025

Eric Topol is my favourite American doctor, and has given me superb advice on many occasions. His latest book looks scientifically at all the diseases that cause ageing, from heart disease to cancer to dementia – and exactly what the latest clinical trials say works and does not work. For someone like me who is turning 60 next year, it was unputdownable!

Broken Threads

Mishal Husain, 2024

Not every broadcaster can write – but Mishal Husain certainly can. This is a beautiful account of the impact of partition in India on both branches of her family, setting their painstakingly researched stories against the backdrop of deep historical currents.

How Countries Go Broke

Ray Dalio, 2025

A book about something no one wants to talk about, but should: our looming debt crisis. In surprisingly readable prose, Ray Dalio explains why we should all be terrified of what is around the corner. As someone who has made his billions building up the world’s largest hedge fund, he knows his stuff.

The Optimist

Keach Hagey, 2025

Finally, a book on the forthcoming AI revolution. A biography of Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, the company that gave us ChatGPT, which has become something of an addiction for me (try asking it your life expectancy). Worth reading for a window on where we are going, through the eyes of one of the most powerful people in the world.

Titles in print are available from The Week Bookshop

Plaid Cymru’s triumph in the Caerphilly Senedd by-election is a “reset for Welsh politics”, said the party’s leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth.

The Welsh nationalists got 47% of the vote in a record turnout of 50%. Reform UK came second on 36% and Labour a distant third with 11%. Here are five things we learned from a historic night in south Wales.

UK politics is evolving 

The result was terrible for the “two big beasts of Westminster politics”, said political editor Chris Mason on the BBC. Labour was “humbled, pummelled, crushed”, while the Tories got just 2%. “Yes, you read that right,” – they “managed just 13% of the vote between them”.

So the “key lesson” from Caerphilly for “every political leader” is that UK politics is “moving at speed, with voter loyalties shifting and atomising in unprecedented ways”, said The Guardian. “Those who cannot adapt will be crushed.”

Bad headlines ‘hampered’ Reform  

Reform UK “threw everything at the campaign”, said Sky News. Nigel Farage “visited three times” and his party was expected to win, but when the result was declared at 2.10am, the party leader was “nowhere to be seen”.

The outcome “represents a clear disappointment for Reform”, said The Guardian, and it’s “possible the party’s chances were hampered” by reports that its former leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, had admitted to taking bribes to make pro-Russia comments in the European Parliament.

In-fighting harmed Labour

Labour “had a horror of a start to this campaign”, said Wales Online. Its council leader “quit”, explaining that he “couldn’t support” either Keir Starmer or the "Johnny-come-lately" by-election candidate, Richard Tunnicliffe.

The Caerphilly “drubbing” could reinforce the “ongoing narrative” that Labour is going to do badly in the full Senedd elections next May. Canvassers “might now think twice” about "whether it is worth their effort” to go door-knocking over the winter.

Reform’s regional obstacles 

Reform coming second with 36% of the vote is a “solid performance for an upstart”, said Mason, but “insurgencies remain insurgent by winning – and they were easily beaten”. It’s “clearly not easy for them to be the first choice ‘none of the above’” alternative to Labour and the Tories when there’s “another party also claiming that mantle”.

So this could continue to be "a challenge for them in Wales, as it is in Scotland with the SNP, in a way that it isn’t in England”.

Labour faces threat from left

Much has been made of the threat to Labour from the right, but “the road to a Labour recovery does not simply lie in winning back voters from Reform”, said polling expert John Curtice in The Times. “The party is losing ground to its left as well as its right.” In Caerphilly it was Plaid who “were able to do most of the damage”.

Welsh Labour is clear where the blame lies for its poor performance. It “remains supportive of and loyal to first minister Eluned Morgan”, said Tom Harris in The Telegraph, but there is “simmering resentment towards Keir Starmer” for the “party’s unpopularity”.

“The impact of Brexit is severe and long lasting,” said Chancellor Rachel Reeves yesterday. The economic fallout from Britain’s decision to leave the EU is, she indicated, one of the main reasons that tax rises and spending cuts are on the table for next month’s Budget.

This is a clear shift in strategy from a government that has long tiptoed round Brexit, for fear of losing its Red Wall supporters. Putting the issue front and centre of its economic analysis, and using it to attack Nigel Farage and Reform, has been welcomed by many in the Labour Party, including cabinet ministers. Health Secretary Wes Streeting said: “I’m glad Brexit is a problem whose name we now dare speak”.

What did the commentators say?

“Economically, Brexit has not been good for us,” Jonathan Brash, MP for Leave-voting Hartlepool told Kitty Donaldson in The i Paper. We should “look at the facts”. The Office for Budget Responsibility has said that Brexit has reduced “long-term productivity” in the UK economy by 4%.

As Reeves talks of “undoing some of that damage”, the marked shift in messaging from fellow government figures is “part of a larger Labour strategy to take on Reform” over Farage’s role in Brexit, said The Spectator’s Steerpike column. Keir Starmer wants to argue that “Farage used ‘easy sloganeering’” during the referendum campaign but “didn’t have a plan” for afterwards. With this “attack line”, he can say Reform offers “quick fixes rather than thought-through policy proposals” and, he hopes, “persuade voters to come back to the reds”.

“Farage is as guilty as fellow Leaver Boris Johnson,” said The Mirror’s associate editor Kevin Maguire. He and Reform “these days rarely talk about Brexit” because he “mis-sold” it “as El Dorado”, and “no Brexit champion, particularly Farage, is worthy of high office after proving so conclusively wrong on such a seismic issue”.

Blaming Farage is “effectively attacking the largest democratic decision ever made by the British electorate”, said former Tory MP and Reform supporter Jacob Rees-Mogg in The Telegraph. “Too scared to accuse the voters themselves of getting it wrong, Labour attacks one of Brexit’s main protagonists, implying that he gulled foolish voters into doing something that was not in their interest.”

Pointing the finger at Farage “also risks re-energising the two-fingers to Westminster attitude that swung the Leave vote in 2016”, said The i Paper’s Donaldson. Reform will say that Farage may have campaigned for Brexit “but it was the Tories who implemented it” and it’s now Labour seeking to undermine it. “I don’t think voters in places like mine see Brexit as a mistake at all; they see it as unfinished business,” Reform’s deputy leader of Durham County Council Darren Grimes told Donaldson.

What next?

“Brexit was only ever going to be a blank canvas,” said Ross Clark in The Sun. “Of itself, it promised neither economic success or failure” but simply gave Britain the chance to “make its own economic policies and negotiate its own trade deals”.

But the Brexit benefits are hard to see, and increased export costs and new EU border checks for travellers mean that even those without an “emotional connection” to the European project “experience a sense of irritation at barriers to their pleasures or their profits having been erected against their will”, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times.

The latest YouGov poll on Brexit shows that just 31% of the public now believe it was the right decision to leave the EU.

The Conservatives used their annual party conference to outline key policies they would implement if they were elected.

New economic ‘golden rule’

Kemi Badenoch’s keynote speech confirmed a new “golden rule” designed to cut government borrowing and taxes. Half of all savings in any future Tory government would go towards reducing the gap between spending and tax revenues, and the other half would fund economic policies such as tax cuts.

Stamp duty

The party will abolish the “unconservative” stamp duty tax that people pay when buying a property. The “surprise announcement” from Badenoch yesterday was “warmly welcomed” by conference attendees, said Sky News, and would be paid for by £47 billion of planned spending cuts.

Young buyers’ tax rebate

A £5,000 tax break would be offered to young people who get their first full-time job, to put the money towards a deposit on their first house. Funds would be “diverted” into a “long-term savings account”, said ITV News. But it isn’t yet clear what would happen for first-time workers “not looking to buy a home”.

Sentencing Council

Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick said the Tories would scrap the Sentencing Council, described as “not fit for purpose”, in favour of offering ministers the power to issue guidelines to English and Welsh courts. Former Tory ministers “expressed disbelief” at the plan, said The Guardian. Ex-attorney general Dominic Grieve said it was “bonkers”.

Energy bills

A future Tory government would cut energy bills by 20% by axing the carbon tax and wind farms. The party has promised the measure would save the average family £165 a year, while there are also plans to scrap Great British Energy – a Labour initiative.

Kemi Badenoch has promised to “restore a strong economy” and “rebuild Britain’s strength” if she wins the next election.

During her keynote speech at the Tory party conference today, Badenoch told members she’d abolish stamp duty, and introduce a “golden economic rule”: at least half of all cuts to public spending made in government would be used to reduce the deficit, with the rest going on measures to boost the economy, including tax cuts.

Can her policy promises turn around her ailing fortunes – and those of her party? “It’s an undeniable truth,” said Raza Hussain at Prospect, “that the grass roots are looking for change.”

What did the commentators say?

This year’s conference felt like Badenoch’s “audition for survival”, said Prospect’s Hussain. “Everyone knows this could be her last disco before the lights go out” but there are “still plenty” of Tories who “believe in Badenoch, or at least want to”. Some “simply want her to stay because changing leaders didn’t exactly help the party over the last 14 years”.

Even Tory MPs who are “uncomfortable” with her rhetoric don’t “feel that there is much point in doing anything about it now”, said Eleni Courea in The Guardian. There’s a view that she won’t “necessarily" lead the party into the next general election, so “what she announces right now is neither here nor there”.

Some of her MPs “think the clock is ticking” on her leadership “and on the long-term viability” of the party, said BBC Radio 5 Live’s Matt Chorley, and there are grumblings, from new MPs in particular, about “a leader’s office lacking in direction, fight, even a willingness to acknowledge their existence”.

But Badenoch’s recent commitment to pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights shows that “here at least, the Tory leader is playing a bad hand rather well”, said Andrew Tettenborn in The Spectator. “Whatever a few older grandees may say on human rights scepticism”, she has “no choice but to embrace it. Forget the chattering of the urban lanyard classes; what matters is the sceptical just-about-managing from Cardiff to Clacton”.

Perhaps she can “break through” by being “different”, rather than “a pale imitation of her opponents”, said Kamal Ahmed in The Telegraph. Under her leadership, the Tories should “uniquely offer a smaller state, lower taxes and free market reforms to release growth”.

What next?

The problem is that the Conservative party, “so often and for so long the dominating force in British politics, is a shrivelled version of its usual self”, said the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason.

Next May’s elections to the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Senedd and many English councils are “shaping up to be the moment of truth” for Badenoch, some Tory MPs have told BBC Radio 5 Live’s Chorley.

“If there are no glimmers of momentum by then,” said The Telegraph’s Ahmed, “she is finished”, and will join the “long list of Conservative opposition leaders who could find neither a way to engage voters nor a way back to No. 10”.

Pope Leo XIV enjoyed rapturous support from his fellow American Catholics when he was elevated last spring, but his latest comments on abortion and immigration are revealing a rift with conservatives in the church.

Leo alienated conservatives this week when asked about the backlash to an award planned for Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a pro-choice Catholic, said The Associated Press. (Durbin later declined the award.) A politician “who says I am against abortion but I am in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life,” the pope told reporters. Similarly, he said that politicians who favor the death penalty are “not really pro-life.”

That apparent knock on President Donald Trump’s immigration policies — and seeming defense of a pro-choice politician — suggests Leo’s “honeymoon with conservatives” has come to an end, said Reuters. Leo is creating “confusion” about the “moral clarity of the Church’s teaching,” said former Bishop Joseph Strickland, a conservative Texan who was ousted from his post by the late Pope Francis. Catholic conservative influencers such as Matt Walsh and Jack Posobiec also joined the criticism. The controversy could “detract” from Leo’s mission to “work for unity” in an increasingly polarized Catholic Church, said Reuters.

‘Morally obtuse’

“Conservatives and traditionalists are going to wince” at Leo’s comments, Michael Brendan Dougherty said at National Review. Leo’s statement was a “weird slur” on Catholics who favor immigration control, “which can be executed humanely or inhumanely.” And where the death penalty is concerned, comparing “aborted children to hardened criminals is morally obtuse.”

Leo made the mistake of “emulating Christ,” Charlotte Clymer said on Substack. The conservative “pro-life” position has often seemed to embrace “only one aspect of the sanctity of life.” They are “laser-focused on abortion” while ignoring a pro-life sensibility when it comes to “immigration, homelessness, mental health” and other issues. The truth is that religious conservatives “cannot reconcile their chosen hierarchy of life with the teachings of Christ.”

The new pope has “shown little interest in wading into the culture wars” that consume American Catholicism, Molly Olmstead said at Slate. Conservatives hoped they had “found a new and powerful ally in Rome” following Francis’ papacy. Leo has instead made clear “he wasn’t interested in joining anyone’s team.”

‘Our teaching is very clear’

Leo’s comments were the “clearest, substantive evidence that his papacy will be in profound continuity with Pope Francis,” Michael Sean Winters said at National Catholic Reporter. The new pope has “obvious” differences with his predecessor where style and personality are concerned but “not so much” where the substance of Catholic teaching is concerned. That means there should be no worries about “confusion” on the church’s pro-life stance: Leo is pro-life but does not side with those who believe “abortion is really the only preeminent issue” that Catholics should weigh. “Is there anyone on the planet who does not know what the church teaches about abortion? Our teaching is very clear.”

"How do you excite people about moderate positions?"

“In the clamour of politics in 2025” that is the “quandary” facing the Liberal Democrats, said Laura Kuenssberg on the BBC.

Leader Ed Davey’s answer up to now has been to try to cut through with a series of attention-grabbing stunts. These have proved surprisingly successful electorally, winning his party 72 seats at the last general election, a record number.

That is all well and good, said Charlotte Henry in The Spectator, but “at a time at which there is a horrendous, and horrendously unpopular, Labour government”, as well as a Conservative Party “in seemingly terminal decline”, the Lib Dems “should be offering more”.

What did the commentators say?

Those hoping this weekend’s party conference would usher in a new, more serious Lib Dems were quickly disappointed after Davey entered the Bournemouth venue at the head of a marching band. It was undoubtedly “eye-catching”, said The Independent’s editorial, but ultimately another “vacuous video-opportunity”.

