What’s happening?

It’s a bank holiday across the UK today, in a week where politics will begin to look more like normal in the wake of last Monday’s terror attack in Manchester.

More like normal because the personal attacks have resumed. But an uncomfortable new normal, where the point-scoring happens against a background that really, pressingly matters.

So expect more to follow from Sunday’s spats over security. Jeremy Corbyn faces fresh pressure after reports that, in October 2014, less than a year before he became Labour leader, he attended a ceremony to honour Palestinians killed by Israeli forces, including Atef Bseiso, a terrorist believed to have planned the 1972 Munich massacre. Meanwhile, Diane Abbott – who writes today in the Guardian about what she describes as government failures on security – claimed she had left her 1980s views on the Northern Ireland conflict behind with her then afro:

The hairstyle has gone and some of the views have gone. We have all moved on.

Labour, and others, will be keen to move on today, with the Times reporting that temporary exclusion orders, a legal power introduced in 2015 to prevent British extremists who leave to fight with Isis from returning to the UK, have been employed just once. Home secretary Amber Rudd insisted on Sunday: “We have started to use them.” She did not give numbers.

Today also sees the Conservatives attempting a reboot of their campaign: with less than a fortnight to go, they’d prefer to be talking about leadership and Brexit. The Liberal Democrats would, too, with Tim Farron telling the Guardian that putting the pro-EU case at the heart of his party’s campaign had been “the right thing to do”, even if the electorate comes round to the idea only after 9 June.

What won’t be happening on 9 June, though, says Farron, is coalition talks:

No deals, no pacts with anyone … We think people should know when they vote Lib Dem that they are not doing it as a proxy for anybody else.



Will that stop the Conservatives creaking out the “coalition of chaos” line again? (Pause here for an arched eyebrow.) Nicola Sturgeon told Andrew Neil in a BBC interview on Sunday night that the SNP would seek to be part of a progressive, anti-Tory alliance in the event of a hung parliament. But with a fairly hefty caveat:



The reality of this election, even with a narrowing of the polls, is that we’re going to face a Tory government.

What we won’t hear in the Conservative reboot is what that absolutely-not-made-up-at-the-last-minute cap on social care costs will be. After Theresa May very definitely did not u-turn after the “dementia tax” backlash, insisting “nothing has changed”, the key detail of where the cap will be set won’t be ascertained until after 8 June, even though they really, truly had thought about it before publishing the manifesto, which didn’t mention it.

Expect the question to pop up this evening, when the two candidates for PM are interviewed, first by a studio audience, then by Jeremy Paxman, for Sky News and Channel 4. Separately, of course: May has refused to debate the Labour leader head-to-head, for reasons they also can’t tell us about.

At a glance:

Poll position

A slew of Sunday polls confirms precisely what any partisan wants to hear and also the opposite. An Observer/Opinium poll pares the Tory lead from 13 points to 10 since last week; YouGov for the Sunday Times squeezes it to seven points (43% v 36%); a Sunday Telegraph/ORB poll puts it at just six (44% v 38%).

Alternatively, ICM for the Sun propels the Conservatives back to a 14-point lead (46% v 32%); and Comres puts it at 12 (46% v 34%), though that’s a drop from 18 a fortnight earlier.

For what this all might mean, keep reading …

Diary

Jeremy Corbyn is still in Scotland this morning, along with the bulk of the reassuringly regular political action: Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie hunkers into a DeLorean in South Queensferry; Scottish Labour’s sole incumbent, Ian Murray , paints pottery in Edinburgh; Nicola Sturgeon and Angus Robertson take tea in Lossiemouth; and the Scottish Greens show off their delayed manifesto at 10.30am in Glasgow.

is still in Scotland this morning, along with the bulk of the reassuringly regular political action: Scottish Lib Dem leader hunkers into a DeLorean in South Queensferry; Scottish Labour’s sole incumbent, , paints pottery in Edinburgh; and take tea in Lossiemouth; and the Scottish Greens show off their delayed manifesto at 10.30am in Glasgow. At the same time in London, the UK Green party launches its disability manifesto.

At lunchtime, a protest against fox hunting wends its way from Cavendish Square to Downing Street.

But it’s a night in front of the telly (and the live blog) for the main action: Tim and Rosie Farron on the One Show sofa on BBC1 at 7pm; Paul Nuttall gets the Andrew Neil treatment straight after that; then it’s over to Sky News and Channel 4 for their Jeremy Corbyn v Theresa May non-showdown, mediated by Faisal Islam and Jeremy Paxman. That’s from 8.30pm.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeremy Paxman at the Hay Festival this weekend, practising his face of mock incredulity. Photograph: Kate Geen/REX/Shutterstock

Read these

Matt Singh, in the Financial Times, assesses why those polls are forking so wildly:

It is obvious that understanding the intentions of voters requires an understanding of who those voters are. What is less obvious is that most people are not reliable predictors of their own probability of making it to the polls … Polls, including YouGov, that show narrower Conservative leads are those that assign probabilities of voting based wholly or primarily on a respondent’s self-reported likelihood of casting a ballot, meaning that young people make up a far bigger proportion of the likely vote than they have historically. Those showing wider Conservative leads, such as ComRes and ICM, model turnout based on historical figures for demographic groups. This would have improved accuracy in most previous elections, but risks coming unstuck if behaviour changes markedly.

In the Scotsman, Dani Garavelli visits East Dunbartonshire, where Lib Dem Jo Swinson is hoping to win back the seat she lost to the SNP’s John Nicolson in the 2015 wipeout:

Two years on, she hopes her pro-UK, pro-European stance will go down well in a constituency where 61% of voters opted to stay in the UK and 71% to stay in the EU. She is urging former supporters to return to the fold and overturn Nicolson’s 2,167 majority…

Old friends Jan Galloway and Celia Clegg, who voted to leave the EU, are united in their opposition to the SNP and a second indyref, but have chosen different ways of expressing it. Galloway, who likes Theresa May, will probably vote for Swinson, because she works hard for the constituency and has a better chance of winning, while Clegg, who likes Ruth Davidson, will put her cross beside Tory candidate Sheila Mechan. ‘It might be a lost vote,’ she concedes, ‘but you have to go with your heart as well as your head.’



Revelation of the day

The two sides in this evening’s TV showdown couldn’t decide in which order May and Corbyn should face Paxman, so the issue was decided by a coin toss “at a neutral territory”. I am not making this up. But the momentum was with Corbyn and he’ll go in to bat first. To further avoid cross-party contamination, the two leaders will have separate green rooms and aren’t expected to cross paths on their way to and from the interrogation chair.

The day in a tweet

Felicity Morse (@FelicityMorse) Sneery Jeremy Paxman sneers at 'sneery media types' for sneering https://t.co/1AiTdHIaVS

And another thing

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