Labour’s Hartlepool candidate Paul Williams came unstuck this morning after Victoria Derbyshire pressed him on Guido’s revelation that he personally recommended cuts to local NHS services. Williams claimed he “took part in a consultation with the community on a decision that had actually already been recommended before I was involved with the commissioning group”. Locals may struggle to reckon with this defence…

Asked why he didn’t do anything to stop it, Williams simply said he left the commissioning group soon after and made efforts to undo the very cuts he recommended. What a record…

Derbyshire then followed up Andrew Marr in quoting Williams’s ‘Tory MILF’ tweets, with Dr Paul stammering through a bizarre apology:

“So I’ve said sorry for that…I’d just actually come back from spending four years working as a volunteer in Africa, I went to my first ever political conference, and that was a conversation that I overheard at a dinner table […] I didn’t know who any of the people were who they were talking about…if I had my time again I would have condemned it, what I did was tweet about it.”

If Dr Paul wins he may well go down as one of the shakiest by-election campaigns in recent years…