Labour and Lib Dems attack Tories’ record — as it happened

• Who will win the general election 2024? Latest poll tracker

However, the Labour leader was forced to defend his package of workers’ rights reforms against a fresh barrage of criticism from trade unions, after The Sunday Times revealed the policy had been rebranded to reassure spooked business leaders.

Rishi Sunak had a quieter day in Yorkshire, meeting local veterans in the morning, but with a series of blunders earlier in the week and the departure of Michael Gove still weighing on Tory MPs’ minds.

The last time I saw Michael Gove, a couple of weeks ago, I asked him how confident he was of winning his seat, the once rock-solid blue bastion of Surrey Heath (majority: 18,349). He would still be there if the Tories held 150 seats, he explained, but a greater implosion than that would sweep him away.

Gove, 56, thought he would hold on and Tory strategists still expect Surrey Heath to remain blue, but Rishi Sunak’s rain-drenched, gaffe-prone first few days can hardly have encouraged him to stay.

Read Tim Shipman’s piece in full

The economy was the big issue on the first weekend of the general election campaign trail, as Labour and the Tories clashed over spending plans (Hannah Al-Othman writes).

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt hinted at tax breaks for high earners, while his shadow, Labour’s Rachel Reeves, said she had “no plans” to raise the burden on working people.

Jeremy Hunt signalled the Conservatives would seek to end the impact of tapering personal allowances on larger incomes, and also described inheritance tax as “profoundly anti-Conservative,” but refused to be drawn on whether it would be cut in the Conservative Party’s election manifesto.

Reeves met supermarket workers in London earlier, pitching Labour as the party of “stability and tough spending”. When quizzed by reporters on Labour’s plans for taxation should her party win the election, she said: “I have no plans to increase taxes.”

Labour has said it would use tax on wealthy non-doms and impose VAT and business rates on private schools to fund improvements to public services.

Writing for The Sunday Times, the shadow health secretary has promised Labour will pursue a decade of change including protections for whistleblowers and sackings for those who try to silence them, says the shadow health secretary.

Read Wes Streeting’s piece in full.

I’ve been speaking to Charlie Nunn, chief executive of Lloyds Bank, one of the biggest banks in the country, this week (writes City Editor Jill Treanor).

He tells The Sunday Times that “a general election provides an invaluable opportunity to refocus and re-energise”.

He’s set out three priorities he thinks politicians should be focusing on. First, economic growth. “The next government should work with the private sector, including reviewing the regulatory framework for financial services, to make the UK the best place in the world to start and grow a business.”

Second, housing. Ministers should be “investing in new developments alongside the private sector and bringing back into use homes that currently lie empty,” he says.

Lastly, Nunn wants the next government to build “an environment that supports personal long-term financial planning for generations to come”. So, more financial education for the nation.

Nunn says: “We can prosper as a country … But we cannot do it without the right foundations in place. The next government will face a long list of challenges. Economic growth, housing, and financial services are three of the opportunities.”

The Conservatives have “failed” on water pollution and let big companies “off the hook”, Sir Ed Davey has said, with the Liberal Democrats pledging to abolish Ofwat and introduce a new water regulator to tackle the sewage crisis (Hannah Al-Othman writes).

Speaking from the campaign trail in Chichester, West Sussex, Davey said the public were “alarmed” about the damage being done to UK rivers and seas, and that it was an environmental, public health and economic problem.

“The Conservative government keeps failing people on this issue,” he said. “Failing to get tougher regulations, failing to fine the water companies properly, failing to reform them and starting to get tough on them and stop this appalling pollution.”

Labour’s Steve Reed had also hit out at the Tories over the matter. “We will give the regulator new powers so law-breaking water bosses face criminal charges and see their huge bonuses being blocked until they clean up their toxic filth,” he said.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has defended his party’s decision to rebrand its package of workers’ rights pledges, or its New Deal for Working People, after a backlash from one of the UK’s biggest trade unions.

Starmer denied he was watering down policies on areas such as zero-hours contracts, parental leave and sick pay after the Unite general secretary, Sharon Graham, said the plans had “more holes than Swiss cheese”.

During a visit to Staffordshire today, Starmer told the BBC: “We have come to an agreement with the trade unions on the new deal for working people.

“There’s been no watering down. This is the most significant set of protections for a generation.

“It’s also something which I think employers and good businesses would say, ‘looking at the detail of it, this is what we’re doing in good businesses’.”

The package from Labour includes a “right to switch off”, a proposed ban on zero-hours contracts and stronger employment rights from day one of a new job.

