Closing summary
We’re now closing this live blog. Thanks for reading and commenting. Here’s a summary of the day’s main events:
Rishi Sunak largely deserted the field after a difficult first few days of the general election campaign. The prime minister held a brief meeting with a group of veterans in his constituency on Saturday morning, but sources had already told the Guardian he’d planned to spend most of the day at home, in discussion with his closest advisers.
A further blow was dealt to Sunak’s campaign as it was announced the number of people arriving in the UK so far this year by irregular means had surpassed 10,000. The prime minister has staked much of his political reputation on ending the crisis.
Michael Gove and Andrea Leadsom joined the now record-breaking exodus of Conservative MPs from the Commons, with the former saying it was time for a “new generation” to lead the party. Gove’s announcement in a letter tweeted on Friday evening had been anticipated by some given the strong Liberal Democrat challenge he faces in his Surrey Heath constituency, but adds to the sense of Tories fleeing in the face of a likely general election loss.
The treasury minister Bim Afolami played down the significance of high-profile Tory MPs to be standing down at an election. He told Times Radio: “Look, it’s not unnatural if you’ve got people who served for 20, sometimes 30 or 35 years in parliament in their 50s or 60s coming to retirement or indeed retiring completely, that they choose to bring their political careers to a close. I think that’s fine.”
Ed Davey welcomes Labour’s pledge to seek to lower the voting age to 16, but says “bolder” reform is needed to fix the “broken” political system.
Speaking at a campaign event in Winchester, Hampshire, the Lib Dem leader says his party has “long supported votes at 16”, saying anyone who wants to join the party’s policy ideas was “very, very welcome”. He adds:
The problem is though, the British political system is broken. I think we’ve all seen the last few years that unless we transform our political system, we won’t get the changes in our health service and our economy and the environment that we need.
So, Liberal Democrats are putting forward a much bolder programme of political reform with electoral reform and with putting power out from Westminster and Whitehall into communities for people. And that pretty profound and ambitious form of political change, I think, is what is needed and what people want.