“This is the perfect time for the Lib Dems to take it to the next level, presenting themselves as a serious alternative to the rise of Reform,” said UnHerd. Unfortunately, the decision “to march into conference at the head of the world’s most embarrassing parade – while his party had a deeply stupid row over trans issues” showed that “these are not serious people”.

The public, it seems, is also growing weary of the endless stunts. Polling conducted by More in Common and presented to members gathered in Bournemouth showed more than 60% of voters think Davey’s campaign antics make the party look less serious. This also extends to nearly half of Lib Dem supporters. Perhaps more worrying is that many voters are still unsure what the party stands for.

Despite the criticism, Davey remains in a “strong position, with a largely happy party behind him”, said Kuenssberg. He will, however, “need to think through how to sell a set of moderate ideas to a voting public that appears to be eager for more drastic solutions”.

It is true they “need a harder edge to their policies, but they should focus on issues on which they could influence a government in a hung parliament, which ought to be the only point of people voting for them”, said The Independent. Social care and sewage “should not be the limit of Lib Dem ambition” when they could offer a “more forward policy on integration with the EU, a more compassionate approach to immigration and a more genuinely liberal attitude to the cause of equal rights”.

What next?

With two-thirds of constituencies where the Lib Dems are behind by less than 10,000 votes held by the Conservatives “winning over disillusioned Tories is the focus”, said The Telegraph.

This explains Davey’s decision to “lay out his pitch” in The Telegraph before the conference. In the article he denounced the “divisive politics being peddled by the likes of Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage” and promised to “provide a home to the millions of former Conservative voters repulsed by the extremes of both the right and left”.

The Lib Dems hope this strategy could result in them gaining more than 100 MPs at the next general election, according to The New Statesman, making them a serious force if, as the current polls suggest, no party emerges with an overall majority.

This still requires “hefty qualification”, especially given that “we are still a long way from knowing how willing people are to vote tactically around Reform”.

Tory woes, however, mean that “the Lib Dems need only stand still for the next three years to profit from the decline and fall of Britain’s oldest party”.

Politicians in Scotland and Westminster are digesting the outcome of the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election for the Holyrood Parliament – Scottish Labour narrowly defeating the SNP, with Reform UK coming a close third.

The "keenly awaited" result comes with less than a year to go until the Scottish Parliament election, said the BBC, but its significance stretches far beyond the border.

'Caveats' for Labour

The "basics" is that this is a "good result" for Scottish Labour, said the BBC. Despite slipping in the polls "considerably" since last year's general election and finding themselves "on the defensive" over "controversial" UK Labour policies, they've taken the Holyrood seat from the SNP.

But there are "some caveats". Labour won a Westminster by-election there less than two years ago with a majority of about 9,500 and triumphed at the 2024 general election by a "similar margin", but this time they "squeaked through" on a "thin margin" margin of 602 votes.

'Fragile' SNP

The result is "more than ample evidence" that the SNP has made "very little progress" since last summer, polling expert John Curtice told the BBC. It "confirms very, very clearly" that John Swinney's party still has an "awful lot of work to do" to get the pro-Yes voters who fled to Labour "back on side". Although the SNP would still be expected to be the biggest party in a Scotland-wide vote, it remains on "relatively fragile ground".

Defiant Reform

Privately, at least, Reform UK might be disappointed. The party had "seemingly gained ground" from both the SNP and Scottish Labour in recent weeks, said The Guardian, and "speculation grew" that it might "push" Labour into third place.

Instead, it was Nigel Farage's right-wing party that finished third but Ross Lambie, Reform’s candidate, was unabashed, declaring at the count that the result showed there was a "new party in Scotland", so it will be a "three-horse race" for Holyrood next year.

'Dismal' Tories

The Conservatives' "dismal" fourth place, with just 6% of the vote, is "more bad news" for Kemi Badenoch, said The Telegraph. Her opponents will "cite it as fresh evidence that she is failing to turn around the party’s fortunes", and Scottish Tories will be asking "where on earth they go from here".

One word will "crop up repeatedly" as right-wing voters "digest" this result: "pact". As much as Badenoch and Farage "hate to discuss it", the "combined votes" for their respective parties would have been enough to win this by-election.

Stayaway Starmer

For Keir Starmer himself, the result was something of a mixed bag. The win has handed the prime minister a "much needed boost", said The Independent, after a campaign that had posed the "question of whether the Keir Starmer project is working".

But the win comes after Starmer himself kept a tactical distance from the campaigning. So, "in essence", said Lucy Dunn in The Spectator, Scottish Labour won "in spite of" the prime minister.

Will the Enhanced Games change the image of drugs in sport? How will autonomous weapons change warfare? And are Reform supporters more datable than Tories?

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As he unveiled his much-touted "reset" deal with the EU, Keir Starmer said it is time to move on from "political fights" and "stale old debates" about Brexit.

Nearly 10 years on from the Brexit referendum, and more than five since the UK formally left the EU, the new agreement strengthens ties over areas including fishing, trade, defence and energy.

Starmer's appeal to "common sense" and "practical solutions" may strike a chord with the public, but his "big bet" is that "nobody really cares" about Brexit any more, said the BBC's chief political correspondent Henry Zeffman.

What did the commentators say?

"This was the day the Brexit dream died," said the Daily Mail in an editorial, while The Express called it "a betrayal dressed up as a policy".

Staunch Brexiteers will "blast" Starmer "on fisheries, rule taking and youth migration", while diehard Remainers "will argue it's a meek deal that hasn't gone far enough to repair the economic scars of Brexit", said Politico. But "this fight down the middle is one the prime minister's quite happy to pick", while the Conservatives and Reform UK, both of whom have described the deal as a "surrender", "risk sounding like broken records on Brexit".

With this deal – coming in the same month that trade agreements were announced with the US and India – Starmer has managed the "impossible", said The Independent: "to have his cake and eat it".

When Labour under Starmer "pivoted" in 2020, from campaigning for a second referendum to a policy of "make Brexit work", "nobody really took it seriously". But he has "succeeded where others failed and managed to break the Brexit conundrum".

Despite the "upbeat rhetoric", some of the "most difficult issues to resolve have been pushed back into future negotiations" – including the shape of a youth mobility scheme, said The Times. The deal also "leaves a number of difficult questions unanswered", such as how much Britain will have to pay to access the new EU defence fund and to align with the EU food standards and energy trading system.

But the government hopes that voters will warm to the tangible effects of a "reset" in relations with the EU, including cheaper food and energy, and a reduction of red tape for small businesses.

What next?

What will "prove revealing over the coming days, weeks, and months" is how much Reform and the Conservatives decide to campaign around the idea of a Brexit "betrayal", said the BBC's Zeffman.

If opposition to the deal becomes a "significant part of these parties' platforms, it will tell us that they believe there is in fact plenty of controversy yet in the decades-long debate over the UK's relationship with the EU".

If that's right, it could thrust questions about Brexit "right back to the centre of political life.

"But if Sir Keir is right that the bulk of the public simply wants as little friction with the EU as possible, then he could prove to be our first truly post-Brexit prime minister."

Reform UK has successfully converted its recent opinion-poll surge into a string of ballot-box victories across England – solidifying its status as an electoral threat to the country's two main political parties.

Most eye-catching of all was the win in this parliament's first by-election, with Reform candidate Sarah Pochin snatching the once-safe Labour seat of Runcorn and Helsby by a mere six votes.

Nigel Farage's insurgent right-wing party also won its first mayoral contest, with Andrea Jenkyns taking 42% of the vote in Greater Lincolnshire, far ahead of the Conservative candidate's 26%. In county-council elections, Reform looks to be gaining ground rapidly, too, taking about 35% of the vote share so far.

What did the commentators say?

The "big question" on everyone's lips as polls opened yesterday was whether Reform "now pose a significant challenge to both the Conservatives and the Labour party", political scientist John Curtice said in a BBC interview. "The answer to that question so far is quite clearly yes."

Reform's by-election victory confirms that this "still new" Labour government "is so deeply unpopular that it cannot hold one of its safest seats", said John Rentoul in The Independent. A "landslide general election win", just 10 months ago, "that matched the giddiness of Blairphoria" has now "turned into the humiliation of defeat at the hands of Nigel Farage". It also confirms that Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer's chief of staff, "is right to see Farage as the main threat to the Labour government".

For the Conservatives, it's even worse. They are losing support to Reform on the right and the Liberal Democrats on the left, said Nigel Jones in The Spectator. They are vulnerable both to "affluent middle-class progressives still upset by Brexit, and working-class communities concerned by mass immigration and the rising cost of living". The "big peril" is that "they're caught in an irreversible death spiral from which there can be no return."

"Voter volatility has been the foundation of Reform's swift rise," said Stephen Pollard in The Telegraph. But that could just as easily become its "Achilles heel" in the months to come. Reform's local-election triumphs mean "it is going to have to start running social care, transport, schools and collecting the bins". And Labour's "dreadful" start in government has shown just how difficult it is "to actually do things in power".

Reform doesn't seem to have much plan, other than "not being Labour or the Tories". And even if they did, they'd do well to remember boxer Mike Tyson’s "famous assertion that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Reality tends to punch governments – and councils and mayors – in the face."

What next?

Council declarations will keep rolling in throughout the day, with the majority due by around 7pm. Reform is expected to take over several councils.

"Make no mistake, these results will shape the tone, tenor and focus of the political conversation" in the months ahead, said Chris Mason, political editor of the BBC. And both Labour and Tory politicians will be "staring, sleep-deprived, hard into the mirror and working out how to respond".

In the 1951 general election Labour and the Conservatives between them secured 98% of the vote. By 2024 that had dropped to 59%, and polling suggests support for the two main parties has continued to fall over the past year, driven in large part by the rise of Reform UK.

What this reveals is that UK politics has been "slowly but steadily unwinding from a two-party to a multi-party system for decades", said Byline Times. But "just like going bankrupt, things in politics change gradually and then very quickly".

What did the commentators say?

With Reform, Labour and the Conservatives roughly tied nationally and the Lib Dems slowly gaining ground in the south, "British politics is heading towards a place it was never designed to go, with a fractured four-way split", said The Economist. "Call it 20-20-20-20 vision."

This is because "politics is no longer one-dimensional," polling expert Sir John Curtice told the Financial Times. The old left-right divide no longer explains British politics; cultural issues are now a key factor.

With both Labour and the Tories shedding votes, "the conditions are there for the biggest challenge to the political conventions of British politics since the 1920s".

Seizing this opportunity is Farage's insurgent party, which "is proving adept at adapting itself to the ideologically fluid political positions of its target voters, for whom the distinction between left and right in politics is not set in stone", said the FT.

The "story of polarisation" – when "working-class" and "middle-class" had clear meanings and strong party affiliations – "holds the key to understanding the threat to the Labour-Tory dominance", said pollster Peter Kellner in Prospect. He described the condition of Britain's two-party system as "chronic".

"We shall of course see fluctuations in party support" but with issues like "Ukraine, slow growth, weak public finances and Donald Trump's presidency" all presenting "tough challenges for years to come" there is "no obvious reason why today's mainstream total, Labour plus Tory, should return to sustained dominance of the electorate".

What next?

This "unprecedented fragmentation puts the electorate on a collision course with the electoral system", said Robert Ford, professor of political science at Manchester University, in The Guardian. "First past the post is an amplifier: the winner takes all, everyone else gets nothing. But when voters divide evenly between multiple choices, this is a recipe for chaos."

This means "once unviable strategies" – like putting up a celebrity candidate with little experience but huge name recognition – "can work", said The Economist. Tactical voting, "the grease that keeps British democracy turning, becomes close to impossible".

Many agree that a new electoral system is needed to better reflect this new multi-party political reality. But neither Labour (who won two-thirds of seats at the last election on a third of the vote) or the Conservatives, nor it seems Reform, appear interested in this – at least for now.

"That doesn't mean that events like another pandemic, war or a climate catastrophe won't squeeze voters back into the two-party fold," said Byline Times. "But it won't be willing and will therefore only ever be temporary."

"It's time to give the people what they want: a Tory-Reform, non-aggression pact," said Jacob Rees-Mogg on GB News, arguing that Labour won its majority because the right-leaning vote was split between Reform and his party, the Conservatives.

It's simple logic in the context of a recent YouGov poll of almost 2,500 UK adults on how people would vote were a general election to be held tomorrow: 25% for Reform UK, 24% for Labour and 21% for the Conservatives. But Rees-Mogg's strongest argument in favour of an electoral pact is that the poll revealed one in five of those who voted Tory in the last general election would now vote for Nigel Farage's Reform UK party.

'Nigel Farage wants to destroy the Conservative party'

Even Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has admitted that Reform is likely to triumph at the Runcorn by-election next month but she has ruled out a "national level" deal with Reform because "Nigel Farage has said that he wants to destroy the Conservative Party". A number of her MPs told The i Paper that an informal non-competition agreement would "make a lot of sense", and Badenoch told BBC Breakfast that Tory councillors would have to "make the choice about what is right for their councils" after the elections. In an attempt to defuse the issue, she pointed out that Tories were already governing locally as part of "various coalitions" with other parties, including Labour and the Lib Dems.

But any kind of local level pact might not be the win for Reform that it first appears. The insurgent party is "thus far untainted by the realities of power", said UnHerd's Tom Jones. "Getting into government, even if limited to the local level, may dull the insurgent edge on which the party trades".

'Drifting further to the right'

But cosying up to Reform won't save Badenoch's party either, said Bloomberg columnist Rosa Prince. The Tories should realise that they're always better off occupying the centre ground rather than continuing a "half-hearted attempt to restore the party's fortunes by drifting further to the right". Instead of mimicking Reform's populist policies as her internal leadership rival Robert Jenrick is wont to do, Badenoch should challenge Labour on the economy and particularly taxation.

The combination of a gloomy economic outlook, not helped by Trump's trade wars, and Labour's lack of connection with voters gives the Tories an opportunity to appeal to voters who care less about "irrelevant woke wars" than about "their own personal finances". And Badenoch should remember that Farage's character is off-putting to as many centrists as it is attractive to those who have defected to Reform.