SNP leader John Swinney has spent the day touring Scottish constituencies, stopping for ice cream in Burntisland in Fife, and posing for pictures with activists in Glenrothes.

Despite having been in post for a matter of weeks, he said yesterday that he was “very confident that the SNP can make gains in this election”.

“We’re going to fight every single election in every seat … in Scotland to win,” he said.

Scotland will be one of the fiercest battlegrounds in the election, with Labour hoping to increase their presence from two MPs to anywhere up to 35.

Prime minister Rishi Sunak kicked off the Conservative campaign yesterday in Inverness with the Scottish Tory leader, Douglas Ross. The party is defending seven Westminster seats.

Sunak conceded that things were still “very difficult for people in Scotland right now”, but criticised the devolved SNP government over educational standards.

The SNP holds 43 Westminster seats in Scotland, as well as running the Scottish government.

Speaking in Glenrothes today, Swinney put forward an anti-austerity message and said his party could hold influence in Westminster on the issue.

He told journalists that public services had been undermined, and called austerity a “punishing and damaging process”.

Rachel Reeves has been pictured out with Iceland boss Richard Walker (Dominic Hauschild writes).

During a visit to an Iceland in Fulham, southwest London, the shadow chancellor said it was “clear the cost of living crisis has not gone away”.

Walker, 43, was at one time expected to stand as a Conservative parliamentary candidate, and was once one of the party’s most prominent business supporters.

However, last September he quit the Tory party after concluding that the government had “drifted out of touch” with the needs of British people. The country was “in a considerably worse state” than before the Conservatives came into power, he added.

Walker’s parents founded Iceland in 1970. He started there as a shelfstacker and store manager before later taking the role of managing director.

Walker has been vocal about his support for Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour. Other former Tory donors who now back Labour include Kasim Kutay, who runs the life sciences fund Novo Holdings, and the property tycoon Nick Candy.

The snap election has forced both the Tories and Labour to scramble to fill hundreds of vacant candidates across the country (Harry Yorke writes).

The Conservatives are racing to select candidates in approximately 200 seats, while Labour have just 80 to fill.

Speaking to LBC while on a campaign visit in Stafford, Sir Keir Starmer said his problem was not filling seats but picking from the huge number of candidates vying for selection.

“I am very confident we will fill the Labour seats, we’ve got no end of people coming forward who want to be Labour candidates,” he added.

“We have got too many people wanting to be candidates and we need to filter them down to make sure we’ve got the best possible candidate in every possible seat.”

Sir Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, is continuing his assault on the blue wall today, with his fifth stop of the campaign taking him to Gillian Keegan’s seat of Chichester (Harry Yorke writes).

Keegan, the education secretary, has a 21,000 majority but like many senior Tories is under threat from the Lib Dems, who are currently in second place in the constituency.

Chichester is one of Davey’s key targets, along with Jeremy Hunt’s seat, Godalming and Ash, and Alex Chalk’s seat, Cheltenham. He said: “The Conservative Party has a record of failure after years of chaos and neglect. It’s little wonder voters in Chichester and across former Conservative heartlands are turning to the Liberal Democrats instead.

“This Conservative government has got to go and it’s clear that in many parts of the country it is the Liberal Democrats who can get them out. This election is our chance to deliver the change our country desperately needs.”

Liz Truss has urged Rishi Sunak to ditch the UK’s net zero targets to help turn around the Conservative election campaign (Harry Yorke writes).

In what is likely to be seen as an unwelcome intervention by No 10, the former prime minister told The Telegraph that her successor also needed to shift further to the right on migration and human rights laws.

“I want the Conservative Party to be much clearer on issues like leaving the ECHR, binning the Human Rights Act, getting rid of our net zero targets, so that we can deliver the dynamic, successful country that people want to live in,” she said.

“And if we do that there will be no need for a Reform Party because people will see their aspirations being delivered through the Conservative Party.”

Labour accused Rishi Sunak of “hiding away in his mansion” on Saturday (Harry Yorke writes).

The prime minister was out campaigning on Saturday morning as he met with local veterans in his constituency, although his plans for the rest of the day have not been publicly confirmed.

The shadow paymaster-general, Jonathan Ashworth, said: “While Rishi Sunak spends today hiding away in his mansion, Liz Truss is yet again reminding voters that he has no control over his party and [a] desperate Jeremy Hunt is making more completely unfunded promises.

“Five more years of the Tories will mean more of this chaos — with the British public left paying the price every single day.”

