UK general election live: Tory party withdraws support from two candidates accused of suspect election date bets | General election 2024

Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dem deputy leader, has also accused Rishi Sunak of waiting too long to drop the two candidates accused of suspect betting.

This should have happened immediately when these scandalous revelations emerged, but instead Rishi Sunak has dithered and delayed.

Sunak must confirm immediately that these candidates will not have the Conservative whip if elected.

Keir Starmer has asked why the Tories did not suspend Craig Williams and Laura Saunders earlier. In response to the CCHQ announcement, he said: “Why didn’t that happen a week ago?”

The Guardian first reported that Williams was being investigated by the Gambling Commisson almost two weeks ago, on Wednesday 12 June.

The following day Rishi Sunak said the news was “very disappointing”, but that he could not act while the investigation was ongoing.

He used a similar line after it was revealed last week that Saunders was also being investigated, and even last night, despite some Tories publicly calling for the two candidates to be suspended, Sunak was saying that he was constrained by what he could do by the need not to compromise the Gambling Commission’s inquiry.

But last night a letter from the commission was released in which it made it clear that it was not blocking CCHQ action. (See 9.26am.)

Craig Williams is the Conservative candidate in Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr. A former MP for Cardiff North, he was elected MP for Montgomeryshire in 2019 with a majority of 12,138. Some MRP polls have implied that Williams could win, but others say that Labour will take the seat, and the betting scandal must make that more likely.

Williams was the first person accused of using inside information to bet on an election happening in July. He was Rishi Sunak’s parliamentary private secretary in the last parliament. As Sunak’s PPS, he was not a key decision maker, but he would have had regular access to the PM and his inner circle.

Williams has not confirmed that he knew about Sunak’s decision when he placed a bet on a July election three days before it was announced, but he has told the BBC he made a “massive error of judgment”.

Laura Saunders is the Conservative candidate in Bristol North West. This is a Labour seat held by Darren Jones, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, and Saunders was never expected to win. She is married to Tony Lee, who is on leave of absence from his job as the Tories’ campaign director because he has also been accused of being involved in suspect bets. In her only comment on the allegations, Saunders has issued a statement through lawyers threatening to sue the BBC for its report saying she was under investigation.

Williams and Saunders will remain on the ballot paper in their respective constituencies, as Conservative candidates, but the decision announced by CCHQ today means that they will not get any campaign support.

In the unlikely event of their winning, they would not be allowed to take the Tory whip and would sit as independents.

Here is the statement from the Conservative party about the two candidates accused of suspect election bets. A spokesperson for the party said:

As a result of ongoing internal inquiries, we have concluded that we can no longer support Craig Williams or Laura Saunders as parliamentary candidates at the forthcoming general election.

We have checked with the Gambling Commision that this decision does not compromise the investigation that they are conducting which is righly independent and ongoing.

The Conservative party is no longer backing Craig Williams and Laura Saunders, the two candidates who have been accused of making suspect bets on the timing of the election, the BBC is reporting.

The party has taken the decision on the basis of what it has uncovered during its inquiries into the allegations, the BBC says.

More on this soon …

Kwasi Kwarteng was the chancellor who delivered Liz Truss’s mini-budget, which triggered turmoil in the markets and ultimately brought down her premiership. Labour says it led to mortgage rates soaring and it is the single event that enabled Labour to convert what was roughly a 10-point lead over the Conservatives in September 2022 into a 20-point lead by the end of that year. It has remained that high every since.

As the Telegraph reports, in an interview with GB News, Kwarteng said he felt “partially responsible” for the Tories’ plight. But only partially. He made it clear he was blaming Rishi Sunak too. He told the broadcaster:

I feel partially responsible but I don’t feel responsible for leaving D-day early, I don’t feel responsible for the Reform party which was on 4% in October 2022 being on nearly 20% now.

I don’t feel responsible for the election betting scandal, nor do I feel responsible for the fact that this election has happened way before anyone was expecting it.

