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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Politics
Andrew Sparrow

General election: Farage tells Johnson to 'drop the deal' or face Brexit party challenge - as it happened

The Scottish Conservative acting leader Jackson Carlaw launching his party’s new campaign advert in Aberdeen. It is a poster criticising Nicola Sturgeon for wanting to rerun the 2014 independence referendum.
The Scottish Conservative acting leader Jackson Carlaw launching his party’s new campaign advert in Aberdeen. It is a poster criticising Nicola Sturgeon for wanting to rerun the 2014 independence referendum. Photograph: Craig Paton/PA

Updated

In his speech this morning Nigel Farage suggested that Labour could lose out more than the Conservatives if the Brexit party stood in every seat in Britain. (See 11.08am.) He said:

Something I think that was completely misunderstood the last time I did this, which was in 2015, when I lead Ukip into that general election – everyone seemed to think that because Ukip were fielding hundreds of candidates, we would have a very negative effect on the Conservative party. And the absolute truth of it is that it was in fact the Ukip vote that disproportionately hurt the Labour party in the 2015 general election. And, actually, there wouldn’t have been a Conservative majority if it hadn’t been for the effects of the Ukip vote.

So this continued lazy thinking, that somehow Brexit voters are all Conservatives, is nonsense.

But the academic Rob Ford argues that in this election the Conservatives would be more likely than Labour to lose votes to the Brexit party. (See 1.04pm.) And two academics from the British Election Survey, Jon Mellon and Geoffrey Evans, have just published a blog on the BES website arguing the same point. Here is their conclusion.

How might this play out with the Brexit party this time? Our most recent data was collected right after the European parliament elections in June when the Brexit party was briefly leading the polls. Taken together, the Brexit party drew 72% of its support from 2017 Conservatives and 17% from 2017 Labour voters. In Labour-held seats, this gap narrows slightly to 64% Conservatives and 24% Labour voters. There are some caveats. It is possible that there may be some small subset of seats where the Brexit party is more attractive to recent Labour voters, and the Conservatives have done a good job of reclaiming Brexit party voters since June. But even with these caveats, it is hard to see how the Brexit party will hurt Labour more than the Conservatives.

Updated

From the Press Association’s chief political photographer Stefan Rousseau

Steve Baker, the Conservative MP who chairs the European Research Group, which represents hardline Tory Brexiters, has accused Nigel Farage of putting Brexit at risk. Echoing comments by his ERG colleague Mark Francois (see 1.55pm), Baker told the Press Association:

The reason every Conservative Eurosceptic MP backed the deal is that it can deliver a Brexit worth having.

But Boris will only negotiate a great future for the UK if he has a good majority of resolute Conservative MPs. Nigel now risks that and our future.

It is completely inconceivable that the Conservative party would now go for no deal and a pact.

Is Nigel a statesman or a campaigner? We are about to find out.

Steve Baker.
Steve Baker. Photograph: James Veysey/Rex/Shutterstock

Updated

Sturgeon says once election is over she will ask UK government for permission to hold second independence referendum

Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, has said she is confident that a Labour government would allow Edinburgh to hold a second independence referendum. Speaking at an election event this morning, she said she would send a letter “before Christmas” to whoever was in 10 Downing Street requesting powers under section 30 of the Scotland Act 1998 for the Scottish parliament to have the right to hold another vote.

Asked if she thought Labour would grant a section 30 order, Sturgeon replied emphatically: “Yes.” Asked to explain why she was so confident, she replied: “I’m a believer in the power of democracy.”

She also said she would interpret a strong vote for the Scottish National party at the election as backing for a second independence referendum. She explained:

If people in Scotland demonstrate the desire – as I believe they will in this election – for an independence referendum, then I don’t believe Westminster opposition to the principle or to the timetable to that will prove to be sustainable.

Everybody knows there’s going to be an independence referendum. The opposition parties might not have got round to conceding that point in public, but they know it and everybody knows it.

