“Michael Gove has stormed ahead as the voters’ favourite to become the next leader of the Conservative Party, the latest survey has revealed. For the second month running, a poll of Conservative members by the ConservativeHome website has found the Justice Secretary and Brexiter well ahead of his nearest rivals” – Daily Telegraph
>Yesterday:
“Curbing benefits paid to EU workers is unlikely to lead to a dramatic reduction in migration, a report claims today. As few as one in ten foreigners from the Brussels bloc claim handouts soon after arriving in the UK – meaning they were mostly lured by jobs, said the Migration Observatory. The revelation torpedoes David Cameron’s EU referendum deal which he said would tackle mass immigration” – Daily Mail
“EU member states that refuse to take in migrants under a new quota system could be fined billions of euros, the European Commission will announce today. Controversial proposals to be unveiled in Brussels would result in countries being fined €250,000 for each asylum seeker they reject… Britain is not part of the scheme but the proposals risk inflaming a row on immigration” – The Times (£)
“Brexit supporters have hit out at German plans for a European army with joint headquarters and shared military assets. A white paper drawn up by Berlin calls for ‘all possibilities’ to be considered to make the forces of member states work more closely together. The prospect of integrating European militaries more closely has been highly controversial in the UK” – Daily Mail
“Economic uncertainty has hit its highest level in Britain in at least 19 years in the lead-up to the EU referendum, sparking concerns at the Bank of England of difficult times ahead. With surveys for April showing the weakest level of manufacturing activity since the eurozone crisis in early 2013, meanwhile, an influential group of US academics has attributed the slowdown directly to concerns about a British exit from the bloc” – Financial Times
“Sir Philip Green faces disqualification as a company director for up to 15 years if found guilty of misconduct by a government inquiry ordered yesterday into the sale and collapse of BHS. Sajid Javid, the business secretary, called for an urgent investigation into the high street company, which went into administration last week, a year after Sir Philip and his wife, Lady Green, sold it for £1 to a former bankrupt with no retail experience” – The Times (£)
“A question about subordinating conjunctions is not expected to trouble an 11-year-old — but it certainly left the schools minister flustered. Nick Gibb’s heart must have sunk when questioned live on air about the grammatical definition of the word ‘after’. He clearly hadn’t done his homework because he failed the test” – The Times (£)
“The employment gravy train linking Whitehall to the City of London can be revealed today. Seven out of nine Treasury ministers who have applied to the appointments watchdog for jobs clearance since 2008 took work in big corporations. The same was true of 17 out of 21 Treasury civil servants” – Daily Mail
“Ruth Davidson began a whirlwind tour of Scotland by helicopter yesterday as new research suggested her party will struggle to replace Labour as the official opposition at Holyrood. The Scottish Conservative leader visited Oban, Keith and Peterhead during the first part of a tour aimed at persuading supporters of other parties to back the Tories for the first time” – The Times (£)
>Today:
“London politics gave us a day of barely-suppressed loopiness, including a joint appearance by the Conservatives’ two warring bigshots, Boris Johnson and David Cameron… yesterday evening they combined at a south London school to promote their London mayoralty candidate, Zac Goldsmith. A crowd of at least 70 was there to see it” – Quentin Letts, Daily Mail
>Yesterday:
“Labour was plunged into a fresh race row last night over an extraordinary slur against moderate Muslims by its London mayoral candidate. Sadiq Khan was branded unfit to be London Mayor after it emerged that he had described moderate Muslim groups as ‘Uncle Toms’ – a notorious racial slur used against black people to suggest that they are subservient to whites. The incendiary claim emerged in a 2009 interview with Iranian-backed Press TV” – Daily Mail
“The Labour Party has a ‘severe’ problem with anti-Semitism, Britain’s Chief Rabbi says as he launches an attack on Jeremy Corbyn and his allies. In his first intervention in the anti-semitism row that has engulfed Labour, Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis criticises the ‘poisonous invective’ and ‘politics of distortion’ from party members such as Ken Livingstone. He warns that ‘there must be no place for anti-semitism in our politics’ and calls on Mr Corbyn to take ‘decisive action’” – Daily Telegraph
“Donald Trump has become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, setting up a likely battle with Hillary Clinton in November, after a decisive victory in Indiana that forced Ted Cruz to abandon his campaign… Mr Cruz suspended his White House campaign after a disastrous performance in the Midwestern ‘Hoosier’ State, which was one of the last opportunities he had to prevent Mr Trump from securing the 1,237 delegates needed to win the Republican nomination” – Financial Times