Daily Record urges readers to vote Labour, in its first general election endorsement in 14 years

Libby Brooks

Labour has received a significant boost in Scotland this morning with an endorsement from the Daily Record.

The Record, which estimates that it reaches 1.5 million readers every weekday along with its portfolio of local titles, has not backed one party at a general election in 14 years, but now splashes “kicking the vile and corrupt Tories out of office”.

It’s not a great surprise – Scottish Labour has developed an increasingly strong relationship with the tabloid under leader Anas Sarwar.

With a front page that appears to be a pastiche of the Tony Blair “demon eyes” attack ad from 1997, it says that “change is coming and Scotland can be a part of it”. Pointedly, it leads with the statement that “this election is not about independence”, chiming with polls which show independence supporters and former SNP voters are now attracted to Labour’s promise of change and the message from Sarwar that how people voted in the 2014 referendum is irrelevant to this election.

But the question remains: how much do newspaper endorsements like this one matter to voters? Jim Waterson, the Guardian’s political media editor, suggests that voters are still intrigued by who well known titles, like the Record in Scotland, or Mail across the UK, are backing even though this is potentially, as he wrote earlier this week, the first post-mainstream media election.

At the weekend Pat McFadden, Labour’s national campaign coordinator, wrote a letter to the Gambling Commission asking it to name people under investigating in relation to the election date betting allegations. He said it was in the public interest for the names to be released.

Andrew Rhodes, chief executive of the commission, has replied to McFadden saying that “to protect the integrity of the investigation, and to ensure a fair and just outcome” it will not be naming the suspects.

He says the commission has asked the people it has been in contact with to treat the matter confidentially – which is cited by Rishi Sunak as the reason why he cannot say more about what happened, and about whether the candidates and officials accused of making suspect bets had advance knowledge about his decision to announce the election.

But Rhodes also says this confidentiality requirement “does not preclude other activity relating to the fact of an investigation taking place” – which implies that, if the Conservative party were to suspend the membership of people under suspicion, the commission would not object.

Two of the suspects are party candidates and, because nominations have closed, the party cannot do anything to stop them being listed on the ballot paper as official Conservative party candidates.

But some in the party have said that Rishi Sunak should disown them as candidates – as Labour did with its byelection candidate in Rochdale who, after nominations closed, was revealed to have suggested at a meeting that Israel allowed the 7 October Hamas massacre to happen. Yesterday Sunak argued that it would be wrong to do this while the investigation into what happened was still going on.

Labour may ‘open the books’ and discover public finances in worse state than expected, shadow cabinet minister says

Andrew Sparrow

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

Nick Thomas-Symonds, a shadow Cabinet Office minister, has been giving interviews for Labour this morning and on Times Radio he said that if the party got into government, it might discover the public finances to be in an “even worse” situation than anticipated.

Asked about the Institute for Fiscal Studies report yesterday saying both main parties were not being honest about the choices they would face after the election, he replied:

Obviously the government is in a very different position from us, because, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies set out, there are no specific departmental spending plans beyond March of 2025 that’s because the government hasn’t conducted a spending review.

We obviously can’t do that from opposition, and we’ve also been open, always that we may open the books and discover the situation is even worse than it is at the moment. We’ve never hidden from that.

Opposition parties sometimes suggest that, when they get into office and have a chance to “look at the books”, they will discover hidden horrors that will require tax measures not previously planned. In a recent Guardian story, Anna Isaac and Kiran Stacey reported on Labour sources who think that might happen this year. They said:

Labour is planning a major package of measures this autumn, according to party sources, and [Rachel] Reeves is looking for a “doctor’s mandate”: the state of the public finances is so bad, she will argue, that they will need major surgery to correct.

But in reality, particularly since the creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility, which publishes an independent and extremely detailed analysis of the public finances twice a year, most of the key information about the state of the public finances is already in the public domain.

