ITV election debate – live: Farage claims Tories ‘about to implode’

Taking a question about immigration, Plaid Cymru leader Rhun ap Iorwerth accused Nigel Farage of having been on “a dog-whistle tour of the UK for many, many years and exploiting the anxiety that people have”.

The Plaid leader said: “We need to heed and listen to people who have genuine concerns about the impact of the movement of population, pressures on public services, but we have to put that in the context of public spending cuts by the Conservatives.”

Angela Rayner had said: “What we need at the moment is a skills strategy. We have not had an industrial and skills strategy, so what we have is we’ve been over-reliant in our economy from overseas workers to fill our skills gap, and they’ve done a tremendous job in doing that and we have needed that, but what we really need is, as employment levels have gone higher again, is we need to really match those skills to give people opportunity to take those jobs.”

Nigel Farage replied: “Well, it’s funny Angela Rayner says that because Labour today launched their six key priorities at the General Election and didn’t mention the single most important issue affecting the lives of everybody in this country, namely the population explosion caused directly by migration.”

You wouldn’t know it from Keir Starmer’s speech at his manifesto launch, but transforming Britain’s relationship with Europe – just as it shifts further to the right – will be one of his biggest priorities in office, says Andrew Grice.

Read Andrew’s piece in full here:

The Tories have hit their joint lowest standing in the weekly tracker poll as Nigel Farage’s Reform takes its biggest share yet and the aftermath of Rishi Sunak’s D-Day gaffe takes effect.

The prime minister apologised for skipping part of the commemorations to do an election interview for ITV last week but the first weekly tracker poll taken by Techne UK after the fiasco reveals the depth of public anger.

Conservative Leader of the House of Commons Penny Mordaunt urged her rivals to keep “dogma” out of public services, such as the NHS, during ITV’s seven-way debate.

“Most of the public don’t care what colour the cat is, they just want some mice caught,” she told her six rivals.

“They (the public) want results and in my experience, listening to people who are actually doing these jobs – police officers who have reduced crime by half over the time we’ve been in office, healthcare professionals who are coming up with amazing initiatives in our hospitals and in our GP surgeries, teachers who are responsible now have 90% of our schools good or outstanding. Listen to the professionals in those services, keep political dogma out of it.”

Plaid Cymru’s Rhun ap Iorwerth hit back: “I have to draw attention to the analogy with the cats and the mice here. What we’ve seen under the Conservatives and 14 years is the fat cats getting rich and getting the cream. I fear that with privatisation of the NHS, we’re going to see the same under Labour.”

The official Labour Party social media channel on X, formerly Twitter, has responded to Penny Mordaunt’s performance at the seven-way ITV debate.

Attached to the picture of the leader of the house, the channel wrote: “You are the weakest link. Goodbye.”

Mr Sunak, meanwhile, is nowhere to be seen on the leaflets, which also make no reference to the Conservative Party or use of its branding.

It will be interesting to know how many people actually sat through the whole of tonight’s ITV seven-way debate.

The debate was undoubtedly the worst yet and once again featured the unedifying spectacle of Penny Mordaunt ripping chunks out of Angela Rayner who spent much of the event looking in a state of shock.

Basically though none of this matters. All that matters is that each participant has the carefully prepared social media clips. They must have been delighted that ITV said no interrupting (Mordaunt did not read the rule book).

Farage, Stephen Flynn and Ms Mordaunt will probably be happiest because they all got their points out cleanly.

Already their parties are posting the clips on Twitter and Facebook.

Unfortunately, for those of us who have to watch these awful spectacles professionally, there are still two more debates to go even though a Labour win looks inevitable.

Labour has gone straight on the attack against Mordaunt, who had a difficult evening.

The former Commons leader was the worst for interrupting her peers and drew laughs from the audience while giving several answers.

“You are the weakest link. Goodbye”, Labour said in post mimicking the popular quiz show.