‘You’d be toast’: Ashworth taunts Gullis over elections

Oh dear. As local election results start to trickle in, it’s not looking good for the Conservatives, with Rishi Sunak’s party losing councillors in Leave-voting areas like Hartlepool and Thurrock. And from the early morning media appearances, it sounds like some of the Starmer army are really rather enjoying revelling in today’s Tory misfortune…

Appearing on the BBC early this morning was Jonathan Ashworth, the Shadow Paymaster General, who was sporting a new pair of Ronnie Corbett-style spectacles. He was up against his Conservative counterpart Jonathan Gullis, the Tory attack dog who sits for Stoke-on-Trent-North. With Labour boasting a 16 per cent swing, Gullis and his majority of just 6,286 are looking extremely precarious at the next election – a point which Ashworth was only too keen to make.

Commenting on the figures as they came in, the Labour MP remarked ‘That’s quite a swing, isn’t it’ before turning triumphantly to Gullis: ‘I mean — you’d be toast, if there was a 16 per cent swing to Labour.’ Ouch.

But that wasn’t the only time the politicians started to scrap. Host Laura Kuenssberg was forced to break up the bickering pair after they descended into a fight on immigration so, er, passionate that no one could quite work out what was going on. Too many Jonathans spoil the broth…