In his Times Radio interview, when asked about the IFS claim that the next government would either have to put up taxes or cut public services, Thomas-Symonds claimed Labour’s focus on growth would make a difference. He said:

We will put that plan on the table, of stability, of investment and of reform. The Office of Budget Responsibility will then look at it so it will be robust, and the snapshot in the autumn will be different. It will then be about growth.

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Home Office minister Michael Tomlinson has said he agrees with the frustration expressed by former Olympic rower and Tory candidate James Cracknell, PA reports.

Referring to the gambling scandal engulfing the Tory campaign, Cracknell said in a social media video: “And if one of my teammates got caught for cheating, they’d be dead to me” and also described the party as a “shower of shit”.

Asked about the “frustration” expressed by the electorate and Cracknell, Tomlinson told Sky News: “That’s right, and I share his frustration. I agree with the frustration that’s being expressed, more than frustration, the anger as well.”

Earlier when asked about the investigations into Tory members and aides, Tomlinson said:

The lawyer in me knows that there is a process, there’s the independent Gambling Commission. That’s the first thing, and as the Prime Minister said yesterday, there is also an internal process.

But this is important, and it’s important that this happens swiftly. And as you say, anyone who is found to have broken the law or even to have fallen short of the high standards that the Prime Minister and all of us expect, that they should be dealt with severely as well.”

It is just before 8am. Let’s take a look at today’s top stories.

The Guardian leads with two reports finding that low wages and price increases under Tory rule have pushed 900,000 children into poverty.

The Times headline is Conversion therapy to be banned by Labour

The Daily Telegraph reports that Scotland yard was ‘leaked names’ in the Tory betting scandal:

The FT: Tory and Labour pledges to improve public services ‘essentially unfunded’:

The I: Tories and Labour refuse to rule out 10 tax rises – as IFS urges leaders to come clean

Scottish Daily Mail: Labour will resurrect SNP’s toxic gender law warns PM

The Daily Record says that it is backing Labour:

Britons think UK is in a bad way, but French more pessimistic, survey shows

Jon Henley

Britons are the most likely of seven European nations to say their country is in a sorry state, but the French are the most likely to think things will get worse over the next 12 months, according to a poll weeks before high-stakes elections in both countries.

With the exception of Denmark, however, none of the European countries surveyed by YouGov in late May and early June revealed themselves to be particularly happy with the the way things were going, or overly optimistic for the future.

Asked whether they thought their country was in a bad way at the moment, 80% of respondents in the UK replied “very bad” or “fairly bad” – compared with 71% in France, 70% in Germany, 68% in Italy, 67% in Spain, 49% in Sweden and 25% in Denmark:

Record number of people have crossed Channel in small boats since January

Rajeev Syal

A record number of people seeking asylum in small boats have crossed the Channel in the first six months of this year.

Home Office figures show that 257 people made the journey in four boats on Sunday, taking the provisional total for the year so far to 12,901. The previous record for arrivals in the six months from January to June was 12,747 in 2022. In the first half of 2023, arrivals stood at 11,433.

The 2024 total to date is 17% higher than the number of arrivals recorded this time last year (11,058) and up 8% on the same period in 2022 (11,975).

Last year a total of 29,437 people arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel in small boats, down 36% on a record 45,774 in 2022.

The record figure emerged as Rishi Sunak claimed that Labour would make the UK the “soft-touch illegal migration capital of the world”.

The prime minister stepped up attacks on Keir Starmer’s proposals to curb migration, which the Conservatives claimed would let thousands more into the UK each year.

The Metropolitan Police has responded to a report in the Daily Telegraph claiming that it revealed the names of people being investigated by the Gambling Commission.

In a statement the Met Police denied the allegations, saying: “The allegations that the Met has leaked information are simply untrue.”

“We continue to liaise with the Gambling Commission and are assessing information they have provided.”

The Conservatives have launched their own inquiry into whether politicians or officials gambled on the timing of the election, Rishi Sunak has said, as the prime minister denied that he had placed any bets himself.

Sunak told reporters he was not aware of any further candidates being looked into and was not himself being investigated, saying he had never bet on a political event: