“None of us sitting in the press gallery were expecting it,” Kiran Stacey, the Guardian’s political correspondent, tells Helen Pidd.
On Wednesday, as Rishi Sunak went into the Commons for PMQs, he realised that his party was another MP down. Natalie Elphicke had crossed the floor to join the Labour party, the second MP to do so in 10 days.
The Conservatives took heavy local election losses last week and are now trailing by 30 points in the latest YouGov poll. What options does Sunak have?
Kiran explains what these losses mean for the prime minister, and looks at what calculation Keir Starmer made in taking in a rightwing Tory. Do recent events give us an insight into how the next general election will go?
“Rishi Sunak has been talking about the possibility of a hung parliament this week, using the local election results to try and gee up his Tory MPs,” Kiran tells Helen. “But just as he’s doing that we see a new poll out on Thursday from YouGov showing Labour now has a 30-point lead in the national polls.”
Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
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