Speaking of defectors, Conservative-MP-turned-Reform-candidate Andrea Jenkyns is running for mayor of Greater Lincolnshire in one of the more closely watched contests of the local elections coming up on 1 May. If Jenkyns wins, the Tory party is braced for further defections and a "renewed frenzy over a potential deal or even merger", said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman. But if Jenkyns loses, Reform's momentum may falter. "The party has poured everything it has into Lincolnshire. If it can't win here, doubts will emerge over how solid its polling figures really are."

"Tory eyes" are being drawn, "not for the first time" to shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick, "one-time leadership rival" to Kemi Badenoch.

On the day this week that Badenoch ran through "her greatest hits" in a "set-piece speech attacking Labour's 'job tax'", the Tory grassroots on social media were clearly "more taken by Jenrick, as he tore into his opposite number, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood, over the 'two-tier' Sentencing Council fiasco", said Richard Vaughan in The i Paper.

It was the latest of several "sharp performances" from Jenrick since losing the Tory leadership contest. And his "apparent omnipresence" has led to whispers within the party that the shadow justice secretary is, in Westminster parlance, "on manoeuvres".

'Unusually robust, no backing down'

Since the election, Jenrick has been "the most effective campaigner on the Tory benches", said Tom Jones in The Critic, "and not by a matter of inches, but miles". Being in opposition can be a "thankless task" but Jenrick can "actually point to successes" – not just on the two-tier justice issue but also in the "storm over grooming gangs", where he was "at the front", calling for gang leaders to receive whole-life sentences.

Some of the reasons for Jenrick's success are "easily discerned and easily replicable: intensity of effort, combined with media mastery". But the shadow cabinet could learn from his "unusually robust" and unapologetic delivery style that allows "little hand-wringing and certainly no backing down".

Indeed, while Team Kemi appears to be trying to "make a virtue out of silence", Jenrick has become "everything Kemi was elected to be," said Tim Stanley in The Telegraph. There's a lesson for us all there: "if you ever apply for a job and don't get it, just show up to work the next day and pretend that you did".

'An alternative leadership'

It might be more accurate to say that Jenrick is "running an alternative leadership", said Peter Franklin in UnHerd. In opposition, there's not much a "Tory boss" can do, other than "develop new ideas and communicate them" and, "on that front, he's leaving his colleagues in the dust".

The question for Badenoch now is what to do about it. "If she sacks him, she could precipitate her own downfall – or, more disastrously for the Tories, his defection to Reform UK". Instead, she could "confine him to his own brief" but, although all Tory MPs have already been told not to sound off on social media, "Jenrick won't be easily silenced". Her best course of action, then, is to promote him to deputy leader. Give Jenrick "the job and the mission of overhauling both policy and communications" and "make his successes her successes".

Jenrick probably does still want to be Tory leader, said Giles Dilnot on ConservativeHome but that, in itself, is not "the smoking gun" his critics might hope for. The answer to the question of what Jenrick is "really up to" is simple enough: he's "spoiling for a fight with Labour".

He is "energised" by targeting the government, isn't afraid to take on Reform, and is "cheerfully revelling" in being "the party's attack dog". But what the Conservatives really need is "the whole shadow-cabinet pack hunting efficiently".

This week's local elections could bring a historic shift in voting patterns, says one of Britain's leading pollsters.

Professor Sir John Curtice, of the University of Strathclyde, told The Independent that less than half of those polled planned to vote for Labour or the Conservatives, the two parties that have dominated British politics for a century.

The "big winner" from the shift in voter intentions is likely to be Reform UK. Nigel Farage's insurgent party is on course to pick up hundreds of council seats across England as it looks to establish itself as a genuine alternative to the Tories and Labour.

The last time these councils were contested was in 2021. That was the high point of Boris Johnson's premiership when the Conservatives won control of dozens of local authorities. Four years on and the picture could not look more different.

Where are elections and when?

Around a third of electors in England are eligible to vote in local elections to be held on Thursday 1 May.

In total, 23 councils will be contested, with more than 1,600 councillors up for election. These include:

14 county councils: Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire, Devon, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire.

8 unitary authorities: Buckinghamshire, Cornwall, County Durham, North Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Shropshire, West Northamptonshire and Wiltshire.

1 metropolitan district: Doncaster.

Six mayoral elections are also taking place in the West of England, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, North Tyneside, Doncaster and – for the first time – in Greater Lincolnshire, and Hull and East Yorkshire.

In February, the government announced that local elections in East Sussex, West Sussex, Essex, Thurrock, Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Norfolk, Suffolk and Surrey, due to also take place on 1 May, would be delayed for one year to allow for the reorganisation of local councils.

No routine elections are taking place in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.

Who is eligible to vote?

The BBC, in collaboration with the Electoral Commission, has produced a postcode tool for voters to check if elections are taking place in their area on 1 May.

British citizens, qualifying Commonwealth citizens and those with citizenship of an EU member state are all eligible to vote in local elections, although rules vary according to which country you are from.

If you have not already registered to vote, the deadline has unfortunately already passed.

After changes to the law brought in under the last Tory government, voters in England now need to show photo ID to confirm their identity at polling stations. You can see the list of accepted forms of identification here. The ID document does not need to be in date, as long as the photo is still clearly recognisable.

If you do not possess any of these, you need to apply for a free Voter Authority Certificate not later than Wednesday 23 April.

What ID do you need?

After changes to the law brought in under the last Tory government, voters in England now need to show photo ID to confirm their identity at polling stations. You can see the list of accepted forms of identification here. The ID document does not need to be in date, as long as the photo is still clearly recognisable.

If you do not possess any of these, you can apply for a free Voter Authority Certificate but not in time for this week's local elections as the deadline has also passed.

What are the polls saying?

"They might not span the whole UK," said Left Foot Forward, but the 1 May local elections still offer a "critical litmus test" and "all eyes are on whether Reform's bluster holds up in the ballot box".

Politico's latest poll of polls has the party leading nationally on 25%, ahead of Labour on 23% and the Conservatives on 21%.

The Conservatives, who are defending almost two-thirds of the seats that are up for grabs, are "braced for a hammering", said the Financial Times. Reform is "challenging the main rightwing party across many areas" and the Liberal Democrats are "targeting big gains in the south".

Farage's party "could take control of eight councils to gain their first real power-base in local government", said Martin Baxter, founder of Electoral Calculus.

At the same time, the Lib Dems, who are polling around 15% nationally, are looking to build on their success in last year's general election and replace the Conservatives as the natural "party of Middle England".

"The party believes it can become the second largest in local government by surpassing the Conservatives, as well as making gains in areas where voters have become disaffected with Labour since the general election", said London's The Standard.

As for Labour, this will be Keir Starmer's first major test at the ballot box since last year's general election landslide. With traditionally Labour local councils such as Doncaster and Durham forecast to swing to Reform, the narrative that the far-right populist party is simply a problem for the Conservatives will be "shattered", said Conservative Home.

Things could get even worse for Labour if Reform overturns a huge majority to win the Runcorn and Helsby by-election taking place on the same day. With Farage vowing to park his talks on Labour's Red Wall lawn, such a result, The Independent said, would be "disastrous for the government".

"Net zero by 2050 is impossible," said Kemi Badenoch in her first big policy pitch to supporters since becoming Conservative leader. Britain simply doesn't have a workable plan to reach the emissions goal in the next quarter-century, and current policies will only drive up consumer energy costs.

The only way to regain the trust of lost voters is to tell the "unvarnished truth" on the matter, she said; net zero by 2050 "can't be achieved without a significant drop in our living standards or worse, by bankrupting us".

What did the commentators say?

Badenoch's pitch makes a "sharp break from years of political consensus on net zero", including from within her own party, said the BBC. The target was enshrined in law by former Conservative PM Theresa May in 2019. This legacy "does not appear to carry much political clout in 2025", said James Heale in The Spectator. Badenoch's calculation is that while Tory voters may profess support for green policies in the polls, in reality "they are much less willing to put their money where their mouth is". Just 5% would accept tax hikes for climate policies, according to research by think tank Onward. For Badenoch, climate change exists, "but tackling it is just one competing priority". Voters also want "cheap energy".

Announcing such a "defensive" policy as her first big pitch suggests the Tories' priority is trying to "fight off the challenge from Nigel Farage" rather than "win the next election", said John Rentoul in The Independent.

But while Badenoch "seems to think she has lobbed a grenade into the sanctimonious eco-consensus", said Gawain Towler in CapX, in actual fact "it may be a dud". That's because Badenoch is merely "slowing the Net Zero train" while "Reform wants to turn it around" completely.

What next?

Badenoch's is an approach already tried by former Tory PM Rishi Sunak, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. His "soft-core climate denial", in which he "theoretically committed to meeting net zero targets" but with "watered down measures", ultimately failed.

Rather than risk "looking a bit mad" by railing against a target that still commands popular support, Badenoch would find more success "attacking Labour's incompetence" over failing to meet these targets over the course of the next parliament; a more likely scenario than this government suddenly becoming "known for its climate radicalism".

Margaret Thatcher is "still adored and revered" by the Conservative Party, "grudgingly respected" by Labour prime ministers past and present, and "despised and reviled on the left and in many working class communities", said Sky News' Jon Craig.

Fifty years ago this week Thatcher became the Conservative leader and her central ideology of "rolling back the frontiers of the state" continues to have a profound influence on British politics.

'Lessons for Badenoch'

Kemi Badenoch has described Thatcher as her "political heroine", while Keir Starmer invoked her recently when he vowed to cut "the thickets of red tape" in the government's pursuit of economic growth, claiming it was "our equivalent" of the Thatcher government's deregulation in the 1980s.

But while some see some parallels between 1975 and 2025 – such as another new female Tory leader facing a Labour prime minister – others would argue the similarities "end there". On the evidence so far, "critics would say Kemi Badenoch is no Margaret Thatcher and Keir Starmer is no Harold Wilson".

Thatcher "still has lessons for Badenoch", said Charles Moore in The Telegraph. If Badenoch wants to succeed, she must "cultivate the talents of her best MPs", as Thatcher did with figures like Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson. And rather than trying to "out-shout Reform", Badenoch should "develop her party's thoughts more carefully and systematically". "Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted" was a favourite phrase of Thatcher's. Voters "might come to admire a party which had put in the work in opposition rather than making the most noise".

'The unfortunate lived present'

This 50-year marker "comes at a melancholy time" when Thatcher's actions are "rebounding on the country with a vengeance", said Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. "Polls show the policies she was most famed for are those most voters now bitterly regret." Thatcher's economic reforms led to soaring wealth at the top while "inequality has stayed at that high level ever since".

Her privatisations resulted in monopolies and financial failures "on an epic scale", which took decades to acknowledge. Conservative think tanks continue to romanticise her "philosophy and vision" while ignoring the long-term economic damage still shaping the present. Thatcher "is not history and certainly not entertainment. She is the unfortunate lived present."

"The government is failing and the Tory opposition is rubbish but we aren’t sure yet about Reform – they seem a bit scary – and we are happy to have the Lib Dems in our back pockets for a rainy day."

With the latest polls suggesting both Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch are struggling against the insurgent populism of Nigel Farage, The New Statesman's political editor Andrew Marr summed up the mood of many voters across the country.

What did the commentators say?

Both Tory and Labour leaders are "looking weak", said Patience Wheatcroft in The New European, but Badenoch "will surely go first".

Her "strategy of not having policies is proving a short-term disaster, which should worry her because the short term may be all she has", said Marr.

Just over 100 days as leader of the opposition and Badenoch has so far failed to improve the Conservatives' dismal approval ratings and, critics say, failed to articulate what exactly the party stands for. Meanwhile, Reform grows ever stronger and presents a real right-wing alternative.

She was forced to issue a rallying cry to her staff on Monday while seeking to blame others "for not pulling their weight", according to Guido Fawkes. That comes after The Spectator – now edited by her former mentor Michael Gove – criticised her performances at PMQs.

There is still "time for her leadership skills to improve and for some enticing policies to emerge", said Wheatcroft, "but the prospects for such change are slight, and the Conservative party tends to be ruthless when deciding the future of a wobbling leader".

Having won a landslide general election victory just six months ago, Starmer is obviously in a stronger position, and "there are still four years for recovery – in political terms, a lifetime", said Marr.

"Patience – the resilience Starmer has shown – is the underrated political virtue" but unless he can tell a better story about what Labour are for, calls for him to go will only continue to grow louder.

What next?

The elephant in the room for both Labour and the Conservatives is, of course, Reform, which has a "plausible, credible and identifiable Roadmap to Power", said the academic Matt Goodwin on Substack.

As Badenoch shifts her party to the right, "there's the obvious danger that they get squeezed" or even worse "overlooked" entirely, said Sean O'Grady in The Independent.

For Labour, which recent analysis by The Observer found is at risk of losing dozens of seats to Reform at the next election, the problem of what to do about Farage is just as acute. That is why talk of a potential successor to Starmer has rounded on the ambitious health secretary, Wes Streeting, who "from the moment he arrived in the Commons in 2015 the words 'future leader' had been appended to his name like a Homeric epithet", said The Sunday Times.

"As one of the few members of the cabinet who's actually good at politics and taking the fight to the enemy, Streeting will be a formidable foil to Farage, who's used to not having his breezy assertions properly challenged," said O'Grady.

Whether Streeting gets the opportunity to go head-to-head with Farage in a future leaders' debate depends on whether Starmer can "change the political mood", said Wheatcroft. Otherwise, "his party might also start to look at him as a problem rather than a leader".

"Sorry, for Kemi Badenoch, does not seem to be the hardest word," said The Times. Last week, the Tory leader used her first major speech in opposition to deliver a characteristically punchy "mea culpa" for her party's failures in government. The Conservatives were wrong to leave the EU without a plan for growth, Badenoch said, and to make empty promises on immigration and net zero.

"The candour is refreshing," said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. It usually takes years for losing parties to "face up to why they actually lost". But it's also a sign that Badenoch is "rattled". And no wonder: the Tories are now in third place in several polls, behind Labour and Reform UK. Admitting past mistakes will allow her to go on the attack against Nigel Farage, who is "promising the earth" on immigration. But it also raises the question: what exactly will her party be selling, "if not the same old magic beans"?

