Almost half Tory members want merger with Reform UK, poll suggests, as leadership infighting escalates – UK politics live | Politics

good morning. Keir Starmer I will be in Washington to attend the NATO summit and make my debut on the world stage as prime minister. This will be a major diplomatic moment and a major policy challenge. My colleagues Pippa Crerar She was accompanied by reporters and, as reported in a feature in the Guardian, while Starmer has said that NATO needs to increase its defence spending, he has yet to give a timeline for when the new government will achieve its target of bringing defence spending to 2.5% of the UK’s GDP.

NATO will be the topic of conversation today, but we will cover the summit in a separate live blog. It’s midnight in Washington, so I want to start this morning with the Conservatives, where the post-defeat investigation and leadership infighting has just begun in earnest.

James CleverleyThe shadow Home Secretary, The Times article Urging the party to avoid civil war and noting the need to “wisely examine what has gone wrong”, he continues:

We cannot afford to fall into bitter infighting and finger-pointing, which is how we got here.

There is strength in unity, Conservative Party We have always been at our best when we embrace broad support. We are losing voters on both the left and the right, and we won’t get them all back if we narrow our offering.

Good luck, as the saying goes: the Conservatives publicly attacked Suella Braverman yesterday, and Conservative MPs and MPs who read The Times will probably pay more attention to another article in the paper written by its political editor. Stephen SwinfordIn it, he reveals how Kemi Badenoch, the current shadow housing secretary, used the first meeting of the shadow cabinet to blast Rishi Sunak over his handling of the election.

The shadow housing secretary told the meeting on Tuesday that Mr Sunak’s decision to call an early election without informing ministers was wrong and bordering on “unconstitutional”.

Instead of telling her cabinet ministers first, snack Trump decided to tell a small group of colleagues, including his congressional aide, Craig Williams, who later admitted to making the bet about election date and whom Trump described as a “clown.”

At Tuesday’s meeting, Mr Badenoch also said: Sunak decides to return home early from Normandy landings commemoration ceremony He said the Prime Minister had dominated the election campaign with “disastrous results”, adding that if he had stayed in France longer colleagues such as Penny Mordaunt would still be serving as MPs.

She said the Conservative party should not downplay the magnitude of its election defeat and that many colleagues were clearly still traumatised. Suella BravermanThe former Home Secretary, who has delivered a series of scathing interventions, appeared to be having a “very public” nervous breakdown.

Earlier this year, Badenoch, who was the bookmakers’ favourite to be the next Conservative leader, was reported to have told colleagues that Sunak would “have to accept” an election defeat. Of course, Swinford hasn’t said from whom she heard about Badenoch’s shadow cabinet intervention, but many in the party will assume that the report came from her camp and that the story is the opening salvo for her leadership campaign.

The article’s publication coincided with the release of the first post-election poll asking Conservative members who they want as their new leader, conducted by YouGov and commissioned by the party. Party Member Project The long-term academic survey, conducted jointly by Queen Mary University of London and the University of Sussex, focused on the opinions of party members. Around 725 party members were surveyed and the results were weighted to be representative of the party’s membership as a whole, suggesting that Badenoch has a clear lead. The Membership Project stated in its report:

Badenoch, while support is still not overwhelming, has emerged as the clear frontrunner and by a significant margin: if we remove the 13% who responded “neutral” and the 6% who responded “don’t know” from the figures (a process we perform on all party leader figures quoted below), Badenoch now has 31% support, double the support of Suella Braverman and Tom Tugendhat, who are on 16% and 15% respectively.

Perhaps surprisingly, Priti Patel, who has recently been mentioned as a possible replacement for Badenoch and Braverman, has the support of just 6%. Robert Jenrick, who has been in negotiations for months, has the support of just 7%. Victoria Atkins (who, like Tugendhat, is seen as representing the self-described One Nation wing of the Conservative party) has the support of just 2%. James Cleverley, seen by some as a possible “unity candidate”, has the support of 10%.

This isn’t too surprising, but what is surprising is that the poll also shows that almost half of Conservative members support merging with Reform UK. The Members’ Project said:

On the possibility of a merger between the Conservative and Reform parties, party members are split down the middle, with 47% in favour, 48% against, and the rest unsure. Perhaps predictably, Leavers are more than twice as likely to back a merger as Remainers (59 to 25). Support for the idea increases with age, with those over 50 more in favour and those under 50 more opposed. Support for a merger is stronger among “working class” Conservatives (C2DE) than “middle class” Conservatives (ABC1), and also among those who backed Truss over Sunak in 2022 (59 to 27).

The poll came in the wake of a general election campaign during which Reform UK’s manifesto was described as twice as reckless as Liz Truss’s mini-Budget and many of the party’s candidates were exposed as racists and extremists.

Today’s agenda includes:

11:30 AM: The House of Representatives will convene and lawmakers can resume their oaths.

From 1pm BST: Keir Starmer is due to hold bilateral meetings with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the NATO summit. The summit begins at 4.30pm, with the plenary session starting at 6pm. At 10.30pm UK time (late afternoon US time), Starmer is due to meet with President Biden at the White House.

5pmRishi Sunak is due to address Conservative MPs at the 1922 Committee.

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