What’s happening?
Today could be the day a number of Conservative MPs find out if they will be charged with fraud over spending in the 2015 election campaign. The investigation has taken more than a year, but with the deadline approaching – tomorrow – for candidates to be nominated (or withdraw/be speedily withdrawn) for this year’s election, we could hear the outcome this morning. For a quick primer on the expenses allegations – which centre on the party’s deployment of its battlebus in key seats – check here.
Back to this year’s bus timetable, and Labour’s has hit the road. The smooth running of the service was delayed by questions over Jeremy Corbyn’s determination to stay on as leader even if Labour does not win the election. He told the BBC that, contrary to a BuzzFeed report, he hadn’t said that:
No, I told them I would carry on as leader because we’ll have won the election by then.
Tricky for him, then, that BuzzFeed had a recording of the interview in which Corbyn said what BuzzFeed said he had said. BuzzFeed reports it has now been told its access to Labour campaign events will be “limited”.
Also less welcome than he would have been at Corbyn HQ (which I’m guessing was already not very) will be Lord Glasman, former adviser to Ed Miliband and “Blue Labour” advocate. Glasman, according to the Financial Times, has been in chats with Nick Timothy, the PM’s co-chief of staff and the man charged with whipping up a Conservative manifesto.
Bernie Sanders, being a different kind of blue, is another matter. Corbyn told the Guardian he was angling for an endorsement from the losing US Democratic candidate, soon to visit the UK:
I hope he will. I think he probably will, actually. But we mustn’t predict these things.
Day two of Labour’s official campaign sees Corbyn and Angela Rayner promise £6bn in extra funding to schools by the end of the next parliament (which should be 2022, but that Fixed Term Parliaments Act hasn’t really proved itself so far), as well as scrapping university tuition fees and reintroducing student grants – paid for by reversing cuts to corporation tax since 2010.
It’s a school day for the Liberal Democrats, too, with Tim Farron announcing that they’d invest more in schools and colleges: their figure is £7bn. Plus the Lib Dem leader has a hovercraft. The stakes are rising.
But not, somehow, for the PM, who – despite the expenses shadow, a party row over her Miliband-esque energy policy, and a backlash to her support for foxhunting – settled unruffledly with husband Philip May on the One Show’s green sofa for a chat about Eurovision, shoes and cookery books. For the best take on this surreally humdrum exchange, read John Crace’s sketch (obviously). But what did we learn?
Theresa May had her sights on No 10 ever since she was “well established in the shadow cabinet” (which she first joined in 1999), her husband told the show’s presenters. A strong and stable ambition, one might say.
What else? Philip May takes the bins out. “There’s boy jobs and girl jobs, you see,” said Theresa May, prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Her husband does the “boy jobs”, he confirmed:
Obviously if you’re the kind of man who expects his tea to be on the table at 6 o’clock every evening, you could be a little bit disappointed.
Not as disappointed as those tuning in for a bit more meat on the interview (in 2011, presenter Matt Baker asked David Cameron: “How on earth do you sleep at night?”). But we did get this killer insight from Mr May:
I quite like ties, jackets, stuff like that.
At a glance:
- Dan Carden, adviser to Unite general secretary Len McCluskey, has been selected as Labour candidate in Liverpool Walton.
- Labour expels three members over an attempt to unseat Jeremy Hunt.
- Tim Farron ridicules Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn at Cornwall event.
- There will be a second independence referendum regardless of the election result, Alex Salmond tells BBC Newsnight.
- Corbyn’s wife, Laura Alvarez, will not join him on One Show sofa.
- New York Times offers ‘Brexit means Brexit’ guided tour of London.
Poll position
A Kantar poll suggests a narrowing of the gap between the Conservatives (on 44%, down four points from last week) and Labour (on 28%, up four points). It says 11% of people are still undecided as we enter the final four weeks of campaigning.
While May maintains her poll lead on decisiveness and negotiating skills, the Labour leader pulls ahead on being “in touch with ordinary people” (57% to 43%) and “interested in other people’s lives” (55% to 45%). Quite unconnectedly, the PM took some unprepared questions from “ordinary people” on a campaign stop yesterday. (“You’ve got a pen in your hand. Are you a journalist?” she sleuthily checked first.)
But the overall trend still has the Tories chillaxing on 47%, Labour on 29%, and the Lib Dems hovering around 9%; follow our poll tracker here.
Diary
- At 9am, Theresa May holds talks with Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg at Downing St, before campaigning in Nottingham.
- At 10am Jeremy Corbyn and Angela Rayner launch Labour’s schools policy in Leeds.
- For Scottish Labour, the focus is NHS pay, with Kezia Dugdale and Anas Sarwar meeting nurses in Edinburgh.
- The Tim Farron battlebus tour of Lib Dem targets in south-west England continues.
- At 10.30 in Worcester, Greens co-leader Jonathan Bartley unveils the party’s mental health policy.
Read these
We’ve heard similar rumblings before, of course, but Christopher Hope in the Telegraph says “as many as 100” moderate Labour MPs could be set to walk – or at least sit – away from the party after the election:
Moderate Labour candidates are already in talks with potential donors about a new “Progressives” group forming in Parliament if Mr Corbyn stays on as leader after a Tory landslide.
One potential scenario is for the MPs to resign the Labour whip and become independents grouped together in the Commons under the Progressives banner. They could then rejoin the parliamentary Labour party once Mr Corbyn had been replaced with a leader they supported…
Although they do not intend to form a new party, a well-organised anti-Corbyn faction, who would sit together on the back benches, could make it difficult for Mr Corbyn to form a viable opposition because of a shortage of MPs to take up shadow cabinet posts.
In the latest dispatch in the Guardian’s Voices and Votes series, Nazia Parveen is in Birmingham Erdington:
At Erdington’s heart is the high street, a once booming shopping area that has had a mass exodus in recent years. When we asked Guardian readers from the area to tell us about the issues that would decide how they voted, many said the decline of the high street was among their concerns, alongside worries about segregation, failing services and homelessness…
For Collette Elliott, who has lived here all her life, the perceived decline of the area feels personal … We take a tour of Erdington together, into deserted squares that were once thriving shopping areas and are now empty cut-throughs to car parks, past closed businesses. During the hours that we spend together, there is a sentence that repeatedly passes Elliott’s lips: ‘This used to be a … but now it’s closed.’ Like others in the suburb, she feels abandoned.
‘Yes, this totally, definitely happened’ of the day
The PM on the power of shoes:
It can have a serious side to it … about four or five years ago I was in the lift in the House of Commons and there was a young woman in the lift and I happened to look down. I said, oh, nice pair of shoes. And she said, I like your shoes.
And then she looked at me and she said, your shoes got me involved in politics.
The day in a tweet
Or two, in the interests of balance:
One reporter told me May aides made clear if he didn't state his question in advance then he wouldn't get a question pic.twitter.com/IEQo9pq7r5
— Michael Crick (@MichaelLCrick) May 9, 2017
The internet: if enough young people vote they can totally sway the election and stop the tories!
— Matt Leys (@mattleys) May 9, 2017
Corbyn: *bans Buzzfeed*
And another thing
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