Boris Johnson has fired the starting gun on the Conservative general election campaign, saying that it will be "the most important in a generation".
Launching the campaign in Birmingham, the Prime Minister said he had been forced to go to the country because Parliament was "paralysed" over Brexit.
He said MPs had become incapable of functioning "like an anaconda which had swallowed a tapir".
It comes as Labour's deputy leader Tom Watson made the bombshell announcement that he would step down in December, saying that the time had come to "start a different kind of life".
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