Oliver Dowden reportedly reveals preferred choice for next Tory leader – UK general election as it happened

Starmer is now taking media questions.

Q: [From Jess Parker from the BBC] What will be the first thing you do if you become PM on Friday?

Starmersays the first thing he will do is change the mindset of politics. He wants to “return politics to service”. It should always be “country first, party second”, he says.

Keir Starmeris speaking in Nottinghamshire now. He is also delivering the same stump speech from yesterday, saying he wants to deliver “a summer of change”.

But change will only happen if people vote for it, he says. He saysLabourwill keep campaigning until 10pm on Thursday.

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Back at the Q&A a woman tellsRishi Sunaksays he had to wait three years for an autism diagnosis for her son. She says they had to get a private diagnosis, costing £2,000. What will the government do to improve this situation?

Sunaksays there is a challenge here. He says the government is going to make it easier for people to get treatement from the NHS provided by a private healthcare provider.

(He is talking generally. He does not say that this is something available to people needing an autism diagnosis for a child.)

Sunak also says the government is giving new powers to pharmacies.

(Pharmacists don’t deal with autism.)

And Sunak’s final point is about the waiting lists that built up during Covid.

(He ignored the question, which was about autism provision entirely, and instead just defaulted to his stock ‘what to say about the NHS’ answer.)

AReform UKcandidate has defected to the Conservative, hitting out at the “racist, misogynistic and bigoted” views of some of her former colleagues, PA Media reports.

Georgie Davidsaid in a statement issued by the Tories that, even though she did not think the Reform UK leadership (ie, Nigel Farage and Richard Tice) were racist, they had failed to tackle the problem in the party. She said:

I am hereby announcing my decision to leave the Reform Party and stand down as their candidate for West Ham and Beckton, with immediate effect.

I am in no doubt that the party and its senior leadership are not racist.

However, as the vast majority of candidates are indeed racist, misogynistic, and bigoted, I do not wish to be directly associated with people who hold such views that are so vastly opposing to my own and what I stand for.

I also have been significantly frustrated and dismayed by the failure of the Reform party’s leadership to tackle this issue in any meaningful way, and their attempts to instead try to brush it under the carpet or cry foul play.

As such, I have now suspended my campaign with Reform, and I an endorsing the Conservative party – I would encourage all of my fellow patriots to do the same.

Asked what he would do to improve growth, Sunak says he will cut tax. ButLabourwill introduced 70 new French-style employment laws, he claims. He says this will lead to more strikes.

Sunakis now taking questions. The first is about how he will restore integrity.

Sunak says he stands up for what he believes in. And he says that he set out his priorities, allowing people to judge whether he was achieving what he wanted to. He claims this is unusual for a politician.

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Rishi Sunakis currently giving a stump speech in Oxfordshire. It is broadly the same as the one he was giving yesterday, where he starts by saying he understands why people are frustrated with the government, argues that it would be wrong to give Labour a “blank cheque” and says that, if the Tories win, he will continue to cut taxes.

Although he is emphasising what he describes as the dangers of “a Labour supermajority”, interestingly he is not using the line aboutnot “surrendering” to Labourthat he used repeatedly in last week’s TV debate.

There has been a major boundary review since 2019 and on Thursday most people will be voting in a constituency that has either changed its boundaries, or that has been replaced with a new seat, with quite different boundaries and a new name. We have got a guide to the new constituencies (below) and, using your postcode, you can check how the boundary changes affect you.

On election night it is important to know, not just how many seats parties are winning, but how the share of the vote has changed since 2019. Given that most boundaries have changed, comparisons with the results from 2019 would be misleading. But the academics Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher have produced notional results for 2019 based on the new boundaries (what the share of the vote would have been for each party, in each constituency, if the 2024 boundaries had been in place then). It is impossible to know for sure, because general election results are only counted on a constituency-wide basis. But, using ward-by-ward data from local election results, Rallings and Thrasher have been able to produce a reliable guide. The Guardian and other news organisations will be using these figures on election night as the benchmark to assess how the performance of parties has changed since 2019, and these figures are included in our interactive graphic too.

As parties get increasingly desperate and fearful of losing in election campaigns, they often ramp up the negative campaigning, and there has been a very good example of that from the Conservative party over the last 24 hours.

YesterdayKeir Starmergave an interview to Chris Evans on Virgin Radio in which he said, if he becomes PM, he will try to carry on with the habit he has had for some years of making sure thathe does not work on Friday nightsso he can spend time with his wife and children. It was an unexceptional thing to say, and Virgin Radio did not even highlight it in their press release.

But yesterday afternoon some news websites started running headlines saying that Starmer had said that he would not work beyond 6pm. And theConservativespicked this up as an attack line, despite knowing it was not what Starmer had said at all. This is from theConservative party’s official X account.

Keir Starmer has said he’d clock off work at 6pm if he became Prime Minister.

You deserve better than a part-time Prime Minister.

The only way to prevent this is to vote Conservative on Thursday.

This is fromGrant Shapps,the defence secretary.

Virtually every military intervention we’ve carried out has happened at night, partly to keep our servicemen & women safe.

The British people will wonder who would be standing in for Starmer between 6pm & 9am – Angela Rayner, David Lammy, Ed Miliband?

Defending Britain’s security isn’t a daylight hours only job.

This morningMaria Caulfield,the health minister, was still trying to run the same attack line – although on Sky News the presenter,Matt Barbet,told her bluntly she what she was saying was untrue.

This has been one of the biggest lies of the campaign – although arguably so transparently absurd as to be relatively harmless. In an LBC interview earlier in the campaignRishi Sunakhimself praised Starmer for having a good work/life balance, and not neglecting the need to spend time with his family.

This morningWes Streeting,the shadow health secretary, was doing a media round forLabour,and he said the “lies and hypocrisy” coming from the Tories were now overwhelming. He told Sky News.

What we’ve seen this morning is just the latest, desperate attack from the Conservative party – the party that brought you the biggest lockdown party in Downing Street now talking about [Keir Starmer’s] work ethic.

The stench of their lies and hypocrisy is even more overwhelming than the vomit they left for Downing Street cleaners to clean up.

And, like the Downing Street cleaners, if we’re given the chance on Thursday, Labour will clean up the Tories’ mess too.

And, as far as I’m concerned, this is just the latest example of why this circus needs to be brought to an end and why people like Maria Caulfield, out this morning debasing herself on national television, should also be removed at the general election.

Sunakis doing the interview from a supermarket.Thompsonasks him if he knows the prices of a loaf of bread.Sunaksays at Morrisons a tiger bloomer loaf is £1.35.

Thompsonasks if he knows how much it has gone up in price over the last five years.

Sunaksays he does not have that figure to hand. Thompson tells him it is 28%.

And that’s the end of the interview.

(It was not a phone-in, as I said earlier. Sorry; I was misinformed.)