The Conservatives say it is inaccurate to suggest Sunak is not out on the trail, and pointed to his meeting with the veterans this morning.

Another chief executive banging the drum for net-zero investment by the next government this week has been Greg Jackson, the chief executive of Octopus (Jon Yeomans, Deputy Business Editor, writes).

“We need real commitment to electrification, with heat pumps and electric vehicles,” he told me this week. Like many in the energy industry, he is bewildered by the agonisingly long time it takes to hook up new projects to the grid, and wants political parties to tackle it.

• National Grid embarks on power trip to future-proof supply

Jackson, who has built Octopus into a giant valued at £9 billion in just nine years, also called for more reform to the City. “The UK has got great startups, but it’s really difficult for firms to grow. We’ve got to unlock the ability for pension funds in the UK to invest in British businesses,” he said.

The Tories are now at their lowest opinion poll rating since the fallout from Liz Truss’s mini-budget in autumn 2022. Rishi Sunak’s party is being squeezed on the left by Labour, who are now polling at 45 per cent, and on the right by Reform UK.

Data suggests that just over half of all 2019 Conservative voters plan to back the party this time. One in five say they will support Reform, while a sixth plan to vote Labour. Labour, meanwhile, looks to have held on to the majority of its 2019 voters, although some may move to the Greens.

Earlier I revealed Labour had rebranded its workers rights’ package to sharpen its economic message (Gabriel Pogrund writes).

For weeks, people in Labour-land had been grumbling that the name of Angela Rayner’s package — the so-called New Deal for Working People — wasn’t resonating and didn’t do enough to hammer home the party’s message on the cost of living crisis.

There was also a sense that certain measures could, as Rupert Soames of the Confederation of British Industry, politely put it, have “unintended consequences” for business.

So they have sandpapered down the proposals — dropping, for instance, a total ban on zero hours contracts — and they have changed the name to the much more consumer-focused Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay. Read more about it here.

Labour would lower the voting age to 16 if it wins power, Sir Keir Starmer has confirmed, arguing that people who pay tax and work should be enfranchised (Harry Yorke writes).

Speaking at Marston Road, the stadium of Stafford Rangers FC, he said: “Yes, I want to see both 16 and 17-year-olds [voting] … If you can work, if you can pay tax, if you can serve in your armed forces, then you ought to be able to vote.”

“Where’s the plan?” is a question many City bosses have been asking during the past few years (Jon Yeomans, Deputy Business Editor, writes).

Miles Roberts, the chief executive of FTSE 100 paper maker DS Smith, told me this week that the next government needs to commit to “the reindustrialisation of Britain”.

“The UK manufacturing sector accounts for about half of our exports, two thirds of research and development spending and employs around 2.6 million highly skilled people across the country,” he said.

Yet the UK still seems to “shy away” from commitment to this area compared to other countries. “During my time at DS Smith, I have seen countless plans for growth from successive governments — the next one needs to make them a reality,” Roberts added.

The campaign continues as it was revealed Labour has quietly rebranded its flagship package of trade union and workers’ rights reforms amid concern from strategists it did not address the party’s core economic message (Laurence Sleator writes).

Until today, the leader had referred to the plan as the New Deal for Working People. It will now be known as Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay. The name change is an attempt to rob the Conservatives of their clothes, with senior government ministers using similar phrases.

However several proposed reforms that form part of the plan have been dubbed as “dangerously French” by the Conservatives.

The Times also revealed the party is looking to introduce votes for 16 and 17-year-olds in its first year in government if it wins the election, giving a further 1.5 million people the chance to vote.

Unusually expressive for a politician, Michael Gove has been a gift to our illustrators (Russel Herneman, Design Editor, writes). In this series he is shown responding to the Covid crisis, helping unplug the malfunctioning Truss-bot and enjoying a collegiate moment with Rishi.

Rishi Sunak’s decision to focus the election on the economy following a fall in inflation has surprised experts given that this parliament has been characterised by extreme economic volatility and falling living standards.

For most voters the cost of living crisis remains a reality and many households face significantly higher mortgage payments this year. Does the longer-term Tory economic record since 2010 justify his gamble?

David Smith, the economics editor, will be examining this in detail in The Sunday Times and concludes that, even on this basis, the record is decidedly mixed. Middle earners have faced a long squeeze on incomes even as the very wealthy prospered hugely from the prolonged period of very low interest rates.