Jeremy Corbyn has not ruled out allowing Scotland to hold a second independence referendum, but he has said he would not want to allow this in the early years of the next parliament.

Sturgeon said she met Corbyn last week but that their focus then, and in other recent discussions, was on Brexit and parliamentary tactics. She added:

I don’t think Jeremy Corbyn is under any illusions, though, about my position around independence and a referendum.

Nicola Sturgeon at an SNP election event in Leith, Edinburgh.
Nicola Sturgeon at an SNP election event in Leith, Edinburgh. Photograph: Tom Eden/PA

Updated

From the Times’ Steven Swinford

This morning I got this question from a reader BTL (below the line).

User avatar for JonnyT1234

@Andrew - a question for the live blogging team:

From a legal and/or speculative political viewpoint, what would happen if, for example, extensive flooding or snowstorms during the election period* were to cause thousands of voters to be disenfranchised in specific areas (not just the people directly affected but also the emergency services and army personnel who would be called on to deal with it)?

Is it daft or me to assume that a 'democracy' as old as ours has thought this possibility through and has a mitigation strategy in place?

* File under reasons why it's stupid to hold elections in December or January

I didn’t have an answer myself, but I asked the Electoral Commission, and a spokesperson sent me this reply.

It’s not possible to suspend or postpone polling in case of bad weather. It’s important to remember that local councils have plenty of experience of providing public services throughout the year and are used to the winter weather conditions in their area. They have contingency plans in place to help them respond quickly to minimise any disruption to polling, and will do everything they can to ensure voters are able to cast their vote on 12 December.

'Have you ever met these people?' - Tory 'Spartans' won't be intimidated by Farage, says MP

Mark Francois, the MP and deputy chairman of the European Research Group, which represents hardline Tory Brexiters, told the BBC’s World at One that he thought Nigel Farage had “screwed up” this morning because his rejection of Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal was unreasonable. Francois explained:

I think Nigel screwed it up. If you genuinely want to work with another political party, you don’t go on live national television and call them liars, which is what he did. He said Boris’s deal doesn’t take us out of the European Union. That is not true. It does take us out of the European Union. That’s why I and my fellow so-called Spartans [the 28 Tory Brexiters who voted against Theresa May’s deal three times] voted for it. We would never, ever have voted for it if we thought it kept us in. I’m sorry, but Nigel is just simply mistaken.

If that was meant to be to be an olive branch, Nigel completely cocked it up.

Francois also said he did not think any of his fellow Tory Brexiters would be intimidated by the prospect of the Brexit party standing against them. He said:

Do you really think he is going to bully people like Bill Cash or IDS or Owen Paterson? Have you never met these people? Look at the MPs who voted for the deal – Sir Bill Cash, Owen Paterson, John Redwood, Andrew Bridgen, Steve Baker, myself – all lifelong Eurosceptics. Do you really think we would have voted for that deal if we thought it kept us into the European Union? Of course not.

I’m sorry, Nigel is a very talented politician, but anyone who works with him will tell you he’s often his own worst enemy. And his ego has got the better of him. I don’t think he’s going to bully any Tory MP into doing anything they don’t want to do.

Mark Francois
Mark Francois. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Updated

From the BBC’s Nick Eardley

There is some new polling out today, from Panelbase. Of course, the usual caveats apply.

Rob Ford, the politics professor and co-author of a seminal book on the Ukip vote, thinks that if the Brexit party does stand candidates all over Britain, the Conservatives will lose out more than Labour.

If you want to know more about the “ecological fallacy”, there is an explanation here.

Updated

This is what journalists and commentators are saying about Nigel Farage’s speech.