"The answer is… hard to discern," said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman. You'll notice Badenoch didn't apologise for her own record in government – she seems physically incapable of admitting personal blame. She talked only of "valiant" personal successes, such as when she repealed several EU laws as business secretary. And while she gave a long list of "what was wrong with the country: low productivity, high taxes... broken public services" – Badenoch offered nothing "in the way of solutions". She has vowed not to set out detailed policies until 2027, so that the party can take the time to "reflect". In other words: she "still has no ideas".

"Time is not a luxury Badenoch has," said Sam Lister in the Daily Express. While the Conservatives waste years taking the party back to "first principles", Reform is out there "filling the vacuum". Right now, Farage's party "has by far the clearest policy positions on things vast numbers of voters care about", said James Frayne in The Daily Telegraph: cutting migration, getting tough on crime, taking on "woke". If Badenoch carries on with a policy void for much longer, her party will go "from being a disappointment to an irrelevance", and Reform will "effectively replace the Conservatives as the official opposition".

With Nigel Farage's Reform UK increasingly threatening to split the right, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has refused to be drawn on the specifics of her policy positions. Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, she said she would not "rush out" stances within six weeks of her taking over as leader of the opposition, claiming she wanted to earn the public's trust first.

"We are about what we are for, not just what we are against," Badenoch told presenter Amol Rajan. "I do the thinking and what people are going to get with new leadership under me is thoughtful Conservatism, not knee-jerk analysis."

What did the commentators say?

During the leadership contest, Badenoch "deliberately avoided" specific policy positions, instead focusing on "Conservative 'principles'", said the BBC. But some in her party have warned against "leaving a void on key issues such as migration that could be filled by Reform".

Badenoch "risks missing a golden chance" to fix the party machine, opting instead to keep the party "as one of empty slogans", said Simone Hanna in The Telegraph. She has offered "little in terms of practical solutions to anything at the top of most voters' agendas", such as migration. Rather, she is "fixated on the optics of 'owning' her opponents as if she were a 2015 YouTuber" and "ignoring" the reality that she is leading a party "on the very edge of survival". The Tories "stay alive by the grace of Labour's catastrophic start in government".

Badenoch's "combative and outspoken manner" was "invaluable" during the leadership race, but "if Tories voted for Badenoch expecting her to be making the political weather, they will have been disappointed", said former Conservative Lord Chancellor David Gauke in The New Statesman. While she has avoided "serious howlers", she has not "landed any heavy blows on the government", while Farage has "maintained a much higher profile". Badenoch was "wise to eschew" committing to policy announcements too early, but "come the New Year, she will need to set out a clearer political strategy".

When Donald Trump's second term in office begins "there will be more than the usual ripples across the pond from Washington to Westminster", said Patrick O'Flynn in The Spectator. As Trump's "paradigm-busting political programme" unfolds, Farage and his Reform UK "stand to benefit the most".

"Seeing the most successful nation in the world prioritise its own citizens and send the woke Left packing is bound to increase the appetite for a similar radical approach to be tried out here," said Flynn, and Farage "is the obvious man to spearhead it".

What next?

It would require a "huge electoral feat" for Reform to go from five MPs to a political threat to the Labour Party in the next general election, said the i news site. Yet there is the "increasing volatility of an electorate that has already blown previous preconceptions out of the water by delivering a landslide majority" to a party that had been "well beaten in 2019".

And Reform UK is garnering interest from across the pond too – and not just from billionaire Elon Musk, who is rumoured to be offering a substantial donation to the party, but from a "number of billionaires", according to treasurer Nick Candy. Speaking to the Financial Times, Candy said British politics is set to undergo "disruption like we have never seen before" thanks to large donations apparently in the pipeline.

Voting in the Conservative Party leadership contest closes this evening, with Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick vying to become leader of the opposition.

Badenoch, the former business secretary, is the favourite to replace Rishi Sunak. Both her and former immigration minister Jenrick are on the right of the party – and neither are strangers to controversy.

After the surprise exit of former home secretary James Cleverly, the lack of an obvious centrist candidate means the race is "harder to pigeonhole", said Politico. While a right-wing candidate may appeal to party members, the same can't necessarily be said when it comes to an electorate that just handed Labour a historic landslide.

What did the commentators say?

Both candidates' messages seem designed to win back support from Nigel Farage's Reform UK, but with "significant differences" in their approach and policies, said The Independent.

Jenrick's warning that Farage risks "becoming unstoppable" if Reform does well in the local elections in May "should give Tories pause for thought", said Sherelle Jacobs in The Telegraph. He is betting on immigration as the "flashpoint issue on which the Tories must win back trust", framed in a way that will not "totally estrange" younger voters. In his words, the Conservatives must talk about migration in a way that "persuades rather than provokes". Canada's Conservatives, for example, call for immigration numbers to be linked to housing targets rather than "apocalyptically bellowing about migrant 'invasions'".

But Badenoch's "vow to heal a fractious Right" with a period of "renewal" is seductive. She believes the rise of Reform is a symptom of how conservativism has "morphed into much vaguer centrism". Her supporters believe the party's task, as it was after its 1997 defeat, is to "craft a single unifying idea that can repair the rifts between warring factions". Tony Blair, who led the Labour Party to that victory, agrees. "The most important thing for any political party is you've got to have clarity of direction," he told Politico's Power Play podcast.

But is Badenoch the one to repair those rifts? "The more people see of her, the more there is to dislike," said The Guardian's John Crace. However, she is undeniably "the real deal". "There's a purity to her nastiness. A seam of contempt that will almost certainly win her the contest."

Perhaps, but it won't necessarily win the next election, said the BBC. Many Tories are warning against "tacking to the right" and pursuing divisive issues like Jenrick's plan to leave the European Convention on Human Rights or Badenoch's "culture wars" around gender and race.

After all, Conservatives lost seats and voters to Labour and the Lib Dems, as well as Reform. A rightward swing could "permanently alienate more centrist former Conservative supporters", which the leader will need if they are to "restore their party's battered fortunes".

The "overwhelming majority" of voters don't care about internal party politics, said Connor Donnithorne, the Conservative candidate in Camborne & Redruth, who lost the seat to Labour. "You need to be in the common ground of British politics if you want to win." The Conservatives need to focus on issues such as "controlled immigration, lower taxes for working people, and supporting small businesses to create jobs".

"It's about having credibility, it's about being in touch with what people want and it's about delivering what you say you're going to deliver," he said.

What next?

The results of the leadership contest will be announced at 11am on Saturday, at a Conservative Party event in London.

Neither candidate has won support from a majority of MPs, so the winner will only have about a third of the parliamentary party backing them.

Whoever wins is by no means guaranteed to lead the party into the next election either, said Politico. Many Tories suspect the next leader "may not stay the course". A good result in next year's local elections will be crucial, but some are "already speculating that it could be Cleverly or even Boris Johnson" at the helm by then. There is still "plenty of time for yet another dramatic twist in the Tories' chequered fortunes".

There were gasps when James Cleverly was eliminated from the Conservative leadership race yesterday. The shadow home secretary had been the favourite to replace Rishi Sunak, topping the ballot of MPs on Tuesday. But a day later he received only 37 votes, behind Kemi Badenoch on 42 and Robert Jenrick on 41.

"Team Cleverly" has been left with "an entire farmyard's-worth of egg on its face", said Paul Goodman in The Telegraph. There are several theories about what happened as party members are now left to choose between two right-wing candidates.

What did the commentators say?

One "conspiracy theory", said The Times, is that, "buoyed by their candidate's strong performance on Tuesday", Cleverly's team "thought they had enough votes to 'lend' some supporters to Jenrick", thinking a two-man race against him might be easier to win.

One former cabinet minister blamed former defence secretary Grant Shapps, who was "running the numbers" for the Cleverly campaign. "He'll have been a clever dick" but it "clearly backfired", they said. This is something the Cleverly camp has denied.

"Instead of a conspiracy-based effort to sway the contest, what seems more likely is a cock-up," said The Guardian. Although the "immediate suspicion was that something nefarious had been going on", a series of individual MPs were probably "trying to vote in ways they believed might help their candidate", with "unintended consequences". For example, one backer of Tom Tugendhat, who was knocked out of the contest on Tuesday, told reporters they were backing Badenoch in an effort to get Jenrick eliminated.

"This doesn’t need to be organised," another Conservative told The Times. "MPs are quite capable of being mercurial on their own."

All of this means that we have a ballot "that suits nobody, other than perhaps Keir Starmer", said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. Conservative members will choose "between two flavours of 'we lost because we weren't rightwing enough'", which is "usually something an opposition party tells itself right before it loses another election".

By eliminating Cleverly, MPs have "denied members the chance to vote for someone focused on winning back voters from the Liberal Democrats", said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman. This will "delight Ed Davey".

What next?

We will probably "never know what happened – at least not until Cleverly publishes his memoirs", said Cunliffe. But "what we do know is that the next Tory leader will come from the right of the party". 

The two remaining candidates "actually represent quite different strands of the party". Jenrick's pitch was "more populist in nature" and Badenoch is "offering something different and altogether more modern".

In the longer term, yesterday's result "may make the job of uniting even harder" because "both members and MPs may feel that the right candidate didn't get a proper chance", said Isabel Hardman in The Spectator. "That feeling may grow if life in opposition does not prove the tonic that some in the party thought it would." 

Cleverly could find "that he benefits in the long-term from being the one that got away". He could still prevail in one of the "several" leadership elections that might be required "before the party has a chance of winning again".

And "whoever the Tory members select as leader" this time, there's "still a secret challenger ahead", said Goodman. "Never forget that lurking figure in the shadows, pondering how the eventual winner may also come to grief." Boris Johnson's "hopes of a comeback are evergreen".

Rishi Sunak told the Conservative Party to "end the division, the backbiting, the squabbling" in his final speech as leader last week, as he urged Tories to unite behind whoever wins the race to replace him.

Speaking at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, Sunak told delegates that they "mustn't nurse old grudges but build new friendships" as he made a final plea for unity. 

The former prime minister warned the party that if the Conservatives were going to get back into power "then our new leader is going to need your support – and especially when the going gets tough". He urged his fellow Tories to "use this conference to look to the future and ensure that one of our four candidates is not just the next leader of our party but our next prime minister too".

Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick and Tom Tugendhat are the four contenders left in the Tory leadership contest. But each candidate has more to do if they are to convince their party that they are the person to lead the Conservatives out of opposition and back into power.

What did the commentators say?

This weekend's conference didn't feel like that of a party "that has just lost an election, let alone lost one so badly", said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman. As "giant banners bearing the faces of the four leadership contenders" hung in the conference centre "like the flags of medieval knights", the mood was "cheerful, upbeat even".

These leadership hopefuls are "battling it out" to lead a party that currently has just 121 MPs. "So why the disconnect between vibe and reality?" The story the Tories are telling themselves is that "there is an easy – or at least a straightforward – way back from the wilderness", said Cunliffe. If they can "cut the infighting, come up with a solution on immigration and make the case for so-called Conservative values" then the country "will come to its senses, abandon Labour and return to the rightful party of government at the next election".  

That attitude is "far too complacent", said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, on Conservative Home. And alongside this seemingly "baked-in complacency" there are other concerns. First, the leadership contest coming immediately after the election has led to "hasty, ideologically-driven" proposals that are "destined to date badly, and often just plain wrong". Secondly, with Badenoch leading in the polls, the party seems set to elect a leader who believes the answer to failing public services "lies in a smaller state" – despite clear public demand for well-funded services – and who thinks voters "care far more about so-called 'cultural' issues than those very same polls suggest they do".

The Conservatives haven't fully grasped the scale of their loss or the threat posed by Reform, said Philip Johnston in The Telegraph. "Grief is said to have five phases, the first of which is denial." But the Tories "have not moved on to anger, let alone acceptance". Instead of remaining stuck in the past, the Conservative leadership candidates should embrace their spell in opposition as "an opportunity for much bigger thinking than we have seen so far".

What next?

The four leadership contenders have now all had their opportunity to make their pitch to the conference, but even among "political obsessives and Tory members" the speeches have failed to move the dial much, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. 

Perhaps the main reason, as one shadow cabinet minister suggested, is that "this isn't a party that is desperate to return to office", said Bush. "Yes, large numbers of Tories believe they will, thanks to Labour's mistakes, come back to office sooner rather than later." But the party lacks the "desperation to win" that drove their 2010 victory or Labour's in 2024.  And that "is the party's biggest problem".

The former home secretary Priti Patel has been knocked out of the Conservative leadership contest in the first round of voting by Tory MPs.

Polling continues in the coming weeks until the field is reduced to two candidates, leaving party members to pick one of them to be the new leader. After a heavy defeat at the general election, understanding what members want next for the party is key to the hopefuls' chances. But that's easier said than done. "I don't think Tory members themselves know what they want", said Ben Walker in The New Statesman.

What did the commentators say?

Tory members are craving a display of "competence", said Walker, so "they don’t want to see noise over the riots" or "party politicking" but rather "someone to rise above that". There has been a "clear change of perspective" since the party's defeat: they want "someone who can steady the party" but "that doesn’t mean they don't want to be self-indulgent – and choose candidates that reflect their own values and cultural politics".

The challenge is that the leadership race "requires appealing to three tribes", wrote Dr Patrick English, Director of Political Analytics at YouGov, for Conservative Home: their fellow MPs, prospective Tory voters and the party members. "Herein lies the problem", he added, "these audiences are very different".

Recent polling data "sheds light on some extremely tricky mismatches" in public and membership priorities, with the seeming demands from Conservative party members to "shift their party to the right and to appeal to Reform UK voters" being "at odds" with the public mood. So a "lurch to the right" may not be particularly helpful in building public support.

The sense that feeling among party members is more "nuanced" than previously thought was born out by a poll that found only a minority favour Britain leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), said Gordon Rayner, associate editor of The Telegraph.

Only 33% of 1,500 Tory members surveyed said it should be party policy to leave the ECHR, with 29% saying Britain's membership should be reformed and 22% saying the country should remain in an unreformed ECHR.

