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.

As the inquiry publishes it final report, the chancellor is under pressure to find £10bn to put right a longstanding injustice

The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, will come under pressure to stay true to his word and sign off on immediate compensation payments totalling up to £10bn to victims of the contaminated blood scandal when the long-awaited final report on the affair is published on Monday.

The scandal is described as the worst treatment disaster in NHS history, with more than 3,000 people having died as a result of receiving contaminated blood products in the 1970s and 1980s. It is estimated that, even today, a person infected during the scandal dies every four days.

Head of Church of England Justin Welby tells Observer that ending policy would lift thousands of UK children out of poverty

• The Observer view: Labour must tackle this scourge
• Gordon Brown: People haven’t woken up to this
• Torsten Bell: We can easily end child poverty

Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, has issued an impassioned plea to the government and Keir Starmer’s Labour party to scrap the two-child limit on benefit payments to families, branding it as a cruel and immoral policy that plunges hundreds of thousands of children into poverty.

The intervention by the head of the Church of England will place particular pressure on Starmer to make a firm commitment to end the policy, which he has so far refused to do, as he tries to position Labour as being responsible with the public finances.

Growing up in a poor household is one of the biggest barriers to opportunity, yet it affects millions of children

• Gordon Brown on the UK’s child poverty scandal
• Torsten Bell: We can easily end child poverty
• Archbishop urges Starmer to ditch ‘cruel’ benefit cap

Almost one in three British children now live in relative poverty. Former prime minister Gordon Brown last week referred to this generation as “austerity’s children”: children who have known nothing but what it is to grow up in families where money concerns are a constant toxic stress, where a lack of a financial cushion means one adverse event can trigger a downward debt spiral, and where parents have to make tough choices about essentials such as food and heating. Rising rates of child poverty are a product of political choices; that we have a government that has enabled them is a stain on our national conscience.

The headline rate of child poverty is underpinned by other alarming trends. Two-thirds of children living in relative poverty, defined as 60% of median income, after housing costs, are in families where at least one adult works, a product of the number of low-paid jobs in the economy that do not allow parents to adequately provide for their children. Unsurprisingly, child poverty rates are higher in families where someone has a disability, and 58% of children from Pakistani and 67% of Bangladeshi backgrounds live in relative child poverty. Child homelessness is at record levels – more than 140,000 children in England are homeless, many living for years on end in temporary accommodation that does not meet the most basic of standards. One in six children live in families experiencing food insecurity, and one in 40 in a family that has had to access a food bank in the past 30 days.

In thrall to a character who may not truly exist any more, the Labour leader kicked off his election campaign in Purfleet

• Tim Burrows is the author of The Invention of Essex

Call him Southend Keir. The kind of geezer who when in search of a new job – in this case the next prime minister of the UK – rolls up his sleeves and takes himself to dockside Essex. That’s where the Labour leader launched his six pledges for the next election on Thursday, in an aircraft hangar-sized rehearsal space in Purfleet, a town in Thurrock known for its 18th-century gunpowder battery. But there were no explosive pledges. Instead, there were anaesthetised assurances that if elected, Labour will, tentatively, try to make people’s lives a little bit better. Just not straight away.

The significance of Essex was not lost on the Times, which pointed out the party’s attempts “to win over the modern equivalent of Blair’s ‘Essex man’”. Simon Heffer, the Telegraph columnist, came up with the term Essex man in 1990 to describe a new kind of voter who materialised during the Thatcher era. He had sharp elbows and worked as a trader in the City of London, near to where his unionised father had worked on the docks. He may have grown up in a socially rented east London flat, but he now lived in leafier environs on the other side of the newly built M25, where he was likely to have bought a council house.

Chancellor seems to cherrypick data as he tries to outline how the Tories have got the country back on its feet

Jeremy Hunt called a press conference on Friday to outline why the electorate should trust the Conservatives with the economy, but some of his claims appear to have used cherrypicked facts and figures. He gave his speech just over a week after the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, accused the Conservatives of “gaslighting” the UK over the state of the economy by presenting too rosy a picture of what is actually going on.

Here are some of Hunt’s statements on the economy, and some context for his claims.

Chancellor also criticised for ‘dodgy dossier’ on Labour plans as he aims to make low tax a key election issue

Jeremy Hunt has been accused of exaggerating the Conservatives’ economic record and presenting a “dodgy dossier” on Labour’s spending plans, as he moved to put low tax at the heart of his party’s offering at the next election.

The chancellor gave a speech in central London on Friday, pitching the Conservatives as having helped the UK recover from economic troubles more quickly than expected. He also signalled a further cut to national insurance in the autumn, having already reduced the tax from 12p in the pound to 8p.

Politics is about achieving things and telling a compelling story. But neither the president – nor Starmer – can match Trump’s gift for narrative

The smile was the giveaway. Asked whether he was “just a copycat” of Tony Blair at the launch of his Blair-style pledge card on Thursday, Keir Starmer positively glowed. He was delighted with the comparison, which the entire exercise was surely designed to encourage. Blair “won three elections in a row”, Starmer said, beaming. Of course, he’s thrilled to be likened to a serial winner. And yet the more apt parallel is also a cautionary one. It’s not with Starmer’s long-ago predecessor, but with his would-be counterpart across the Atlantic: Joe Biden.

It’s natural that the sight of a Labour leader, a lawyer from north London, on course for Downing Street after a long era of Tory rule, would have people digging out the Oasis CDs and turning back the clock to 1997: Labour election victories are a rare enough commodity to prompt strong memories. But, as many veterans of that period are quick to point out, the circumstances of 2024 are very different. The UK economy was humming then and it’s parlous now. Optimism filled the air then, while too few believe genuine change is even possible now. And politics tended to be about material matters then, tax and public services, rather than dominated by polarising cultural wars as it is now.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Ahead of the byelection in Blackpool South, the Guardian takes the temperature in the once prosperous northern coastal town, with many voters expressing complete apathy and disdain for the state of politics.

The area is going to the polls because the former Tory MP Scott Benton resigned after being found guilty of breaching standards rules in a lobbying scandal. Labour is hopeful of taking back the seat, which Benton won with a majority of 3,690 in 2019

• Polls open in England’s local elections with Tories braced for heavy losse

• Analysis: Will Tories dump Rishi Sunak if election results worse than expected?