Kemi appears to reject former LibDem George Osborne’s endorsement on X:

“Don’t worry…He doesn’t love me. He just doesn’t want the other guy. You know where my true blue heart is.”

Starmer’s biographer Tom Baldwin spoke on No 10’s inability to deal with its cronyism scandals on The Week in Westminster:

”The defensive crouch with which [crony stories] have been greeted by Downing Street has exacerbated the problem… there’s an uncertain shape about how they approach things.”

David Cameron told Times Radio he wouldn’t be coming back for a third go at politics:

“I’m not coming back to frontline politics, but I do want to help whoever wins. It’s a very difficult job being leader of the opposition and thinking about how to do that and try to become prime minister. And so, you know, whatever help I can give, I want to.”

Paul Johnson, director of the IFS, speak to Times Radio about raising employers NI…

“I mean, it seems to me that would be a straightforward breach of a manifesto commitment. I went back and read the manifesto and it says very clearly we will not raise rates of national insurance. It doesn’t specify employee national insurance.”

Andrew Griffith, Shadow Secretary of State for Science and Technology and former FTSE100 finance director said…

“Securing investment is not about canapes and cocktails. The government must walk the walk. Threats to hike up taxes on capital gains, giving workers the right to start a job in the morning and sue their employer at an employment tribunal the same afternoon and the Chancellor trying to fiddle the definition of debt are all flashing ‘sell signals’ on the UK. We need a government that understands real wealth creators; not one which taxes with one hand and doles out subsidies with the other.”

Boris Johnson says Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine if Trump were president…

“I happen to believe that when Donald Trump says that had he been President, there would have been no Russian invasion of Ukraine. My view is that is a credible assertion.”