In recent years, party members have "tended to pick the more right-wing candidate of the final two", said Sam Francis, political reporter of the BBC. For instance, in the first of two leadership elections of 2022, Rishi Sunak "consistently won more support" from MPs than Liz Truss, during each round, before party members "had their say".

While Badenoch "commanded the support of a number of high profile MPs" at her launch, wrote Beth Rigby for Sky News, Cleverly's first event was "instead was filled with party members", with activists saying his "undying loyalty to the party during difficult times" had "won plenty of support with the grassroots".

But a survey of Tory members will "make happy reading for Team Kemi", said Guido Fawkes, as she "pips the polls" at 34%, twice as many as Jenrick, who trails second at 18%. She also "beats all other candidates at a head-to-head contest".

How might Badenoch's opponents turn things around? Rigby thinks that playing to the various membership factions might be a wise move, whichever path the leader hopes to take in the longer term. The hopefuls "may want to take a page out of Starmer's playbook", she wrote, and note how he "engaged with the left during the leadership race", only to "reset in the centre group".

What next?

After Patel's elimination, the five remaining candidates will be "whittled down to four" by Conservative MPs in a further vote next week, said Henry Zeffman, chief political correspondent for the BBC.

Those four will march forward to the party conference, where three days will be "devoted heavily" to "multiple appearances" by the leadership contenders, said Politico's London Playbook. They will be "put through their paces repeatedly" in front of members, including a "fireside chat", a Q&A session and a speech from the main podium.

After the conference, Conservative MPs will again narrow the field, this time to two, before members have the final say. The winner will be announced on 2 November.

Meanwhile, a debate is already underway over how much power party members should wield in the future. Following her elimination, Patel called for party members to have "a greater role in the running our party" in a statement on X.

But, writing in The Times, former leader William Hague said this "will not be the change for which the wider electorate is looking", because voters have a "justified sense" that the Tories were "unable to govern well because of their internal politics".

Tom Tugendhat was eliminated from the Tory leadership contest yesterday in the third round of voting by Conservative MPs. James Cleverly, who was joint fourth with Tugendhat in the previous round, surged into first place with 39 of the 120 votes, overtaking Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch.

Previous front-runner Jenrick dropped to second place after an "underwhelming" party conference performance, said The Guardian. Cleverly gave a better speech, delivering an "upbeat message" while emphasising "his experience in office", said the Financial Times.

But Cleverly's rival campaigners are confident that Badenoch and Jenrick will be more popular with the party membership. "Dogs bark, cats meow, Tory members support the right-wing candidate," a source told the newspaper.

Another contender will be eliminated in a vote today, before the final two are put on a members' ballot. The result will be announced on 2 November.

Robert Jenrick

The former immigration minister began strongly, leading in the opening round of voting before slipping behind in the latest results. Jenrick is a "right-wing champion" who has put "migration, the economy and policing" at the forefront of his campaign to become Tory leader, said London's The Standard. 

The 42-year-old MP for Newark in Nottinghamshire has served in various secretary of state and ministerial roles since 2018, but resigned from his last post in December 2023 over disagreements around Rishi Sunak's immigration bill. 

Jenrick is now the outsider to become the next Tory leader, according to the bookies, sitting at 7/2.

James Cleverly

The last Conservative home secretary is now the frontrunner in the leadership contest with odds of 11/10. The most moderate of the remaining candidates, Cleverly is seen as a "unifying, Michael Howard-type figure" by some Tory quarters and the best chance of bringing a splintered party back together, said The Guardian. 

His critics argue he lacks the "political vision or serious solutions" to be leader, yet he is proving popular with his "well-pitched speeches". The 55-year-old does have a "propensity for gaffes", however, including having to apologise for making a joke about spiking his wife's drink with Rohypnol.

Cleverly says he will bring back the previous government's Rwanda immigration plan if he becomes leader, despite allegedly having described it in private as "batshit".

Kemi Badenoch

After becoming an MP in 2017, Badenoch was fairly quickly tipped as a future leadership candidate after attracting support through her "direct approach and dedication to 'anti-woke' principles", said the BBC.

Despite failing in her bid to replace Boris Johnson in 2022 (though she survived in the contest much longer than expected), the 44-year-old is now second favourite to assume leadership of the opposition at 6/4 odds. 

The former banker has gathered supporters by trying to appeal to people who “may have been tempted to vote for Reform UK", said The Standard. But she has also been caught in controversies, including accusations of bullying (which she denied), posting emails from a journalist on X, and getting caught in a row over maternity pay. 

David Cameron has resigned from Rishi Sunak's shadow cabinet, eight months after his return to frontline politics as foreign secretary.

Announcing the news on X, Cameron, who sits in the House of Lords after being made a life peer in 2023, said it was essential that the shadow foreign secretary should sit in the Commons opposite his government counterpart. His Foreign Office deputy Andrew Mitchell, the Conservative MP for Sutton Coldfield, will replace him. 

Cameron said he remained a "committed Conservative" who would endeavour to help the party "rebuild from the very disappointing election result".

Richard Holden struck a similar note in his resignation as Conservative Party chairman. The MP for Basildon and Billericay, who fended off his Labour rival by just 20 votes with the Reform candidate close behind, said in his resignation letter to Sunak that a "thorough review of the general election campaign" is needed.

Many of the key cabinet briefs remained unchanged, the BBC reported, with Jeremy Hunt continuing in his role as shadow chancellor and James Cleverly staying on as shadow home secretary. But new appointments were required after 12 senior ministers lost their seats in last week's election. James Cartlidge has taken up the role of shadow defence secretary and Ed Argar is shadow justice secretary after Grant Shapps and Alex Chalk were voted out.

Sunak himself said he will stay on as party leader until arrangements for selecting his successor are in place, and allies of the former PM say he has no plans to continue beyond the summer. 

A growing number of MPs are "urging the party's 1922 Committee to opt for a lengthy leadership contest to replace Mr Sunak in order to allow time for a thorough post-mortem and avoid fresh divisions over the summer", The Telegraph said.

However, some senior Tories fear a prolonged leadership contest could allow Reform's Nigel Farage to "position himself as de facto leader of the opposition", said The Guardian.

When Rishi Sunak entered No. 10 in October 2022, buoyed by a well-regarded stint as chancellor, "the hope was that he could pull the party's ratings up to his level".

But in fact, the BBC's former political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, wrote in May, "it is the opposite that has happened". After all Sunak "inherited a political party in a huge mess" and an increasingly unreceptive voting public. As one party insider told Kuenssberg, "after the Tory Party's many bouts of political madness in the past few years, 'the public just doesn't want to listen'".

Here are five key moments in the party's decline:

December 2019: the emperor's new coalition

An 80-seat majority may not seem an obvious harbinger of doom, but "Johnson's victory was much flimsier than it first appeared", wrote John Burn-Murdoch for the Financial Times.

Many of the "red wall" voters who switched their allegiance to the Tories did so out of pragmatism rather than passion. Their vote was a "short-term loan" – and one they were prepared to retract without compunction if the party failed to impress.

And failing to impress was almost inevitable. During the 2019 campaign, the Conservatives had excelled at "being all things to all people". But once actually in power, "that's a lot of different groups left disappointed".

January 2020: the Brexit bubble bursts

When the UK officially left the European Union, the Conservative government was polling at over 50% – and Leave voters were especially hopeful. Between 2015 and 2019, "the proportion of Leave voters who backed the Conservatives jumped from 45% to 74%", wrote Peter Kellner for Prospect. By 2024, only 27% of Leave voters still intend to vote Tory – and Remain voters have fallen away too, albeit at a less precipitous rate.

Why? To put it simply, the benefits of Brexit have failed to materialise. Instead of the promised prosperity, "taxes have gone up, living standards down". With oft-repeated notions that Brexit would lead to lower immigration and investment in the NHS also notable by their absence, it's no wonder that voters "have no real idea any longer what the party stands for".

November 2021: Partygate

On 30 November 2021, the Daily Mirror broke the first story in the lengthy saga that would quickly come to be known as Partygate. The allegations – that government staffers, including Johnson himself, enjoyed social gatherings while the nation was in Covid-19 lockdown – sent both the prime minister and his party "abseiling down the polls", said Politico.

Just before the revelations, the Conservatives were polling at 36% of the vote – by Christmas, that had fallen to 30%, and the Conservatives have not reached that 36% vote share in any YouGov poll since.

Before Partygate, Johnson specialised in shrugging off "career-ending revelations", said the website, but the revelations "ruptured" the notion that "everyone was in the same boat" during lockdown, and unleashed voter fury.

September 2022: the budget that broke Britain

Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng's deceptively named "mini-budget" managed to "trigger" a "domestic financial crisis", said The Guardian's economic correspondent, Richard Partington. The "ideologically driven" blueprint for radical tax cuts sparked a "run on sterling, gilt market freefall and spooked global investors", and ended the Liz Truss premiership just 45 days after it began.

The turmoil severely dented voter confidence. YouGov voting intention polls carried out five days after the budget gave the Labour Party a 33-point lead over the Tories – an increase of 25 points from polls carried out the week before.

June 2023: (re)enter Farage

Nigel Farage – who founded Reform UK as the Brexit Party – surprised even Whitehall insiders by announcing he was returning to frontline politics to lead the party into the election. Within days of the announcement, YouGov voter-intention polling put Reform just one point behind the Conservatives.

While Britain's first-past-the-post voting system means Reform's popularity will not be reflected in the Commons, the Tories "should, frankly, be terrified", wrote Andrew Marr for The New Statesman in June.

Farage, "whatever you think of him, remains one of the best political communicators in the country", and his rhetoric expertly positioned him as "raising the pirate flag" of revolt for the frustrated right-wing. In his sights? The "listing, drifting and battered galleon that is the Tory Party".

If the polls are correct, Labour is on course to win the general election today with one of the biggest majorities Britain has ever seen.

Keir Starmer's party is "virtually certain" to win more seats than they did in 1997 under Tony Blair, according to the latest Survation MRP polling. Its prediction is that Labour will win 485 out of a total of 650 seats; Blair's New Labour won 418 seats in the 1997 landslide. 

Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak's beleaguered Conservative Party looks to be heading for the worst result in its electoral history. The Survation poll says the Tories will only just do well enough to become Britain's official opposition, with 64 MPs compared with the Liberal Democrats' tally of 61. 

What did the commentators say?

It's time for the Conservative Party to "read the writing on the wall", said the former home secretary Suella Braverman in The Telegraph: "it's over and we need to prepare for the reality and frustration of opposition". 

The Conservative vote is "evaporating from both Left and Right", said Braverman. And while critics may "cite Boris, Liz, Rwanda and, I can immodestly predict, even me as all being fatal to our 'centrist' vote", the reality is that the party is "haemorrhaging votes largely to Reform".

That's because the Tories "failed to cut immigration or tax, or deal with the net zero and woke policies we have presided over for 14 years", said Braverman. "There's a reason why insincere posturing isn't fooling anyone now, and it's our record in office." 

After the "daily noise" of the news falls away, the history books will be "quite kind" to Sunak, a prime minister who has "brought an element of political and economic stability to the UK after the absence of either", said the BBC's political editor Chris Mason. 

But the PM also finds himself up against the cold historical fact that "no party has ever won five general elections in a row in modern times", added Mason. 

Sunak may well be far behind in the polls, but anyone who thinks a Labour majority is a "foregone conclusion" should consider recent YouGov research, which suggests swing voters could still deny Labour an election landslide, said the Daily Mail in a leader article.

According to analysis of the data if just 34,000 voters switch to Conservative in marginal constituencies, then Starmer's anticipated majority could be as much as halved – and if 132,000 people were to do so, he could fail to win a majority altogether. 

"That is less than 0.3 per cent of those registered to vote, showing how vulnerable the Labour lead is," said the paper. And there is "precious little love in the country" for Starmer, with his current level of support as a leader "less than Jeremy Corbyn enjoyed in 2017". 

What next?

In an election campaign with little excitement and a "seemingly inevitable result" a "small but very noisy section of the British news media" have turned to opinion polls for their "source of fun", said John Harris in The Guardian. 

Never has a campaign been "so dominated" by polls. The fact that YouGov used MRP polling to "unexpectedly predict 2017's hung parliament" has now given the method  "an air of quasi-scientific magic". The publication of each new MRP poll now is "greeted in some quarters with a huge level of expectation". 

Despite predictions of a "full-blown Starmergeddon, and the advent of a one-party state", until this morning "no one had voted and nothing had actually happened".  And neither can anyone be entirely certain that the predictions are "in any way accurate".

Polls are, of course, sometimes wrong. But if the industry has called this election wrong, "they wouldn't just be wrong, they would be wrong by a bigger magnitude than ever before – just to get to a hung parliament not a Conservative victory", said Paula Surridge, professor of political sociology at the University of Bristol, speaking to The Guardian's First Edition newsletter. 

An exit poll at 10pm this evening will give the first sense of how the country has voted. By 7am almost all seats will have been declared, with the country waking up either to the news of a new Labour government in Westminster – or, far less likely but a possibility – a stunning escape from electoral wipeout by the Conservatives.

"The hurly-burly is almost done," said the Daily Mail: polling day is upon us. The parties spent the final week of the campaign making last-minute pitches to voters. Rishi Sunak urged them not to "surrender" to a Labour "supermajority", warning that it would lead to major tax hikes and pose a threat to national security. Keir Starmer asked voters for a strong mandate to get on with what he called "the change we need". 

At their second head-to-head debate last week, Sunak gave what was widely regarded as his punchiest performance to date, but few expect it to stave off a punishing election defeat for his party. When the PM stunned his colleagues by calling an early election six weeks ago, they "feared the worst", said Katy Balls in The Spectator. Yet what "they originally saw as the worst case scenario now looks like quite a good result". At the time, it seemed plausible that the Tories might hold on to 200 MPs; they now fear they may end up with as few as 50. 