From the Economist’s Philip Coggan

From my colleague Jonathan Freedland

From Sky’s Sam Coates

From the Daily Mirror’s Pippa Crerar

From the Financial Times’ Robert Shrimsley

From Sky’s Lewis Goodall

Voting for Brexit party will put Corbyn into No 10, says Tory chair James Cleverly

The Conservative party chairman, James Cleverly, has put out this statement in response to Nigel Farage’s speech. Cleverly said:

A vote for Farage risks letting Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street via the back door – and the country spending 2020 having two referendums on Brexit and Scottish independence. It will not get Brexit done – and it will create another gridlocked parliament that doesn’t work.

(As stated before, the ‘two referendums’ claim is not strictly true.)

James Cleverly
James Cleverly Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP via Getty Images

Updated

From Sky’s Sam Coates

Nigel Farage's 'leave alliance' electoral pact offer to Tories – summary and analysis

Here are the main points from what Nigel Farage, the Brexit party leader, was saying in his speech and Q&A about the conditions he is offering for a pact with the Conservative party.

  • Farage said he wanted Boris Johnson to abandon the withdrawal agreement he has negotiated with the EU. Echoing the arguments made by President Trump in his LBC interview yesterday, Farage said it did not amount to proper Brexit because the level playing field conditions in the political declaration meant the UK would end up being tied to EU regulations, making trade deals with countries like the US impossible in practice. Farage said Johnson had to “drop the deal”.

So I’m going to say this to Boris Johnson, drop the deal. Drop the deal, because it’s not Brexit, drop the deal, because as these weeks go by, and people discover what it is that you’ve signed up to, they will not like it.

This is crucial. A lot of the media discussion about a Conservative/Brexit party pact has been premised on the notion that it would create a majority in parliament for Johnson’s version of Brexit. But that is not what Farage is saying at all. He is asking Johnson to abandon what has been the one success of his short premiership (negotiating a version of Brexit acceptable to the EU and to almost the entire Conservative party) and so there is no chance at all of Johnson agreeing to this.

  • Farage said the UK should instead negotiate a quick and limited free trade deal with the EU. He claimed this amounted to a compromise on his behalf, because until now Farage has been calling for a no-deal Brexit. But Farage also said that if this Canada-style deal could not be agreed by July next year, the point at which the UK will have to ask for an extension of the transition if it wants one, the UK should just leave and then trade with the EU on WTO terms, with a view to negotiating a trade deal at some point in the future.
  • Farage said that Brexiter supporters backing his proposal (see paragraph above) should then join forces at the election and fight as a “leave alliance”.
  • He said that, if Johnson did not agree to a pact, the Brexit party would put up candidates in every seat in Britain. Assuming the Tories refused to join the “leave alliance”, the Brexit party would do two things, he said:

The first is to make sure that every house in this land is informed as to what is in the treaty, and what is in the political declaration, what the costs of this are, what the time implications are, to make people truly understand the extent to which this is a sellout.

And the second thing in those circumstances that we will do is we will contest every single seat in England, Scotland and Wales.

Please don’t doubt that we are ready. Don’t underestimate our determination, or our organisation. Indeed next Monday we have 500 candidates coming to London, and they will all be signing their candidate forms on that day.

Asked for details of how this might work, Farage said this would have to be negotiated. He accepted that, as the bigger party, the Tories would get a free run in all or most of their seats. But he argued that it would make sense of the Conservatives to stand down in the 150 seats they have never won, allowing the Brexit party to maximise its chances in those constituencies. (See 11.28am.)

  • Farage claimed that the Brexit party might make an exemption in seats where rival candidates oppose Johnson’s Brexit plan. He said:

Now of course I’m open and flexible to local exceptions, and already we are in communication with a number of MPs who are prepared to renounce the withdrawal agreement, to renounce the deal, and they themselves to stand on a ticket of a genuine free trade agreement or leave on WTO terms.

In those cases, where MPs say this, we will view them as our friends and not our enemies.