Growth has been slower since 2010 than in any other post-war period of government, though the economy has faced a series of shocks in that time. In his column in our Business section, he also asks whether either party is being honest and realistic about the very tough tax and spending challenges that lie beyond the election.

Read David Smith’s articles in full here.

Speaking to Times Radio, Bim Afolami, the economic secretary to the Treasury, insisted the Tories could cut taxes while increasing spending (Harry Yorke writes).

“We’ve set out our plans in the budget that are scored by the OBR [Office for Budget Responsibility] and pored over by hundreds of independent forecasters,” he said.

“In the next parliament we will have an increase in real terms, so [an] increase above inflation, every single year in public spending,” he said. “But we’re going to do that whilst keeping taxes down … because we’re picking tax cuts that help grow the economy.”

Pressed on whether that meant Paul Johnson, the head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, was wrong to say taxes would need to be hiked, Afolami replied: “He is suggesting that somehow, we will, for other reasons out of choice, somehow have to increase the spending from what we’ve already set out in the budget documents, and we reject that. He’s making a political judgment.”

Paul Johnson, the respected head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, is “wrong” to claim that the next government will likely either have to hike taxes or cut public spending (Harry Yorke writes).

Bim Afolani, the economic secretary to the Treasury, made the assertions while speaking to Times Radio.

Johnson has recently said that with both the Tories and Labour struggling to make their sums add up, there were effectively three options for whichever party formed the next government: taxes will have to go up to meet their spending plans; departmental budgets will have to be slashed; the parties will have to change their fiscal rules to reflect that they will not be able to get debt to fall.

The Tories are pledging to abolish national insurance and are considering other tax cuts for the manifesto, which would require, according to Johnson and other economists, huge spending cuts to public services.

Rishi Sunak has said he avoided catching pneumonia after getting wet while speaking outside No 10 at his campaign launch, but admitted to constituents he was not sure what state his suit was in (Laurence Sleator writes).

The prime minister met local ex-servicemen at one of their regular Saturday breakfast meetings in Northallerton, North Yorkshire, in his Richmond constituency.

Sunak spoke to veterans for about 20 minutes and briefly chatted with other customers in the pub, some of whom were having breakfast or a pint.

Speaking about how he called the election, he said: “I thought, ‘Come rain or shine, it’s the right thing to do’. No pneumonia yet — my suit on the other hand … I’m not quite sure what state it will be in when I get back down to London.”

Sunak did not take any questions from the media and it is unclear what his plans are for the rest of the afternoon.

Lord Vaizey, who made Gove best man at his wedding in 2005, said he believed he would now return to journalism and write books, but could also be interested in becoming a peer (Harry Yorke writes).

“If the Conservatives lose the next election, the direction of travel of the Conservative Party is going to be an interesting one,” Vaizey said. “You want senior figures with a degree of influence to try and steer the ship of opposition.

“So I think he could and should have stayed. I think the life of a backbench MP is not too onerous. It does allow you to do other things, but it also allows you to keep your hand on the tiller.”

He added: “I think Strictly is inevitable for Michael Gove. He’s seen how it helped Ed Balls’s transition from being a senior figure in the Labour government to now being one of the foremost media personalities in the country … I think he’s going to get far.”

It is “inevitable” that Michael Gove will end up on Strictly Come Dancing and will probably end up in the House of Lords, his Conservative colleague and close friend Lord Vaizey has said (Harry Yorke writes).

Discussing Gove’s shock decision to step down after 19 years as an MP, Vaizey told Times Radio he was “surprised” he had done so because he was a “politician to his fingertips”.

“When I discussed this with him a couple of days ago, I compared him to Ken Clarke, in the sense that Ken Clarke didn’t leave the House of Commons until he was, I think, in his late seventies or early eighties,” he said.

Looking back on the last five years of government, most businesses are craving one thing: stability (Jill Treanor, City Editor, writes).

Kevin Ellis, the chair of PwC UK, told me this week: “Both parties need to find a way of getting the economy to grow, that requires government action, investment and confidence — and a commitment to consistency.”

He added: “Some of the key levers for growth are going to be skills, technology and infrastructure, and the interplay between them will always link back to training.

“A lot of it is about confidence. You need certainly stability and a positive narrative about investment and why the UK is best.”

My colleague Laith Al-Khalaf and I spoke to Ellis earlier this year for a Sunday Times Profile interview about the future of PwC, AI and why accounting will become “less boring” in years to come. Read the story in full here.

What do chief executives think about the election? We’ve been asking them this week (Jon Yeomans writes).

Although they are a cautious bunch they have shared some thoughts on policies they would like to see in the parties’ manifestos.

