A summary of today's developments
At the penultimate hustings in Norfolk, Liz Truss said she would prefer Boris Johnson be prime minister rather than Rishi Sunak.
Sunak said he would rather Truss be prime minister than Johnson, as he called for the country to “move forward”.
Truss said the “jury’s out” on whether France’s president Emmanuel Macron is “friend or foe” to the UK. The foreign secretary added that if she was prime minister she would judge him on “deeds not words”.
Truss said she questioned lockdown policy during the pandemic, and argued on reflection “we did do too much”.
Steve Barclay, the health secretary, was harangued by a passerby outside a hospital who demanded to know what he was going to do about the ambulance waiting time crisis. She said that during their 12 years in office the Tories had done “bugger all about it”.
Ipsos released some new polling that suggests that, by a margin of more than two to one, people do not trust Liz Truss to reduce the cost of living. Keir Starmer has the best ratings on this measure of the four politicians featured in the poll, followed by Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson and then Truss.
Prof John Edmunds, head of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and one of the most prominent and influential figures on Sage during the pandemic, has responded to Rishi Sunak’s criticism of the pandemic scientists. He says that if Sunak thinks the economic consequences of lockdown did not receive enough attention, then Sunak himself is to blame, because as chancellor he should have been commissioning that analysis.
In his World at One interview, Rishi Sunak also ruled out leaving politics if he loses the leadership campaign. When it was put to him that Dominic Cummings, the PM’s former chief adviser, said today that Sunak’s Spectator interview read like something from someone “whose epicly bad campaign had melted his brain” and who was about to quit politics (see 12.11pm), Sunak laughed briefly and said this was “absolutely not” the case.
Albanian police could be brought to the UK to observe migrant arrivals and pass on intelligence in a bid to tackle Channel crossings, PA Media reports.
And that brings the hustings to an end.
The final one is in London on 31 August.
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