But there are few, if any, seats where sitting MPs will renounce Johnson’s deal and propose a harder, Farage-style Brexit instead. All the hardline Tory Brexiters in the European Research Group ended up backing Johnson’s deal. If they were to give Farage the sort of public pledge he is demanding, Conservative HQ might think twice about having them as party candidates because Johnson wants MPs elected who will vote for his deal – not vote against it. It was telling that Farage did not name any places where he expected this to happen.

  • Farage also claimed that there might be informal, non-aggression pacts in certain areas. He said:

More interestingly, already we’re being approached to put together informal arrangements on the ground, constituencies in which they may have a better chance of winning and we won’t bother to campaign, but equally constituencies in which we have got a better chance of winning and we won’t campaign. And that is already beginning to come together.

This would presumably involve the Brexit party still putting up candidates against Brexiter MPs, but just deciding not to try very hard. It is possible that some prominent Tory or Labour Brexiter MPs could benefit from this sort of arrangement, because they would not have to publicly sign up to the Farage-style Brexit.

Nigel Farage at the Brexit party launch.
Nigel Farage at the Brexit party launch. Photograph: Alberto Pezzali/AP

Updated

Q: Are the Tories looking at the polls and thinking they don’t need you?

If they think that, that’s fine, says Farage.

But if the Tories think that, they are wrong. No one party owns the Brexit vote, he says.

And that’s it.

I will post a summary soon.

Q: What if Boris Johnson offers you something, and then changes his mind once nominations have closed?

Farage says Johnson has changed his mind in the past.

Q: Is there at least a risk of you splitting the vote?

Farage does accept this. That is what happened in the Peterborough byelection, he says. His party could have won that seat if the Tories were not standing, he says. And in the Brecon and Radnorshire byelection the Tories would have won if the Brexit party had not been standing.

He says the mathematics of a deal work.

Q: So you could be risking Brexit?

No, says Farage. He says Johnson’s deal is not Brexit.

Updated

Q: Won’t you damage the Tory prospects, and stop Brexit happening?

Farage says Johnson is like a used-car salesman. The car may look fine from the outside. But it isn’t. This is not real Brexit, he says.

Q: Do you blame Dominic Cummings for the Tories’ refusal to offer a pact?

Farage says he does not know.

But he is sure Cummings is a charming chap, he says sarcastically.

Q: What are the terms? Do they have to let you stand in those 150 seats?

Farage says there will be a negotiation. But he has set out the upper end of his negotiation.

Q: How many seats could you win?

Farage says he knows how difficult it is winning seats under first-past-the-post. But the two-party system is crumbling, and now parties can win seats with just over 30% of the vote. So it has better prospects than in the past.

Updated

Q: Boris Johnson will never accept this. Isn’t this just a waste of time?

Farage says he is not wasting time. He is selecting candidates.

But he is prepared to put country before party.

He says he thinks there will come a point in the next couple of weeks when the Tories realise they have no choice. He does not mind if they agree a pact out of principle, or because they are worried. He just wants it to happen.

Q: Will you stand, and where?

Farage says he will announce this in the next few days.

But he does not want to say today, because it would be a distraction.

Q: Could a vote for the Brexit party stop Brexit, by costing the Tories votes?

Farage says what Johnson is planning is “not Brexit”.

He says Brexiters will be appalled when they realise exactly what Johnson is planning.

Updated

Q: What conversations are you having with the Tories about this?

Farage says he has not had formal talks. But informal conversations are taking place, including some in the PM’s “inner sanctum”. He says some of them are interested. Some would rather lose than have a pact.

But he says there is a big majority in the Conservative party that wants this.

Farage's Q&A

Farage has now finished his opening speech. He is now taking questions.

Q: How many candidates will you stand if the Tories do accept this deal? And when must they decide?

Farage says nominations close on 14 November.

He says he recognises the Tories are a much bigger party.

But there are 150 seats that the Tories have never won in their history. He says these are the seats where the Brexit party would do better, he says. There could be a non-aggression pact. That would benefit the Brexit cause, he says.