Alistair Phillips-Davies, head of energy giant SSE, wants the next government to turbocharge the rollout of green energy.

Chief among his hopes is to unblock the UK’s gummed-up planning system. “Setting a maximum 12-month limit on planning decisions and cutting consenting times for offshore wind farms in half should be urgent priorities,” he said.

In March, I visited the £9bn windfarm project that should generate power for six million homes. Read the story in full here.

Boris Johnson should stand in one of the vacant seats left by Conservative MPs who have quit, a former minister has said (Laurence Sleator writes).

Dame Andrea Jenkyns, who was briefly an education minister, said it was time to “bring back Boris” to help defeat Sir Keir Starmer.

The MP for Morley and Outwood submitted a letter of no confidence in Rishi Sunak last year and is a loyal Johnson supporter.

Nigel Farage’s decision not to stand for Reform UK does not appear to have impacted on the party’s popularity, a new poll has suggested (Harry Yorke writes).

A survey of 2,072 adults carried out by YouGov, the first it has conducted since the election was called, puts Richard Tice’s party on 14 points, up 2 points on its previous poll.

• Who will win the general election 2024? Latest poll tracker

Meanwhile, Labour have dropped 2 points to 44, the Conservatives are up 1 point on 22, the Lib Dems remain on 9 points and the Greens have dropped 1 point to 6.

The findings are likely to worry Tory MPs and election strategists. It had been widely anticipated that Farage declining to stand would lead to a big dip in Reform’s support.

Sir Keir Starmer has said that making “ruthless decisions” is easy for him because his priority is delivering for voters (Harry Yorke writes).

Speaking to The Telegraph, the Labour leader was asked about some of the major calls he had taken since being elected, including ousting his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn and forcing out Richard Leonard, the former leader of the Scottish Labour Party.

“For me, it’s really straightforward. The most important thing in politics [is to keep in mind] the very many people who desperately need a better country,” he told the paper.

“If I’m not delivering for them, I’m not delivering anything. And therefore, if I’ve got to take a ruthless decision in order to get to where I need to be to give them the country that they deserve, then that’s an easy decision. In the end you have got to be single-minded. It was always going to be that way and it will always have to be that way.”

Rishi Sunak could get a deportation flight off the ground to Rwanda before the country goes to the polls, despite saying on Friday that they would be delayed until after July 4 (Harry Yorke writes).

According to The Telegraph, the Home Office is, behind the scenes, still working to a schedule that would see the first migrants removed as early as June 24. This would tally with Sunak’s previous pledge to get flights off the ground within 12 weeks.

Labour also suspects Sunak may be planning a surprise flight for later in the campaign. Doing so could wrongfoot Labour, which has pledged to scrap the scheme, at a critical juncture.

The last time I interviewed Michael Gove three months ago he told me about his fears that young people would turn against democracy and capitalism if they could not get a foot on the housing ladder (Caroline Wheeler writes).

At the time, Gove was leading a campaign to introduce leasehold and rental reforms. Since then the Renter’s Reform Bill has been ditched and the Leasehold Reform Bill has gone through with significant policies stripped out.

• Michael Gove: If the young can’t get housing, they will abandon democracy

Speaking in February, Gove told The Sunday Times: “If people think that markets are rigged and a democracy isn’t listening to them, then you get — and this is the worrying thing to me — an increasing number of young people saying, ‘I don’t believe in democracy, I don’t believe in markets’.

“And you can see that in polling, with people saying, ‘I just want someone to fix this. I’d be prepared to have an authoritarian leader who would just fix this,’ and that is a danger.”

Darren Jones, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, and the Labour MP for Bristol North West, defended Labour’s pledge to tax private school fees on Times Radio this morning.

“Our policy on VAT on private schools has been independently checked by the Institute for Fiscal Studies,” he said. “They have concluded that we would be able to raise billions of pounds a year, which we’ve said we will spend on hiring more teachers for our state school system.”

“If we’re elected on July 4, you’ll see those measures come through pretty quickly,” Jones said, without being more specific. He added that private schools could “decide whether they want to phase this in over a number of years or pass it on immediately to their parents”.

Boris Johnson has risked reopening a row with Sir Keir Starmer after accusing the Labour leader again of failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile during his time as director of public prosecutions (Laurence Sleator writes).

In his column in the Daily Mail, Johnson wrote: “He always brags about his time as head of the Crown Prosecution Service, and how he takes responsibility for everything that took place on his watch — except of course for the failure to prosecute the paedophile, necrophiliac BBC superstar Jimmy Savile. As they say … just sayin’.