The 2024 election campaign has certainly been eventful, said Jack Blanchard on Politico. Since Sunak launched it during a rainstorm, he's made numerous mistakes, not least his bizarre decision to leave the D-Day commemorations early. We've also had the surprise return of Nigel Farage to front-line politics, and the grimy revelations of the Westminster betting scandal. All of this against the backdrop of a Tory meltdown over their dire polls. "For political nerds, there have been few campaigns like it."

Yet for voters it has been a curiously unengaging exercise. Neither Sunak nor Starmer have meaningfully addressed the big issues facing Britain in 2024, such as the housing crisis, the university funding deficit, or the problem of runaway welfare payments. For the Tories, the campaign has served only to highlight their shortcomings, said The New Statesman. Sunak's D-Day decision betrayed his complete lack of political judgement; the Tories' manifesto, centred on £17bn of "implausible" tax cuts, confirmed the party's "intellectual exhaustion"; the betting scandal exposed its "moral torpor". 

The ousting of the Tories can't come soon enough, said The Guardian. "After 14 years in power, they are a shambles." Just imagine how depressing it would be to wake up and discover that, against the odds, they'd somehow won a fifth term in office. The Conservatives have to go, agreed the FT. Britain needs a fresh start. The Tories have had to deal with numerous external shocks during their stint in government, including the Covid pandemic and Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, but for the most part they've brought disaster on themselves, through their incompetence, infighting and contempt for the rules. "This generation of Tories has squandered its reputation as the party of business, and its claim to be the natural party of government." It needs a spell in opposition to regroup. 

That's the negative case for voting Labour, said The Economist, but there's a positive one, too. The party has changed a lot under Starmer, who has dragged it away from "radical socialism" to a more pragmatic, centrist position. While he may have run a "maddeningly cautious" campaign, he has rightly highlighted the restoration of economic growth as a key priority. Labour is best placed to deliver that growth because its "young, aspiring, urban supporters will give it permission to act in ways that the Conservatives have avoided" – building more houses and infrastructure, for instance, and forging closer links to the EU. 

But voters who seek "change" with Labour, despite the party's "refusal to reveal its full agenda", may come to regret their choice, said The Sunday Telegraph. The last Labour government introduced many reforms that have caused lasting damage: it "vandalised the constitution, began the devolution experiment, hugely increased the size of the state" and left the economy "reliant on mass migration". Who knows what a future Starmer government might do, armed with a massive majority? 

The thought of a Starmer government doesn't terrify me, said Matthew Parris in The Times. His agenda seems reasonable enough. I do fear, though, that his instinctive reaction to problems will always involve more government intervention, leading to an ever-larger state. That's why, although I don't believe the Tories deserve re-election, they'll still get my vote. I hope at least a few other people feel the same, said Robert Colvile in The Sunday Times. "The voters want to give the Tories a kicking. And, boy, are they going to get a kicking." But it would be unhealthy for politics if the party is reduced to a state where it can't even act as an effective opposition.

Thursday's "night of political drama" will begin when the exit poll is published at 10pm, said Tim Glanfield in The Sunday Times. 

This poll is only a sample of voters from 150 constituencies across the UK, but usually provides a pretty accurate picture of how each party has performed. 

The first of 650 constituencies to declare will be Sunderland, a safe Labour seat where a result is due by 11.30pm. By 2am, about 50 more will have been declared – many also safe Labour seats in northern urban areas.

The seats to keep an eye on

Watch the bellweather seat of Nuneaton: the party that wins here has gone on to govern after every election except one since 1983. In Rochdale, we'll see if George Galloway holds the seat he won in February's by-election.

"The excitement will really ramp up" from 3am, when several Tory "big beasts" will discover their fates, said Dominic Penna and Rachel Slater in The Daily Telegraph. They include Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, who is at risk of losing to the Lib Dems – as are ministers Alex Chalk and Gillian Keegan. Others, such as Grant Shapps, Iain Duncan Smith, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and leadership hopeful Penny Mordaunt are at risk of losing to Labour.

The final election results

Sunak's constituency will be declared at about 4am – some polls suggest that even he could slump to a historic defeat.

There are pitfalls for Labour too, said Robert Ford in The Observer. Jeremy Corbyn is challenging his old party in Islington North, a seat he has held for 40 years; shadow culture secretary Thangam Debbonaire's Bristol Central seat is a target for the Greens. Both of those results will be in by 4am, when we'll also find out whether Reform UK's Nigel Farage has won in Clacton, to become an MP at his eighth attempt, said Jamie Grierson in The Guardian.

By 7am, any remaining seats will have been declared – and whoever is set to lead the next government will be preparing to address the nation.

The UK heads to the ballot boxes on Thursday for the long-awaited general election. 

The polls suggest a triumphant night for Labour and Keir Starmer, while Conservative leader Rishi Sunak could be about to preside over an "an extinction-level event for Britain’s oldest and most electorally successful party", said The Guardian.

But election time means a number of quirky traditions, from party colours to comedy candidates. Here are some of the questions you may need answered.

Why are elections held on Thursdays?

Since 1931, general elections have been held on a Thursday. Theories vary as to how this tradition began. The most popular is that Thursdays were chosen to avoid the influence of two forces: the Church and the pub.

It's thought that Fridays were ruled out because people might be more interested in going to the pub than casting their vote and Sundays were also avoided because of a fear that churchgoers "might be swayed by what they heard from the pulpit", said the BBC.

Traditionally, Thursday was a market day, so more people would be going into town that day, making it easier for them to pop into the polling station. Later, Thursdays became early closing day for many shops, and this strengthened the tradition as it meant more people could easily cast their votes.

Why are Labour red and Conservatives blue?

Radical left-wingers adopted a red flag during the 1848 French revolution to symbolise "the blood of angry workers" and it quickly became the colour of the political left, including the Labour Party when it was founded in 1900. Under Tony Blair, the party briefly flirted with a different colour, adopting purple during its 1997 general election broadcasts.

Originally, the Conservatives used the colours of the Union Jack – red, white and blue – but when Labour adopted red, the Tories limited themselves to blue. The formula of red for the more left-leaning party and blue for the right is seen in many countries. A rare exception is the US, where the Democrats are blue and the Republicans are red.

Why do we use pencils in voting booths?

Pens are not provided as there is a risk that they may run out of ink or the ink may leak. Also, explained the Electoral Commission, the ink may cause some transfer of the mark the voter has made on the ballot paper when they fold it, "potentially leading to a rejection" as "it may look like they have voted for more options than they are entitled to".

That said, there is nothing to stop you from bringing your own pen to mark your vote as there is no legal requirement for ballot papers to be marked with a pencil.

What happens if there's a tie?

If the top two candidates get the same number of votes, the returning officer will decide how to choose a winner. This could mean pulling a name out of a hat or even tossing a coin.

Tied votes are rare but in 2017, the Conservatives lost the chance to gain control of Northumberland County Council after they tied with the Liberal Democrats in a crucial ward. The two candidates drew straws after two recounts in South Blyth, and the Liberal Democrats' Lesley Rickerby won after she drew the long straw.

Who is Count Binface?

As the result is called in his Richmond and Northallerton constituency, Rishi Sunak will share the stage with a number of colourful characters: a candidate from the Monster Raving Loony Party, Count Binface and a YouTube prankster.

The "intergalactic space warrior" Count Binface is the "brainchild" of comedy writer and performer Jon Harvey, said The Guardian. In 2017, he debuted as Lord Buckethead, challenging Theresa May in Maidenhead. Two years later, as Count Binface, he ran against Boris Johnson in Uxbridge and South Ruislip.

For general elections, there is a £500 deposit required from candidates, and only those who gain at least 5% of the vote get their deposit returned. Most joke candidates "profoundly fail", said the BBC, including Catherine Taylor-Dawson, who stood for Vote For Yourself Rainbow Dream Ticket in Cardiff North in 2005 and received just one vote.

What ID will I need to vote?

Acceptable forms of ID include a passport, driving licence, Proof of Age Standards Scheme cards, Blue Badges and some concessionary travel cards. Ministers said they intend to make veterans' ID cards a valid form of voter identification after former service personnel were turned away from polling stations at local elections in May.

Can I take a selfie as I vote?

No, you shouldn't take selfies inside the polling station as it might put the secrecy of the ballot at risk and you could end up breaking the law.

Also, sharing a photo of your ballot paper could put you in breach of the law and you could find yourself facing six months in prison if you inadvertently reveal how someone else has voted.

If the polls are right, this general election could deliver the most "lopsided" results in modern history, said The Guardian. The Labour Party looks set to enter Downing Street with "a record number of seats and an immense majority", despite receiving slightly fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn in 2019. 

The latest YouGov MRP poll projects Labour taking 39% of the vote, and winning 425 seats, its largest-ever number; the Tories, with 22%, would have only 108 seats. Our first-past-the-post (FPTP) system is notoriously unfair to third parties, but this time the outcome would be particularly "skewed". Nigel Farage's Reform UK, according to YouGov, would come third, with 15% of votes, but would win only five seats; by contrast the Lib Dems, with only 12% of the vote, would get 67. In short, this election "could make the case for proportional representation (PR)".

'PR for foreigners'

FPTP has long been defended on the grounds that it roots MPs in their local community and provides stable governments, said Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. "PR was for foreigners, typically Italian, who like being governed by chaotic coalitions" collated from party lists. But that case now looks less convincing. "The two-party system is dying." 

Smaller parties have emerged to represent "the disenfranchised" and "the discontented": the SNP, Reform UK, the Greens. Yet elections are still delivering results as if we were living under two mass-membership parties, circa 1945. Curiously, this is one part of the political system Keir Starmer doesn't want to reform. "Votes for 16-year-olds, Lords reform, yes." But why would he "tinker with an electoral system that hands him Napoleonic powers"?

'Screwed by the system'

Still, the Lib Dems, long the victims of FPTP, have shown a way to adapt to it, said Andrew Adonis in Prospect. Experts in "tactical opposition", they have built up their support so that it is concentrated in a hundred or so seats, mainly in the southwest and the Home Counties.

FPTP has always had its "quirks", said John Burn-Murdoch in the FT. But the "mismatch between votes and seats" is becoming much harder to wave away. And it's not clear that it "ensures greater political stability" and moderates the influence of extreme parties, as its defenders claim.

Analysis by the group Make Votes Matter shows that governments actually stay in power longer under PR than under FPTP. And if next week it deprives smaller parties of seats, its effect will be to boost populists like Farage by leaving "millions of voters with a justifiable sense of having been screwed by the system". It's time for change. "The make-up of Britain's Parliament should reflect the views of Britain's voters, not the peculiarities of its electoral system."

Whoever wins the general election, taxes will rise. 

On the face of it, the Tories are touting a £17bn package of tax cuts, the biggest being a cut in the main rate of national insurance (NI) for employees. Labour promises to get by with limited tax increases, worth £8.6 billion, and has specifically ruled out hikes on "working people": income tax, national insurance and VAT. 

But the consensus among economists is that neither major party is being honest with voters. Current government plans imply large real-terms cuts over the next few years in spending to departments that aren't protected by specific commitments (i.e. Health, Education and Defence). Barring an implausible uptick in growth, both parties face shortfalls if they are to avoid real-terms cuts to "unprotected" services such as courts, prisons, policing, legal aid and further education by the end of next parliament in 2028/29, says the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). Tory plans imply a £10 billion to £20 billion shortfall forecast; Labour would need an extra £6 billion to £16 billion.

Why are public finances under pressure?

It is widely acknowledged that public services are crumbling after years of austerity, and that local councils face a funding crisis. Yet the UK's economic situation is still very tight. Extra borrowing to finance the fallout from the Covid pandemic and the Ukraine War energy shock, along with high interest rates and persistently low growth, have pushed up the ratio of debt to national income to an uncomfortable 97.9% of gross domestic product (GDP). Tax cuts are a tall order. But that's a difficult message for an electorate already labouring under a tax burden now at its highest level since the Second World War. Hence both parties' reliance on stealth taxes to fill the coffers, particularly the dark art of "fiscal drag".

What exactly is fiscal drag?

Freezing tax thresholds, rather than raising them with inflation, so that more people are drawn into paying higher taxes – even though tax rates ostensibly remain unchanged. In the aftermath of Liz Truss's disastrous mini-Budget in autumn 2022, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt froze both the tax-free "personal allowance" (currently at £12,570 for those earning under £100,000) and the higher-rate 40% tax threshold (£50,270) until 2028. Labour has confirmed that it will leave these thresholds untouched. The upshot, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, is that some 7.5 million Britons will have moved bands by 2028, generating an increase in Treasury tax receipts of over £34 billion a year from 2028. It's a classic example of "the art of taxation", as Louis XIV's finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, described it: "plucking the goose so as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing".

What would Tory tax cuts do?

Most workers would be better off as a result of the manifesto plan to cut the main rate of NI by two further percentage points (from 8% to 6%) – worth around £450 for a worker on a typical salary of £35,400 (though they would lose £150 to fiscal drag). The Tories have also promised a "triple lock plus" on pensions, which will raise the tax-free allowance to keep it untaxed – a bung to older voters that could backfire if it draws attention to the fiscal drag dogging everyone else. The Conservatives also plan to boost the housing market by permanently abolishing stamp duty for first-time buyers on homes worth less than £425,000, though critics point out this would likely add to housing demand when the problem is lack of supply.

How would they pay for this?

They say that this £17 billion package of last-minute goodies will be paid for by a lightning-fast £12 billion reduction in the welfare bill, and a £6 billion clampdown on tax avoidance/evasion. Growing health-related benefits are likely to be the main target. But this would involve, say, getting roughly one million people (19% of the total) off health-related benefits, or applying big cuts to all claimants' payments, says the IFS. This seems implausible.

Do Labour's plans hold water?

Not as so far stated. Keir Starmer and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves have said that they have "no plans" for tax rises beyond a handful of announced measures – including VAT on private school fees, ending the use of offshore trusts to avoid inheritance tax, clampdowns on "non-doms" and private equity bonuses, and a bigger windfall tax on energy companies. Critics think that is disingenuous. Although Rishi Sunak's claim that Labour would raise taxes by £2,000 "for everyone" has largely been debunked, this manifesto is notable for what isn't included. Though some hikes have been ruled out, others have been left on the table. Labour's tax-raising plans are "trivial" considering its ambitious proposals, says Paul Johnson of the IFS – for instance, to spend £17.5 billion over five years on its "green prosperity plan", and the likely pressure it will face to increase spending on public services.

