General election – latest: Sunak hits back at Shapps’s Labour ‘supermajority’ claim as Tories U-turn on National Service

Polling experts have warned Rishi Sunak he is running out of time to woo voters with the first ballots set to be cast in the election within days, our Whitehall Editor Kate Devlin reports.

Postal votes will start landing on doorsteps early next week, the Electoral Commission has told The Independent.

With one in five now voting by post time is running out for the prime minister to turn around Labour’s 20-point lead in many polls.

One polling expert told Mr Sunak it was “now or not at all”.

Lord Hayward, who is also a Tory peer, said many people return their postal votes as soon as they arrive.

He added: “If the Conservatives are going to have an effect, for a fairly high proportion of voters the effect is now or not at all.”

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has warned he faces a battle to retain his Godalming and Ash parliamentary seat, Joe Middleton reports.

The seat is a key target for the Liberal Democrats who are aiming to demolish the Conservative “Blue Wall” in southern England.

A Survation poll has predicted that he could become the first chancellor to lose his seat at a general election.

Mr Hunt’s majority in the 2019 general election was 8,817, but he thinks this could now be a much closer race this time around.

He told Bloomberg: “There’s all to play for. This seat is probably going to be won or lost by the Conservatives by 1,500 votes or fewer.”

In order to boost his chances of retaining the seat, Mr Hunt has contributed £100k of his own money to the constituency party, official records show.

There are a total of 4,521 candidates in this election.This is a record for a general election in the UK and is up 36% on the number that stood in the last poll in 2019, which was 3,320.

The previous record was 4,150 candidates, which was set at the 2010 election.

“This last pledge is to be achieved by “better targeting” disability benefits and tightening up “how the benefits system assesses capability for work”. It is pie in the sky – precisely the type of nonsense that Sunak so rightly criticised Truss for peddling in the Tory leadership campaign two years ago.”

The Green Party said it would “accelerate clean energy investment and delivery” by cancelling recent oil and gas licences such as those for the Rosebank oil and gas field, removing all oil and gas subsidies and stopping all new fossil fuel extraction projects in the UK.

The party also said it wants to see “the phase-out of all nuclear energy” and will push for wind to provide 70% of UK energy by 2030.

On nature, the party has outlined extensive plans to protect and restore the UK’s environment by “giving rights to nature itself”.

The party will work to end the sewage scandal, extend people’s access to nature with a new English Right to Roam Act, and end the emergency authorisation of bee-killing pesticides.

On protecting animals and habitats, elected MPs will call for an end to all blood sports, badger culling, factory farming, routine use of antibiotics in farm animals and close confinement in cages.

For more on agriculture, the Greens have pledged to “work with farmers and other stakeholders to transform our food and farming system”.

Their manifesto includes measures such as almost tripling financial support for farmers to transition to nature-friendly farming, improving biodiversity and soil health, and linking farm payments to reduced use of pesticides.

Several environmental campaigners have welcomed the Greens’ manifesto for “grasping the reality” of the climate crisis.

The party pledged to stop all new fossil fuel projects, tax the wealthy and “mend broken Britain” as it launched its manifesto in Hove, East Sussex.

According to the document, elected Green MPs will push for measures that restore the UK’s depleted nature, increase the energy efficiency of homes and spend £50 billion per year on health and social care by 2030.

Mike Childs, head of policy at Friends of the Earth, said: “The Green Party is so far the only political party that has grasped the reality that unless we properly invest in reducing carbon emissions from our homes, industries, farming and transport, it will be impossible to avoid the huge financial and human costs of the climate crisis in the future.”

Dr Doug Parr, Greenpeace UK policy director, said the manifesto “clearly recognises” that there is no long-term prosperity or security for anyone without tackling the climate and nature crisis.

“Both the Green Party and the Lib Dems have now drawn a clear line in the sand between them and the Labour Party on the common sense notion that the very richest people should pay more to fix our crumbling country,” he said.

Rishi Sunak drew comparisons with his predecessor Liz Truss and her disastrous mini-Budget as he unveiled a manifesto containing £17bn of tax cuts.

The grand unveiling at the Silverstone Formula One racetrack was seen as a last chance for Mr Sunak to turn around his party’s flagging fortunes in an election campaign that has been filled with missteps as the Tories remain stuck at around 20 points behind Labour.

It came on the same day as a YouGov poll showed that Reform UK is closing in on the Tories at just one point behind, with 17 per cent to the Conservatives’ 18 per cent.

The Green Party has pledged to raise taxes for the wealthiest in society and mend “broken Britain” in its election manifesto.

A tax on multimillionaires and billionaires will be used to raise additional revenue of between £30-70 billion to help fund improvements to health, housing, transport and the green economy, the party said.

In its manifesto, the Greens also said “privatisation has failed” and promised to bring water companies, railways and the five big retail energy companies into state ownership.

Other measures include a pledge to invest £40 billion a year to shift to a green economy, a £12.4 billion investment pledge in green skills and training, and a carbon tax to drive down emissions – all during the next parliament.

Former cabinet minister and Boris Johnson ally Nadine Dorries has said “its over” for the Conservatives, Joe Middleton reports.

She told Times Radio: “I’m not even sure why candidates are bothering to go out and deliver leaflets. It’s over.”

She said that Labour are likely to have a tough five years if they do win the general election as politics is harder now due to “social media and other factors”.

Ms Dorries added that another problem Labour could have is that “there is not a lot of love” from the electorate towards Sir Keir Starmer.

She said that unlike Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage the Labour leader did not have a big personality.

Never miss a big story as our dedicated politics team will keep you informed on the latest breaking news, exclusive features, gripping interviews and must-watch videos.

You can expect breaking news alerts, exclusive poll results and campaign updates, cutting-edge opinion from our commentators and Premium news analysis from our award-winning journalists.

For more details on how your data is used, our privacy policy, community guidelines and more, click here.