“People treat this point as a taboo, an unmentionable. But let’s face it, if others had that kind of failure on their CV (a Tory, for instance) it would be thought at least worthy of comment.”

The former prime minister first made the accusation in 2022, which Starmer said at the time was a “ridiculous slur”.

A Conservative Party MP has denied reports that Rishi Sunak is taking a day off from the campaign in order to reset his approach after a faltering start (Laurence Sleator writes).

The Guardian said that the prime minister will spend the day at home in his constituency and in London in discussions with his closest advisers.

However, Bim Afolami, the Treasury minister, told Sky News it was not right to say Sunak was taking the day off, adding: “He’s going to be campaigning in Yorkshire.”

Sunak is due to meet veterans in his constituency on Saturday morning but his plans for later in the day are not clear.

Treasury minister Bim Afolami insisted it was “not unnatural” for high-profile Tory MPs such as Michael Gove to stand down at an election (Laurence Sleator writes).

Afolami, the MP for Hitchin and Harpenden, which has a Conservative majority of just 6,895, told Times Radio: “It’s not unnatural if you’ve got people who served for 20, sometimes 30 or 35 years in parliament, in their fifties or sixties, coming to retirement or indeed retiring completely, that they choose to bring their political careers to a close.”

He added the party had a “good balance” of newer MPs and experienced parliamentarians such as Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor.

Michael Gove, who has announced that he is standing down as an MP, will be remembered as one of the most consequential Tories in modern political history. In government he earned a reputation as a reformer, particularly during his time at the Department for Education.

But his most significant legacy was undoubtedly Brexit and its aftermath, which included two acts of political and personal betrayal which resonate to this day.

In the run-up to the referendum in 2016 he opted to join the Leave campaign, ending a close personal friendship with David Cameron, the former prime minister.

As joint leader of Vote Leave alongside Boris Johnson, he was a critical figure in persuading a majority of voters to back Brexit. In the wake of the vote came a second act of betrayal as he turned on Johnson.

Read in full: Michael Gove, the radical reformer who betrayed two MPs

Boris Johnson, the former Conservative prime minister, has made his first intervention in the general election campaign, arguing Sir Keir Starmer would be “the most dangerous and left wing” Labour prime minister since the 1970s.

Writing in his column in the Daily Mail, the former MP said Starmer and Labour would raise a wealth tax to help plug a £10bn bill of “unfunded spending commitments”.

“Everywhere you look, Starmer’s Labour loves to punish aspiration, to expropriate the rewards of effort and to snatch away opportunity,” he warned.

He argued his former rival was a captive of the “woke tyranny”, highlighting his previous support for the Black Lives Matter campaign, his position on transgender rights and his diet: “He doesn’t even eat meat, only fish,” he wrote.

Both Labour and the Conservatives are focusing on the economy today as they seek to make it a key dividing line between the two parties come July 4.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, has hinted at a large cut to inheritance tax describing it as “pernicious” and “profoundly anti-Conservative”.

He added that his party would seek to end the impact of tapering of personal allowances on larger incomes.

Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, highlighted a belief in “sound money” in a piece for the Daily Mail. “I do not believe you can tax and spend your way to growth, and I didn’t come into politics to raise taxes on working people. Indeed, I want them to be lower,” she wrote.

With the deadline for selecting parliamentary candidates still some way off, many more Conservative MPs could decide on their future today.

Yesterday, the number of Tories stepping down reached 78, surpassing the 72 who left in 1997.

Most notably, this included Michael Gove, the former education secretary and prominent Brexit campaigner, who said it was time a “new generation should lead”.

Also announcing they were leaving parliament were Andrea Leadsom, the former Tory leadership campaigner, Greg Clark, a long-time cabinet member, and Craig Mackinlay, the “bionic MP” who only returned to the Commons this week after losing his limbs to sepsis.

As the general election enters its third day of campaigning, party leaders continue their tour across the United Kingdom.

Rishi Sunak hosts a campaign event in Yorkshire after completing a two-day trip round all four nations yesterday.

After his visit to Glasgow on Friday, Sir Keir Starmer will be in the West Midlands, focusing on the cost of living as new Labour analysis claims the average household is almost £6,000 worse off since 2019.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey will be visiting the ultra-marginal constituencies of Chichester and Winchester, where he will announce the party’s plans to abolish Ofwat and introduce a new water regulator to tackle the sewage crisis.