Outdoor campaign events, so often fraught with peril, proved the undoing of Rishi Sunak and Ed Davey this week

It has been tough for Rishi Sunak, so it’s nice that he still has some cheerleaders. A visibly tricky encounter with some cones during a football training session may have resulted in him being mocked mercilessly on TikTok, but one loyal newspaper described his troubling manoeuvre as a Cruyff turn, a move named after the beguiling Dutch great. Not since Kim Jong-il scored 11 holes in one in his first ever round of golf has a leader’s sporting prowess had such an unlikely upgrade.

From Reform and Redwood to a Titanic misstep, early electioneering has offered much unintentional hilarity

Every election needs some questionable statistics. Lovers of crimes against line graphs will be pleased to hear of one from Reform UK showing migration since 1066, which missed out migration spikes long before William the Conk was even a twinkle in the Duke eye. A major peak came, for instance, about 25,000 years ago, when the population went up from zero – a startling increase – and Reform also had nothing to say about the Romans, Anglo-Saxons or Beakers. And why leave the Vikings out? Reform’s obsession with small boats might have actually captured the zeitgeist.

In latest Opinium poll, only 16% say accepting rightwing Tory MP’s defection was the right move – against 33% who see it as a mistake

More voters believe Keir Starmer was wrong to allow a rightwing Tory MP into Labour than think it was the right move, after anger from within the party’s ranks over the defection.

Natalie Elphicke, the Dover MP, said the Tories had become “a byword for incompetence and division” when she made her shock departure to Labour earlier in May. The party leadership regarded it as a major coup to win the support of the MP on the frontline of the Channel crossings issue that Rishi Sunak has attempted to prioritise. The move came despite concerns among MPs that her views conflict with Labour in a variety of areas.

A quarter of Britain’s children live below the poverty line. Near his Fife home, the former PM shows how charities help families and says this issue must be a priority for any government

• The Observer view: Labour must tackle this scourge
• Torsten Bell: We can end child poverty
• Archbishop urges Starmer to ditch ‘cruel’ benefit cap

Outside a warehouse squeezed between a waste recycling plant, an auto parts outlet and a scaffolding company in Lochgelly, Fife, a blur of figures in hi-vis jackets are busily ­packing boxes into headteacher Ailsa Swankie’s car. Not for the first time, she is taking delivery of household essentials, hygiene products and food from the area’s heaving “multibank” – an institution she describes as an “absolute lifeline”.

The specific items differ with each pick-up – sometimes ­toilet rolls, other times washing ­powder or hot water bottles, donated by local businesses or sourced cheaply. But the need for each trip is always the same: an increasing number of families at her school who have found themselves struggling to afford what should be basic products. “We do have a lot of working families who work very, very hard, but they’re still really struggling,” Swankie says. “If I took nappies back to school, they’d all be gone by 3pm.”