He says the Johnson deal is so bad it would amount to “the end of Brexit”.

Farage says he is open to being flexible in particular seats.

He suggests if MPs are willing to renounce Boris Johnson’s deal, his party will stand aside.

And he says there could be informal pacts on the ground between Brexit supporters.

But he says he hopes common sense will prevail, and Johnson will agree to a pact. But if he doesn’t, the Brexit party will fight the Tories, he says.

Updated

Farage says Brexit party will contest every seat in Britain if Tories do not agree to pact

Farage says the only way to solve the Brexit impasse is to create a leave alliance.

That does not just mean Tories and the Brexit party, he says. He says there are other leavers who might join.

He says, if that were to happen, they could become, as President Trump said yesterday, “an unstoppable force”.

If that does not happen, the Brexit party will be the only party standing up for Brexit.

He says it will make sure that every house in the land gets information about how the deal is a sell-out.

And he says the party will contest every seat in Britain.

Updated

Farage claims Johnson’s Brexit deal so bad it would lead to UK deciding to rejoin EU

Farage says Boris Johnson claims his plan is a great deal. But it isn’t. It is not Brexit, he claims.

Farage says Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, has been a much more brilliant negotiator than anyone on the UK side.

The EU is heading for regulatory alignment, he says.

And he says he is glad President Trump made it clear last night that the Johnson plan would obstruct a UK-US trade deal.

The Johnson plan would give the UK all of the disadvantages of EU membership, but none of the advantages of being out.

He says if the UK adopted that plan, it would trigger a campaign to rejoin the EU. And he says that campaign would succeed.

  • Farage claims Johnson’s Brexit deal so bad that it would lead to the UK deciding to rejoin the EU.

Johnson should drop this deal, he says.

Nigel Farage speaking at the Brexit party launch.
Nigel Farage speaking at the Brexit party launch. Photograph: Peter Nicholls/Reuters

Updated

Farage suggests Labour, not Tories, could lose out most from his party's campaigning

Farage says he will be in the east Midlands, the north-east, south Wales, London and Workington next week.

In 2015, when he led Ukip into the general election, people thought it would have a negative effect on the Conservative party.

But in fact the Ukip vote disproportionately hurt the Labour party, he says. He says that is why the Tories were able to get a majority.

He says the idea that Brexit party supporters are all Tories is “lazy thinking”.

  • Farage suggests Labour, not Tories, could lose out most from his party’s campaigning.

Updated

Farage says level of broken promises on Brexit is astonishing

Nigel Farage says the UK is still in the EU, even though it was meant to be out by now.

That is why people have lost faith in politics. And that is why he has come back to frontline politics.

The sheer level of broken promises is astonishing.

Farage says Labour said it would respect the referendum result. But now it is planning to offer voters a choice between remain and remain. (Farage argues that a soft Brexit amounts to remain.) That is a “betrayal”, he says.

Updated

Richard Tice, the party chair, is speaking again.

He says the Brexit party has turned anger into hope. It has hundreds of prospective candidates, led by Nigel Farage, ready to fight the election.

Farage takes to the stage.

Updated

Fox says Labour is also keen to avoid talking about Brexit.

She says it should be embarrassed about the way remainers have depicted leavers as ignorant.

And she says Labour has not been willing to challenge the pro-business features of the EU. She goes on:

Labour’s radicalism is, in truth, rather timid.

She says the Brexit party is an insurgent party that could change politics for good.

Claire Fox, another Brexit party MEP, is speaking now.

She says the election has already shown that stereotypes about Brexit party voters are wrong. There have been claims that “Workington man” is now the archetypal leave voter. But people in Workington reject this, she says.

She says she is alarmed by Boris Johnson talking about the need to get Brexit done, so he can focus on domestic issues.

That ignores the radical promise offered by Brexit, she says.

