Election news live — Tories ‘to take Hartlepool’ as Salmond claims he could have ‘destroyed’ Sturgeon

The government has “no plans” to bring forward the earliest date for the end of lockdown from 21 June, despite “hugely encouraging” data on Covid transmission, Downing Street has said.

Our politics editor Andrew Woodcock reports:

Damian Lyons Lowe, the boss of polling company Survation, has said he’ll never survey a constituency again if Labour wins the Hartlepool by-election.

His comments come off the back of his firm’s bombshell poll showing the Tories with a 17-point lead in what was once a Labour stronghold.

The survey was conducted before the “cash for curtains” scandal and had a tiny sample of just 301 people, but the size of the lead suggests Labour is in trouble.

Boris Johnson has appointed Tory MP Neil O’Brien as his adviser on his “levelling up” agenda, Downing Street said.

The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said that the MP for Harborough would be working with Government departments on developing policies ahead of a “levelling up” white paper.

“His role is going to be to work alongside departments to develop the policies that sit within that – the bold policy interventions which are going to help improve opportunity and boost livelihoods across the country,” the spokesman said.

“We are making multibillion-pound investments to transform the country’s prosperity and spread opportunity already.

“We have the opportunity to go further and that is the work Neil O’Brien has taken up.”

Alex Salmond has claimed he could have “destroyed” SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon’s political career if he had wanted to.

My colleague Adam Forrest has more details here:

The latest Opinium survey for the Scottish election finds the SNP slipping back by 2 per cent on the constituency vote, with the union-backing parties getting small uplifts.

But the party is still on course to form a majority government, according to the survey, and is projected to win 67 of the 129 seats available.

Chris Curtis of Opinium said: “The campaign finishes much where it started, with razor thin margins set to decide whether Nicola Sturgeon can govern alone, or will need the backing of other pro-independence parties.”

Former Labour PM Gordon Brown has had more to say about the various “sleaze” claims surrounding the government – saying public service “cannot be a platform for private gain”.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour: “I think if he’s (Boris Johnson) breached the ministerial code and he’s told the House of Commons something that turns out not to be true, that becomes untenable.

“I think the issue at the moment is, can you have rules for gifts? People should not be receiving gifts because they’re in government because you become beholden to people, you become in their debt, you cannot have that and clearly gifts have got to be declared.”

As the G7 foreign ministers’ discussions get under way, foreign secretary Dominic Raab and his counterparts were separated from one another by clear screens in order to minimise the Covid risk.

Raab began the meeting by running through the agenda, with sessions today focused on “geopolitical priorities”. Ministers are set to talk about relations with Russia, China and Iran, as well as the crisis in Myanmar, violence in Ethiopia and Syria.

A working dinner at Lancaster House will close the first day’s session.

Returning now to some of the more interesting comments made by Keir Starmer this morning. The Labour leader claimed “the inequality that’s built into our economic model is morally unjust” and “economically stupid”.

The Labour leader told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The inequality and injustice in our economy were baked in because of austerity before we got to the pandemic … We’ve got to decide, do we go on to a different and better future, or do we go back and try to patch up what we had before?”

Asked if the purchasing of the vaccines would have happened under Labour, Starmer told Today: “Well, of course it would.

“We would have set up a taskforce and, in fact, during the course of last year, we were pressing on the government the need for taskforces on a number of issues, including getting our schools back open again as quickly as possible, which ended up being a right fiasco.”

The latest Opinium poll for The Times has the Tory candidate Andy Street 17 points ahead of Labour’s Liam Byrne in the West Midlands mayoralty contest.

Alex Salmond has claimed he could have “destroyed” Nicola Sturgeon if he’d really wanted to.

It follows the SNP leader’s revealing interview with The New Yorker, in which she talked about the civil war with her old boss over harassment complaints.

“I think my political opponents – I don’t know, maybe Alex himself … There was an element of ‘We can break her,’ you know,” Sturgeon told the US magazine. “That was how it felt.”

Salmond reportedly “chucked” when told about the comments, before adding: “If I wanted to destroy her, that could have been done.”