Where would the necessary cash come from?

Changes to wealth taxes, such as inheritance tax (IHT) and capital gains tax (CGT), and a revamp of pension rules look like the most fruitful sources. An easy win would be to remove the exemption of pension funds from IHT introduced in 2015, or targeting the £15 billion in annual tax relief currently handed back to higher-rate taxpayers who save into pensions. Attention has particularly centred on CGT (currently charged at 10-28%, compared with the current 45% top rate of income tax) on the sale of assets including shares, property and businesses – though Starmer made a rare clarification: that the party would not charge capital gains tax on the sale of primary residences. Labour has been outflanked on the Left by the Lib Dems, who have pledged an additional £27 billion in spending for health and public services, funded by a rise in CGT and various levies.

Balancing the government books

In 2023/24, UK government spending was estimated to be £1.2 trillion, some £17,000 per person, and around 45% of the total size of the economy, as measured by GDP. (By contrast, in 2022, the US spent 36% of GDP, Germany 49%, and France 58%.) Around two-thirds of the total is "day-to-day" spending on public services, such as health (the biggest, at just over £200bn), schools and prisons. Around a quarter is spent on social security, such as universal credit and the state pension (which costs £124 billion, the largest item in the welfare budget). The remainder can be split into interest on government debt (around 8% of the total in 2023/24, above the recent norm because of high interest rates) and government investment (around 5%).

By contrast, the government's total income in 2023/24 was nearly £1.1 trillion. About two-thirds of receipts came from three sources: income tax (£277 billion), national insurance contributions (£180 billion) and VAT (£170 billion). Corporation tax contributed £103 billion, and council tax £45 billion. About £95 billion was generated from "other sources", largely income from public corporations such as social housing. The deficit, the difference between public spending and receipts, was £121 billion.

A senior Conservative has been accused of placing an £8,000 bet that he would lose his Westminster seat.

Philip Davies, who is defending a 6,242-vote majority in Shipley, West Yorkshire, at the general election, told The Sun that the sum involved was "nobody's business", that he "fully expected to lose" the seat and that he had done nothing illegal.

A string of MPs are being investigated by the Gambling Commission and there are growing calls for the rules to be tightened or for MPs to be banned from betting completely. 

What did the commentators say?

Concern over gambling on politics has been around since betting shops were legalised in the 1960s, said Politics Home. From then bookmaker William Hill worried that "it could become an evil if sensational reports of the odds were published" and "it could sway public opinion and make people vote according to their stake instead of according to their conviction".

Insider betting, which is what the Conservatives currently being investigated by the Gambling Commission are accused of, is already illegal. But there have now been calls for MPs to be banned from betting entirely.

Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory party leader and deputy chair of the all-parliamentary group on gambling-related harm, said MPs shouldn't bet on politics, because politics is "what we do" and "betting on it shows a disregard for the seriousness" of it. Tory MP Tobias Ellwood told BBC Radio 4’s "Today" that we should "prevent any current politician or party professional from placing any bets in the future".

Asked by Times Radio whether politicians should "just be banned" from placing bets, Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, replied: "Yeah, quite possibly, and I think we do need to have a debate about it."

This suggestion "would have looked absurd two weeks ago and is still absurd now", said Henry Hill on Conservative Home. "Any comparison with sport is spurious" as "there is no evidence that politicians are deliberately trying to lose races to win bets", and there is "no even theoretical misalignment of incentives if they bet on themselves to win". So any new regulation would "just be a press-management strategy", designed to "make this story go away by assuring the newspapers that something has been done". 

The debate has "ballooned into an unhelpful and unnecessary war on politicians betting altogether", said William Atkinson in The Spectator, with "confected" media outrage "whipped up" against a "harmless habit". "Ill-tempered moralism" is "never a good position from which to legislate, regulate, or investigate", so "those getting on their high horses" about political betting "should be careful not to crucify a long-standing and inoffensive bit of fun" in a "media witch-hunt".

Speaking to the Financial Times, Anthony Pickles, assistant professor in social anthropology at the University of Birmingham, said it would be very difficult to define any ban's limits. "Should unpaid political advisers be barred from political gambling? What about newspaper columnists?" he asked.

What next?

Five Conservatives are being investigated by the Gambling Commission, the industry regulator, for placing election bets, but "reports suggest the number of politicians involved is much higher", said the London Evening Standard.

Rishi Sunak said "the integrity" of that investigation "should be respected", but "what I can tell you is, if anyone is found to have broken the rules, not only should they face the full consequences of the law, I will make sure that they are booted out of the Conservative Party".

A Labour candidate has also been suspended by the party after betting against himself, with the Gambling Commission also launching an investigation into him. The outcome of the various investigations will go a long way to determining whether a full ban will be imposed.

Nigel Farage has made no bones about his desire for Reform UK to supplant the Conservatives as the main opposition to Labour following next week's general election.

Political commentators and many voters may scoff at the idea that a party with no current MPs could replace one of the most electorally successful political entities in the history of democracy, but "there is a playbook for this", said The Telegraph's Philip Johnston.

Just such a surprise victory in Canada in 1993 has "acquired a near mythical status on the populist right". And the parallels with the UK today – a Conservative administration in office for over a decade and led by a relatively new prime minister – are "uncanny".

What happened to Canada's Conservatives?

It is "difficult to overstate the magnitude" of what happened at the 1993 Canadian federal elections, said the UK in a Changing Europe think tank.

Just five years earlier, under then prime minister Brian Mulroney, the Progressive Conservatives (PC) had won a second consecutive majority with 43% of the vote. Following the 1993 election, they were reduced to two seats in Canada's 295-seat Parliament. "They had official party status removed, and were effectively supplanted by Canada's Reform Party, which became the broad home of right-wing voters" said City A.M.

The result "fundamentally altered the country's political landscape" said The Guardian, and "shattered the notion that only the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives were the rightful parties of government".

"The lessons of 1993 are that the worst-case scenario can happen," said political analyst Éric Grenier at the Writ. "Just because you've been around forever doesn't mean that you will be around forever. You can have the kind of election that requires you to restart a party and to come back from almost zero."

As UK Conservatives faces the prospect of a comparable defeat, political historians say Canada's recent past offers "lessons on the challenges of tempering populist rumbles – and the steep electoral losses that can follow", said The Guardian.

What happened to Canada's Reform Party?

"Huge, huge, huge," said Farage when he was asked about how important the former leader of Canada's Reform Party has been in shaping his campaign.

Founded and led by Preston Manning, initially as a protest movement, Reform won its first seat in Canada's parliament in a by-election in Alberta in 1989. Campaigning on a "populist agenda, which included creating an elected Senate, abolishing official bilingualism and broadly reducing the size of government" at the 1993 federal election, Reform "stormed to prominence, winning 52 seats and replacing the Progressive Conservatives as the voice of Western Canada" said the national broadcaster CBC News.

In less than a decade, rebranded as the Conservative Alliance, the party swept to power under Stephen Harper, who served as prime minister for nine years.

"In the end they sort of 'reverse took over' the old Conservative Party – they are the model," said Farage. "That's the plan." 

Will it happen in the UK?

There are some "almost exact parallels with the current political moment in the UK", said the London Evening Standard: the economy was failing, a conservative incumbent had recently replaced its leader, and it was up against a young, insurgent right-wing party named Reform. The "most significant similarity" between Westminster and Canada may be that both use first past the post (FPTP), "a system that has the potential to significantly skew how votes are converted into MPs".

If the polls are correct, the Conservatives are heading for a cataclysmic defeat on 4 July. 

Clearly, there are "several similarities between the difficulties they confront and the PC’s dire situation in 1993", said UK in a Changing Europe. But "as dim as the prospects are for the Tories, they are unlikely to suffer an electoral rout on the same scale due to the much more territorialised nature of the Canadian party system".

In the 1993 Canadian election, "regional issues were highly salient, and whereas the PC vote share was geographically diffuse and highly inefficient, two of their main competitors benefitted from having regionally concentrated support".

That Reform UK does not have the "geographical base in the same way that Reform in Canada had" poses Farage's real problem in Britain's FPTP system, as his party will struggle to translate votes into seats, Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, told CBC News.

If Labour returns to power next week, it is "likely that the Conservatives will be the biggest opposition party", said Prospect magazine. "What is remarkable is that the question is even worth asking."

Labour has reaffirmed its commitment to "modernise, simplify and reform" the process of legally changing gender.

The party has said its plans will "remove indignities for trans people who deserve recognition and acceptance" but also provide "protections so you can't legally change your gender overnight".

In response, Tory leadership hopeful Kemi Badenoch, the women and equalities minister, said this would "unravel all the protections in the current system designed to protect women and girls" and create "loopholes for predators and bad-faith actors to infiltrate women-only spaces and put us at risk".

What is Labour's position?

Under existing laws, transgender people wishing to have their new gender legally recognised must obtain a gender recognition certificate (GRC).

Labour plans to remove what it terms outdated elements of this process, including consent from a spouse if the person is married and the requirement to prove the applicant has lived as their preferred gender for two years. This will be replaced with a two-year "reflection" period after the application has been submitted. A panel of doctors and lawyers that currently approves GRCs will also be replaced by a single doctor specialising in gender issues, who will be able to provide a medical report supporting the gender change.

Plans to introduce a controversial self-ID law, which would remove the need for a medical diagnosis altogether, have been abandoned.

Has Labour's stance changed?

The proposals set out this week are "largely the same" as those outlined last year by Labour's national policy forum, said The Guardian. Nonetheless, said The Times, they are "likely to heighten concern among critics over Labour's approach to transgender issues".

Keir Starmer appeared to change his position on transgender rights during Thursday's BBC "Question Time" election special. Last year, the Labour leader said "99.9% of women" do not have a penis and in 2021 stated it was "not right" for Labour MP Rosie Duffield to say that "only women have a cervix". But on Thursday night he said he agreed with former Labour leader Tony Blair's position that "biologically, a woman is with a vagina and a man is with a penis".

In April, shadow cabinet member Louise Haigh suggested Labour should be a "safe space" for gender-critical but not transphobic opinions, amid fresh party tensions over gender in the wake of the Cass review.

Speaking on Times Radio this morning, the shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said: "I think at times in pursuit of inclusion, we've ended up in a position where women have felt excluded, biological women have felt excluded." He added that he was "very optimistic" that Labour could find a way to address both the rights of biological women and trans women in the debate.

How do Labour compare to the Conservatives?

As part of its manifesto, the Conservatives have promised to rewrite the Equality Act so that it only offers protections on the basis of a person's biological sex.

At present, sex, along with race, disability and sexual orientation, is a protected characteristic and the act makes it illegal to discriminate against someone on those grounds. The Conservatives do not want the term "sex" to apply to those who have changed their legal sex, said Context, in order to "protect female-only spaces and competitiveness in sport".

In contrast, Labour has said it supports the Equality Act as it is, "including its exemptions that allow for the provision of single-sex spaces in certain circumstances", said the news site.

The two parties also differ on how children are taught about sex and gender in schools. 

Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson has suggested she would scrap planned Tory guidelines on "gender ideology" in schools. The guidance, which was set to come into effect in the coming months, says pupils should not be taught
"that people can be born the wrong sex and that they can change their identity to the opposite sex or other categories such as 'non-binary'", said The Telegraph.

Responding to accusations that the wording had "drifted far too much into partisan and unnecessary language", Education Secretary Gillian Keegan warned a Labour government "would play politics with the lives of our children by ripping up guidance on gender-questioning children".

A fourth Conservative Party official is being investigated by the gambling watchdog in a growing scandal that has engulfed the Tories 10 days before the general election.

Nick Mason, the party's chief data officer, has been informed by the Gambling Commission that he is part of their inquiry into bets being placed on the timing of the election, said The Sunday Times. The Conservative Party has said he has now taken a leave of absence.

Mason is the latest person to be implicated in the scandal, which erupted last week. Those involved include a police officer who was part of Rishi Sunak's protection team and Sunak's parliamentary private secretary Craig Williams, the Tory candidate for Montgomeryshire and Glyndwr, who has admitted placing a bet on the date of the election and is facing an investigation. Tony Lee, the party's director of campaigns, and his wife Laura Saunders, the Tory candidate for Bristol North West, are also under investigation.

What did the commentators say?

Contempt was "oozing" from the audience as Sunak appeared for his BBC "Question Time" grilling on Thursday night, said Rosa Prince on Politico. As Fiona Bruce "read out the charge sheet" concerning the latest scandal, Sunak "appeared a broken man". 

Speaking to a largely hostile audience, the prime minister said he was "incredibly angry, incredibly angry, to learn of these allegations". He admitted that it is "a really serious matter – it's right that they're being investigated properly by the relevant law enforcement authorities". And he added that "if anyone is found to have broken the rules, not only should they face the full consequences of the law, I will make sure that they are booted out of the Conservative Party."

But despite the strong words, the antipathy towards Sunak "was clear from the moment the prime minister entered the room", said Prince. "His responses were a death rattle, the atmosphere heated, tense".

Political scandals in Britain "do not have to involve large sums of money, but they linger in the public imagination if they feel politicians have been acting with impunity", said Dan Sabbagh and Jim Waterson in The Guardian. 

It was 15 years ago that dozens of MPs were forced out of Parliament after the expenses scandal, with one memorably forced to quit "after asking taxpayers to pay £1,645 for an ornamental duck house". And it was Sunak's predecessor but one, Boris Johnson who was forced out of office just two years ago for another scandal — the so-called "Partygate" affair.

"There was a terrible human smallness" to the Partygate scandal, said Sam Leith in The Spectator, "and there's a terrible human smallness to the scandal now". Even if "you're not the sort of person for whom self-respect, or respect for the party with which you're affiliated and its traditions, or basic moral principle have any real sway" then one is still left with "a cold calculation of interest". What the scandal has revealed is that there appears to be a "dismaying number of such people in positions of trust at the top of the Conservative party" and that "the calculation of interest they are making is that there's nothing parliamentary Conservatism can now offer them that's worth more than a few hundred quid from Ladbrokes".