She says Brexit should be a chance to have “root and branch democratic reform”, as highlighted by the constitutional reform plans mentioned by Richard Tice earlier. (See 10.42am.)

Claire Fox
Claire Fox Photograph: Guardian

Ann Widdecombe, the former Tory minister who is now a Brexit party MEP, is speaking now. She says she wants to explain the reasons, beyond Brexit, why she supports the party.

She says the behaviour of parliament has been outragreous.

When she was an MP, parliamentarians did not lie, she says.

She says Theresa May claimed her deal would not involve the UK being trapped in the customs union forever.

But, when the full text of the attorney general’s legal advice was published, it became clear that what May had said was untrue. The AG said the UK could be trapped in the customs union.

Widdecombe says, for her, that was the moment when she decided to act.

She says Boris Johnson promised that the UK would leave the EU on 31 October even though “he knew darn well” that parliament would probably block this.

I do believe that we have rotten, rotten politics in this country at the moment.

She says she has now “lost all confidence” in both the two main parties.

Ann Widdecombe
Ann Widdecombe. Photograph: Guardian

Updated

Tice says the Brexit party would introduce a £200bn spending programme.

He says the money would come from three areas.

1 - Scrapping HS2 would save £100bn, he says.

2 - The UK could save £39bn by not paying its divorce bill to the EU, he claims. And he claims British officials wasted another £7bn by not recovering money from the European Investment Bank.

3 - And the UK should also halve its aid spending, and use the money for domestic projects.

Tice says £100bn of this money should be spent in the left-behind regions, in particular on “oven-ready” road and rail projects.

He says high-speed wifi should be rolled out across the whole country.

And he says business rates should be cut to help high streets thrive.

Brexit party calls for constitutional change

Tice says politics needs to change. And that change needs to start in this “stinking, rotten borough of Westminster”, he says.

He says the electoral system needs to be reformed. Millions of votes do not count, and millions of people do not vote because they know their vote does not count. He says we need proportional representation.

The House of Lords needs to be replaced with a smaller, elected second chamber, he says.

He says, if MPs change parties, a recall system should allow a byelection to be called.

There is too much postal voting, he says. He says the government should revert to the previous system.

And he calls for the supreme court to be subject to political scrutiny. That is because it is now a political court, he says. And he says that begs the question as to whether a written constitution is needed.

Richard Tice.
Richard Tice. Photograph: Guardian

Updated

Brexit party launch

The Brexit party launch has just started.

Nigel Farage, the party leader, is due to speak at 11am, but we are getting various speeches first.

Richard Tice, the party chair, is opening proceedings. He says it should be clear now that the Conservatives cannot deliver Brexit.

We are just about to install a live feed at the top of this blog.

From the Times’s Steven Swinford

Updated

From my colleague Josh Halliday

Tory minister rules out pact with Brexit party

On the Today programme this morning Robert Jenrick, the housing secretary, restated the party’s opposition to a pact with the Brexit party. He said:

We are not interested in doing any pacts with the Brexit party, or, indeed with anybody else. We are in this to win it.

In the past the Conservatives have rejected the idea of a pact with the Brexit party in even stronger terms. In September a Tory source told journalists that Nigel Farage and his close ally Arron Banks were not “fit and proper persons” and that “they should never be allowed anywhere near government”.

But that briefing sounded as if it had been inspired by Boris Johnson’s strategy chief, Dominic Cummings, who has been a harsh critic of Farage’s for years and who spent much of his time as the campaign director of Vote Leave ensuring that Farage had as little as possible to do with the leave campaign, because Cummings thought he was electorally toxic to the people whom Vote Leave needed to win over.

However, others in government have got a much higher opinion of Farage. For example, at the Tory conference in Manchester, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the Commons, described Farage as “in many ways admirable”. In his LBC interview yesterday Donald Trump also claimed that Boris Johnson has “a lot of respect and like” for Farage.

