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Tory Home Secretary Amber Rudd has been accused of "shutting down" a rival raising questions about the Government’s arms deals with Saudi Arabia during an election hustings.

Independent candidate Nicholas Wilson cried "censorship!" after Ms Rudd was seen passing a note to the chair of the debate in Rye, East Sussex.

Moments later, the chairman rang a bell and ordered Mr Wilson to end his speech.

Asked by the Mirror if he believed Ms Rudd's note was directly responsible for the cutoff he said: "Without a doubt."

Before he was interrupted, Mr Wilson was criticising Theresa May selling arms to Saudi Arabia.

He said: “Saudi Arabia are the country responsible for IS and they support IS. We supply arms to Saudi Arabia…”

But the chairman said he had strayed from the topic of the question, which was the Manchester terror attack.

“Am I being censored?” he said, before claiming Ms Rudd was planning to abolish the independent Serious Fraud Office so that she could be in charge of prosecutions of financial institutions through the National Crime Agency.

The chairman approached him, gesturing for him to hand over his microphone and saying this was “the kind of personal attack I wanted to avoid.”

But Wilson, who led a successful campaign against HSBC to get compensation for customers hit with excessive credit card charges, said: “This is censorship. I have suffered censorship for 10 years. People don’t know about these things because of censorship.”

He eventually gave up his microphone.

Later he posted the clip on YouTube under the comment "Amber Rudd shuts down my speech about arms sales to Saudi Arabia".

It has been viewed more than 300,000 times.

We asked the Conservative Party what Amber Rudd wrote on her note.

Nineteen hours later, a spokesman replied: "The chair decided to move it on."