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Nigel Farage took over leadership of the Reform party from Richard Tice and is standing for parliament in Clacton. This came as news on Monday to Tice, and to Reform’s candidate for Clacton, Tony Mack. Outside the Wetherspoons pub where he launched his campaign, Farage had a McDonald’s banana milkshake thrown over him. Farage proposed net-zero immigration. The Conservatives then said they would ask the independent Migration Advisory Committee for a recommended level for an annual cap on visas, and put that to a parliamentary vote. Invasive Asian hornets, which can eat 50 bees a day, were found to have survived a British winter and might stay permanently.
Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, in a debate on television with the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, said every family would face tax rises of £2,000 under Labour. The Treasury said that civil servants had not provided all the figures for this claim. Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow paymaster general, said: ‘This is a desperate lie.’ After alarums and excursions, Diane Abbott was reselected by the Labour party’s executive to fight her seat of Hackney North and Stoke Newington. The polling company YouGov’s first Multi-level Regression and Poststratification constituency projection, before Farage’s announcement, showed Labour could win a 194-seat majority, bigger even than the majority of 179 in 1997. It put Labour on 422 seats (up 220 from the 2019 election), the Tories on 140 (down 225), the Lib Dems on 48 (up 47) and the SNP on 17 (down 31). Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, freewheeled downhill on a bicycle in Wales.
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