(I’ve asked Johnson’s aides if this is correct, but have not had a reply yet. However, given that this was a comment from one person notorious for lying about what he had been told by another person also notorious for being casual with the truth, it would be unwise to treat it as gospel.)

Surveys have also shown consistently that around half of Conservative party members do favour a pact with the Brexit party. There is a new one out today from ConservativeHome.

In practice, there is almost zero chance of any formal alliance between the two parties. But that does not necessarily rule out some kind of informal, non-aggression pact (Labour and the Lib Dems had one in 1997, which seemed to have an impact in some seats), although if there were any arrangement of this kind, the two parties would do their best to keep it secret.

Updated

On the Today programme this morning Barry Gardiner, the shadow international trade secretary, dismissed President Trump’s criticism of Jeremy Corbyn in his LBC interview yesterday. Gardiner said:

Of course he sides with the super-rich, Labour doesn’t. So, it’s no surprise to me that he thinks it would be bad news for people like him.

Given Trump’s unpopularity in the UK, his non-endorsement is almost certainly a boost to Corbyn. It adds a bit more plausibility to the claim that voting Labour would stop the NHS being opened up to US companies by a Tory UK-US trade deal (‘That must be why Trump is so opposed to Corbyn’). And, as the huge anti-Trump demonstrations in the UK have shown, there are a lot of people who would like to find a way of expressing their opposition to the US president.

As the Times’s Matt Chorley points out with the polling figures below, the Trump intervention could firm up Corbyn’s standing among possible Lib Dem voters, because Lib Dem supporters seem to dislike the US president even more than Labour ones do.

Updated

Farage restates call for Brexit party pact with Tories

Good Morning. It’s 1 November. Boris Johnson spent three months swearing blind that by now the UK would be out of the EU. But, for now, we’re still in (and Johnson’s poll ratings, far from being harmed, are looking as good as they ever have).

Today we should get an announcement that will have some bearing on Johnson’s election chances. Nigel Farage, the Brexit party leader, is holding his election campaign launch, and he should tell us how many seats his party will fight. There has been speculation that, instead of fighting most seats, as originally planned, it might only concentrate on a few dozen. The conventional wisdom is that that would benefit Labour but, as Rowena Mason reports in the Guardian’s overnight election lead, there is an argument that in some seats having the Brexit party on the ballot will actually help the Tories because it will hoover up more Labour votes.

Speaking on LBC this morning, before the launch at 11am, Farage refused to give clues as to whether his party would be fighting a national campaign, or a narrowly focused, constituency-specific one. He said:

Some newspapers are suggesting that we will fight vast numbers of seats, others think we will fight as few as 20 seats. I run a very tight ship, we don’t leak. I will reveal all later on today.

But he did restate his call for some sort of alliance with the Conservative party. He said:

I can assure you that most of what I say will be about Boris’s deal and the need, in my view, for some kind of Brexit alliance.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9am: Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister and the Scottish National party leader, takes part in a campaign event in Edinburgh.

11am: Nigel Farage, the Brexit party leader, launches his party’s election campaign at the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster.

10.30am: Richard Leonard, the Scottish Labour leader, takes part in a campaign event in Fife.

Midday: Jackson Carlaw, the Scottish Conservative leader, launches a campaign ad van in Aberdeen.

As usual, I will be covering breaking political news as it happens, as well as bringing you the best reaction, comment and analysis from the web, although I will be focusing almost exclusively on general election developments. I plan to publish a summary when I wrap up.

You can read all the latest Guardian politics articles here. Here is the Politico Europe roundup of this morning’s political news. And here is the PoliticsHome list of today’s top 10 must-reads.

If you want to follow me or contact me on Twitter, I’m on @AndrewSparrow.

I try to monitor the comments below the line (BTL) but it is impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer questions, and if they are of general interest, I will post the question and reply above the line (ATL), although I can’t promise to do this for everyone.

If you want to attract my attention quickly, it is probably better to use Twitter.

Updated

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