Early evening summary
Keir Starmer has said the actor David Tennant should have been more respectful when he criticised Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary and minister for women and equalities minister, at the British LGBT awards. (See 3.41pm.)
Starmer has said the allegations against the two Tory candidates suspended over election bets were more serious than the incident that led to a Labour candidate being suspended over a bet. (See 2.36pm.) He also said he did not want to ban MPs from betting on politics; what was needed were higher ethical standards, not new laws, he argued. (See 2.47pm.)
Martin Lewis, the journalist, campaigner and founder of the MoneySavingExpert website, has accused the Conservative party of misrepresenting him in a clip it has used on social media. (See 3.13pm.)
That is all from this blog now. But we are covering the Sunak/Starmer debate on the BBC on a separate live blog. It’s here.
More than third of voters say there's still chance they may change mind about how to vote, poll suggests
Labour is worried that all the MRP polls we have been getting recently, like the latest Find Out Now/Electoral Calculus one (see 5.28pm), will make its supporters complacent, and lead them to assume that it does not matter if they vote next Thursday. This Labour campaign video makes the point quite well. It works best if you watch it wearing headphones.
Wasn’t expecting that 😳 pic.twitter.com/hlj0qEUCKm
— The Labour Party (@UKLabour) June 26, 2024
As well as potential voter complacency, voter volatility is another factor cited as a reason why the polls cannot be trusted. Ipsos has published its latest political monitor today and one of its findings is that that the number of people who say they might change their mind about how they will vote is higher than normal at this stage in a campaign. It says:
More than one in three say they may change their mind before the election (36%). At this stage in December 2019 it was 27%.
That sounds like good news for the Conservatives. But when you look at what people say about where they might go if they do change their mind, it is not such good news. Ipsos says:
Among those who may change their mind, 21% are considering Labour, 19% the Lib Dems and 14% the Greens, 7% are considering the Conservatives and 7% Reform UK.
Overall, the polling is very bad for Rishi Sunak. It says 72% of people say they dislike the Conservatives – the highest figure since Ipsos started asking this question in 2007. A year ago the figure was 67%.
This is how Gideon Skinner, the senior director of UK politics at Ipsos, described the results.
The Conservatives are finding themselves unable to turn the tide of public opinion, with 7 in 10 or more unhappy with the prime minister and with the government’s performance, disliking the Conservative party and overall just wanting a change. Whilst a relatively high one in three say they may still change their mind, at the moment there is little sign of this benefiting the Conservatives.
In fact, with Labour ahead on the key issues of this election, people have become more open to the prospect of a [Keir] Starmer government since the campaign began, and there are also signs of tactical voting among Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters. At the same time the Conservatives are also being challenged on the other flank by the rise of Reform, particularly on the issue of asylum and immigration, with Nigel Farage as popular among 2019 Conservatives as Rishi Sunak.
So far this has been a campaign to forget for the Conservatives, but the fundamental challenges they were facing in public opinion were in place even before the election was called.