"The danger of this scandal, I think, is that it's pretty funny," said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. The Conservative Party has long had to battle the perception it is the "nasty party", he wrote, "but I do not foresee that it will win elections anytime soon when it looks hapless and silly – and this story makes it look both". 

What next?

Campaign officials and Tory MPs are reportedly "braced for the possibility of more party figures being named as under investigation for election-related bets in coming days", said the Financial Times, with one Tory insider describing the party as in "freefall", with the scandal just the latest blow in a beleaguered campaign.

The decision to keep Williams and Saunders as Conservative Party candidates has reportedly "sparked anger" within the party, with many believing that support should be withdrawn even if it is now too late to remove them from the ballot papers ahead of the 4 July election. 

Of the 650 MPs in the House of Commons, 135 have announced they will not be standing at the election on 4 July – so a new generation of politicians is about to take office. 

Among the famous faces departing are 22 current and former secretaries of state. Most notable are former prime minister Theresa May, former deputy PM Dominic Raab and current levelling-up secretary Michael Gove among the Tories, while former Labour ministers Harriet Harman and Margaret Hodge are also not seeking re-election. They are joined by Ian Blackford, the former Westminster leader of the SNP, two current deputy speakers, Rosie Winterton and Eleanor Laing, and the chairs of 10 select committees.

By far the highest number of MPs standing down are from the Conservative Party, with 78 heading for pastures new. While MPs retire for all sorts of reasons, "the thought that their party could be heading for another historic drubbing and a long spell in opposition is sure to be playing on Tory minds", said the BBC.

So who are the next generation of MPs that will shape the future of British politics? The Week takes a look at four of the brightest prospects.

Darren Jones

Keir Starmer's shadow chief secretary to the Treasury emerged as a rising star thanks to his role as chairman of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Select Committee. It was on TikTok primarily where footage of "his pithy and often brutal grillings of evasive ministers and hapless executives" went viral, said Jane Merrick on the i news site. 

Jones was elected to the Commons in 2017, when Jeremy Corbyn eliminated Theresa May’s majority, but "he is no Corbynista", said The Guardian. It was the policies of Tony Blair's 1997 Labour government that transformed his life, he told the paper. "It should be, in my view, at the heart of our plan to transform the country, and at the heart of our political vision – but you would have to anchor it in people's concerns and experiences," he said. 

Now destined for a prominent role in a future Starmer cabinet, Jones has the opportunity to practise what he preached.

Katie Lam

A former adviser to Boris Johnson and Suella Braverman, Lam's selection for "what is expected to be a safe constituency the Tories should win" in Weald of Kent, said the Kent Messenger, underlines her future prospects. 

Lam was deputy chief of staff to Johnson in No. 10 and a vice-president at Goldman Sachs. Following in some illustrious footsteps she was also president of the Cambridge Union but is perhaps most well-known as an "award-winning lyricist behind Broadway and West End shows", said the Messenger. Lam penned the lyrics to a musical adaptation of "The Railway Children", so perhaps a role at the Department for Transport could be appropriate should Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives pull off an unlikely victory.

Carla Denyer

After 14 years, Caroline Lucas, the Green party’s sole MP, will stand down at the next election but ready to take her place in the party's somewhat limited limelight is Denyer. 

Looking to win the Labour seat of Bristol Central, Denyer served as a local councillor from 2015 to 2024. She was named by the Women's Engineering Society as one of the UK's top 50 women in engineering due to her work on the climate emergency motion and also featured in Bristol Live's Pink List of the most influential LGBT+ people in Bristol. 

"Obviously, I'm not going to have the keys to Number 10," Denyer told Politico. "But as we've already seen with Caroline Lucas in Westminster, having a Green in the room has allowed her to ask questions, put forward motions, put things on the agenda that were simply not on the agenda before," she said. "That's what Greens can do." 

Zarah Sultana

The Labour MP for Coventry South is the youngest Muslim MP ever elected in this country and carries the twin distinction of being the most followed British politician on TikTok and also the most abused online. She told Elle: "I'm a woman, I'm young, I'm Muslim, I'm left wing. When people attack me, it's usually for one – or all – of those reasons." 

Since her election in 2019, Sultana has been praised for delivering "speeches on issues that matter to her", said the London Evening Standard. These include "ending child hunger, stopping gas licences in favour of a Green New Deal, free healthcare, and providing better pay to rail workers to end strikes". Sultana's left-wing credentials could be just the ticket for Starmer to prove Labour is a broad church when it comes to choosing a potential cabinet.

The value of the pound shot up after news that the UK's rate of inflation had eased in May to the Bank of England's target of 2%, for the first time in three years.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that Consumer Price Index (CPI) growth fell from 2.3% in April, "delivering a fillip" to Rishi Sunak as he tries to "turn around his struggling election campaign", said the Financial Times. "The figure marks a milestone for the UK economy after the worst inflationary upsurge in a generation."

However, sterling "eased back slightly" after it emerged that, despite easing in CPI, services inflation was "stickier than expected", said Sky News. That fell to just 5.7% in May – higher than forecast, which reduced the chance that the Bank of England (BoE) would cut interest rates in June. The Monetary Policy Committee is now expected to keep interest rates at a 16-year high of 5.25%.  

What did the commentators say?

The figures are a "rare nugget of good news" for the prime minister, who called the general election on the day the April figures were published, said Politico's London Playbook. Inflation is "back to target", said Sunak, "and that means people will start to feel the benefits and ease some of the burdens on the cost of living". 

Taking credit for that was "a piece of chutzpah" from Sunak, said Sky News business presenter Ian King. But unless there is a "major global shock", nothing like the peak inflation of 11.1% in October 2022 is expected again "any time soon", said business reporter Daniel Binns. The housing market is also continuing to "show signs of recovery from the slowdown in late 2022 and 2023". 

But rents – which recently hit a record high – are continuing to increase, according to the ONS. The economy has also not yet dealt with the effects of attacks by Yemen's Houthi rebels on cargo ships in the Red Sea, said assistant economics professor at Durham University, Michael Nower, in The Conversation. Shipping costs are up 150% since December 2023 – which will continue to "feed through into inflation". Domestically, "productivity growth remains persistently low".

In terms of business, "the economic lifeblood of the UK is actually strong", said Michael McLintock, the chairman of city investor group The Investor Forum. The UK has the most unicorns (start-ups with a value of at least $1 billion) in Europe. 

But "three decades of regulatory creep" has "diluted Britain's risk appetite and fuelled a vicious cycle of lower returns and lower growth", said The Telegraph's economics editor Szu Ping Chan. 

The 2008 recession "reinforced a growing culture of risk aversion that leading figures in the City warn will be hard to unpick". A lack of capital and investment has also left the UK "increasingly dependent on immigration to grow the economy".

Britain is actually "starving" for public investment, wrote academic Adrian Pabst in The New Statesman – with some of the "lowest levels" in the West". A new IPPR report this week, titled "Rock Bottom", placed the UK 35th in the 38-country OECD. 

But the fiscal target of limiting the annual budget to 3% of GDP, and reducing it over five years, "acts as a further brake" on investment. But this "stale fiscal orthodoxy" discourages the very thing on which "higher economic growth, higher productivity and higher living standards depend". And judging by both parties' manifestos, it looks set to continue. "At a time when Britain needs to revive an active state, this is a self-imposed straitjacket." 

What next?

The BoE expects inflation to "tick up again later this year", which could contribute to "caution" in cutting interest rates, said Binns. Most predict the BoE may delay cutting interest rates until September.

But at the end of the day, wrote John Stepek in Bloomberg UK's Money Distilled newsletter, "whether there's a rate cut in August, September or even as late as November (gasp!) will make very little difference to the personal finances of anyone who isn't a City trader." The chances of rates returning to levels typical in the 2010s are "extremely low". Neither Starmer nor Sunak will get them down to sub-1% rates – "a good thing, by the way", to avoid another financial crisis.

The longer-term impact of artificial intelligence should not be discounted, said Nower in The Conversation. "The AI revolution, which the UK is embracing" is predicted to have a similar impact to the so-called "ICT revolution", which contributed to a fifth of UK GDP growth from 1989 to 1998.  

But whichever party becomes the next government, it "needs to put forward a credible 10-year plan of public investment to the tune of 5% of GDP a year", said Pabst. "Only then is there hope for a genuine decade of national renewal."

Nigel Farage has set out a two-election strategy that he claims paves the way for him to be elected as prime minister after his Reform UK party becomes the main opposition to Labour.

Speaking yesterday before launching his party's manifesto, called "Our Contract With You", Farage said he hoped the upcoming 4 July election would result in Reform establishing a "bridgehead" in the House of Commons. He would then build a "big national campaigning movement around the country over the course of the next five years for genuine change".

The "real ambition", he said, was to clinch the top job at the next election, which must be held in 2029 at the latest.

What did the commentators say?

The most obvious route to No. 10 for Farage would involve staging a "reverse takeover of the Conservatives", said the i news site. He has "made no bones about his desire to see the Conservatives 'destroyed' and for him to pick up the pieces to shape the remnants of whatever is left in his own image".

But the choice of Merthyr Tydfil for Monday's manifesto launch was telling, said UnHerd. Far from the fabled Red Wall, the South Wales town has been solidly Labour for more than a century.

For Farage, "that seems to be the point". The former Ukip leader "barely bothered with the Tories in his remarks, but rather set out a two-election strategy to establish Reform as the true opposition to Labour" and then "storm to power in 2029".

That has a "fleetingly plausible ring to it", said The Independent's chief political commentator John Rentoul, "and sounds less like a snake-oil preacher predicting the Rapture" – unlike the two pages of "costings" at the end of the "contract" document, which "look like a ChatGPT version of something the Institute for Fiscal Studies might endorse".

For all the oxygen that Farage's return to front-line politics has taken up, debate continues about how popular his policies actually are with the wider public and if the manifesto is really a winning platform with the electorate.

"The mainstream elite in the media and in politics who claim to oppose Farage, and who pretend to stand as a bulwark against far-right politics, are again duly buying into the hype he has created for himself," said Aurelien Mondon, senior lecturer in politics at Bath University, on The Conversation.

What next?

Farage may be right when he said that UK politics was becoming more "presidential-style", with people voting for leaders rather than parties. But strong poll numbers do not necessarily translate into power in a first-past-the-post parliamentary system. Even in a best-case scenario, Reform will enter the next Parliament with just a handful of MPs.

Should the Tories suffer a near-extinction level event, Farage will still "not be the leader of the opposition, and he will not be the 'real' leader of the opposition", said Rentoul. "He will be a lonely figure at the back of the far end of the opposition benches." And while "the 'What to do about Nigel' question may continue to split the Tory party", the "prospect of a reverse takeover, of the larger entity by the smaller, will remain distant".

If Farage is "serious about spearheading a movement, is Reform really the right vehicle for it", asked Sky News's deputy political editor Sam Coates. Or "is a broken Conservative Party a better host for his ambition", given that "there is a chance the membership could well elect him leader if he ever got into the last two candidates in a contest to run the party"?

Farage has repeatedly side-stepped questions about whether he would rejoin the Tories to lead them, probably because he "genuinely has not ruled out the possibility, depending on the success or otherwise of Reform UK and the makeup of the Conservative Parliamentary party after 5 July".

"He is clearly enjoying himself – the TikTok videos, the TV interviews, the campaign events… It's all part of his love of publicity and the airtime which Reform's position in the polls gives him right now," said Laura Kuenssberg on the BBC.

But questions remain about whether he genuinely wants to be PM – or even become an MP, with all the limits that entails.

"He's just a reality TV star," said a source quoted by Kuenssberg. "Going to the jungle wasn't leaving the political arena, it was coming home."

More than 100 seats in the general election "could be ripe for tactical voting", said The Independent.

Analysis by the paper, using data from YouGov's latest MRP poll, found that almost half of the Tories' projected wins would have a margin of less than five points, making them vulnerable. The Conservatives might also be eyeing up some tactical voting wins if they can persuade Reform UK voters to back them.

How does it work?

Voters deliberately choose not to vote for their first-choice candidate, usually because their favourite has little chance of winning. They might opt for their second choice if they think it will stop another party from getting into power. For instance, if a Labour voter lives in a marginal seat that is closely contested by the Conservatives and the Lib Dems, they may vote Lib Dem to keep the Tories out.

Tactical voting websites claim to show the most likely contenders in each constituency, based on polls or previous elections, and some recommend which party to choose in order to keep another out of government.

Has it worked before?

When the Conservatives have suffered landslide defeats in the past – as they did in 1906, 1945 and 1997 – "these have been at the hands of co-ordinated anti-Tory coalitions", said The Economist. And "another such coalition may be forming now".

Widespread disillusionment with 14 years of Tory rule has combined with Keir Starmer's efforts to move Labour to the centre, making it easier for Liberal Democrat voters to countenance backing his party. By contrast, Reform UK appears much less likely to back the Conservatives in order to stop progressive candidates winning.

One of the "striking features of local elections and parliamentary by-elections in this parliament has been the incredible willingness of Labour voters to vote Liberal Democrat, and vice versa", said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. But we don't know if this will translate to the general election, which has a lower proportion of engaged voters.

"Less politically engaged voters, who are more likely to vote in a general election than in by-elections, may not be as attuned to these possibilities", said The Economist.

A survey carried out by Deltapoll last year found that just 52% of voters could correctly identify the winning party in their local area, dropping to 19% when asked who came second.

Will it make a difference in 2024?

There is a "mixed mood" among party insiders on how big a role tactical voting tools will play, said Politico. "Skeptics say British voters just aren't clued up enough on the finer points of the country's system to get tactical voting really firing."

Constituency boundary changes, which represent a once-in-a-generation shake-up in the electoral map from the last general election in 2019, have made it even harder to work out which party has the best chance of winning.

Like in previous elections, said Joe Twyman, director of polling firm Deltapoll, it might turn out to be the "case of the dog that failed to bark".