Tory leadership rivals turned on Kemi Badenoch on Sunday after she suggested maternity pay was “excessive”.

On the first day of the Tory conference in Birmingham, Mrs Badenoch said regulations around the benefit have “gone too far” and were tying business in too much red tape.

She said families needed to take more “personal responsibility” over their finances when they have children and suggested working people were paying too much in tax to fund statutory maternity pay.

The remarks in a radio interview were quickly rejected by other contenders, with Tom Tugendhat saying he wanted to see “strong maternity and paternity pay”.

Robert Jenrick said he didn’t “agree with Kemi on this one”, while James Cleverley refused to back her by adding: “You need to ask Kemi about Kemi’s comment.”

A source from one rival camp described it as an “Andrea Leadsom moment”, a reference to the former Cabinet minister whose bid to lead the Conservatives in 2016 was derailed when she suggested she would make a better prime minister than Theresa May because she was a mother.

Later, Mrs Badenoch said her comments had been taken out of context, writing on X: “Of course maternity pay isn’t excessive: no mother of three kids thinks that.”

As blue-on-blue attacks dominated the conference, outgoing Tory leader Rishi Sunak pleaded with members to unite.

“We must end the division, the backbiting, the squabbling,” he said. “Because when we turn in on ourselves we lose; and the country ends up with a Labour government.”

The row came as other candidates attempted to woo conference delegates and the party grassroots. Mr Tugenhat vowed to stop the imposing of one-person shortlists for MP candidates in constituencies, while Mr Jenrick warned the party they faced a political death unless they proposed quitting the ECHR.

Meanwhile, a poll found James Cleverly was the preferred candidate among the wider British public.

Mrs Badenoch will address the conference alongside her leadership rivals on Wednesday. After this, the final two candidates will be selected on October 10, with the result declared on Nov 2.

Asked on Times Radio whether maternity pay was set at the right level, Mrs Badenoch said: “Maternity pay varies depending on who you work for, but it is a function – where it’s statutory maternity pay – a function of tax.

“Tax comes from people who are working. We’re taking from one group of people and giving to another. This in my view is excessive.”

Statutory maternity pay is paid for up to 39 weeks. It is worth 90 per cent of average weekly earnings before tax for the first six weeks.

Then for the next 33 weeks, the mother-to-be receives 90 per cent of her average weekly earnings, up to a ceiling of £184.03.

This is one of the lowest levels of statutory maternity pay in the Western world.

Asked whether she thought it was excessive, Mrs Badenoch said: “I think it’s gone too far the other way in terms of general business regulation.

“We need to allow businesses, especially small businesses, to make more of their own decisions.

“The exact amount of maternity pay in my view is neither here nor there. We need to make sure that we are creating an environment where people can work and people can have more freedom to make their individual decisions.”

Pressed on the fact that some families claim not to be able to afford a baby, she said: “We need to have more personal responsibility. There was a time when there wasn’t any maternity pay and people were having more babies.

“We have got to a point where Government isn’t working any more and it’s tinkering everywhere. Me giving you an exact amount of what maternity pay should be when circumstances are different everywhere is not where we’re starting from.”

A supporter of one rival camp said: “This feels like an Andrea Leadsom moment. Beating up on women is totally unnecessary and is always a terrible look. Why is she picking a fight with pregnant women?”

Asked about Mrs Badenoch’s comments, Mr Jenrick said: “I don’t agree with Kemi on this one. I’m a father of three young daughters. I want to see them get the support they need when they enter the workplace.

“Our maternity pay is among the lowest in the OECD. I think the Conservative Party should be firmly on the side of parents and working mums who are trying to get by.

“I know how difficult that is, we should be supporting them, not making their lives more difficult. Nobody says it’s easy having kids; why would we want to make it harder?”

Mr Tugendhat said: “Women must have the ability to choose how they live their lives. It’s not for me to tell you whether you should go to work, stay at home or how many kids you should have. That’s none of my business.

“My job as a politician is ensure you have that choice. I believe in empowering people to make the best choices for their family – that is why I champion families having a greater ability to share tax dependency as well as strong maternity and paternity pay because that means people can make these choices.”

Labour Party chairwoman Ellie Reeves said: “It is symptomatic of the Conservative Party as a whole that this is the kind of intervention that one of their leadership contenders is coming out with.

“The Tories and their continuity candidates are completely unserious about the problems they inflicted on the country over 14 years of chaos and decline.”

Later, Mrs Badenoch tweeted: “Of course maternity pay isn’t excessive… no mother of three kids thinks that.

“But we must talk about the burden of excessive business regulation otherwise we might as well be the Labour Party.

“My campaign is different from others because tell hard truths.  It is how we will renew our party, our thinking and our politics.”

One shadow cabinet minister, a supporter of Ms Badenoch, said: “This was the third time in a day that Robert sought to misinterpret and misconstrue what Kemi has said and undermine his biggest challenger and the members’ favourite.

“It is about time that Robert developed some of his own policies instead of stealing Kemi’s and putting words in her mouth.”

Sir Keir Starmer’s team used Lord Alli’s Soho townhouse worth £4 million for election strategy meetings, it has emerged.

The Georgian property in central London was used by senior aides and shadow ministers, including Pat McFadden, as well as by Sue Gray, Sir Keir’s chief of staff.

It is the second London property lent by Lord Alli, the figure at the centre of the donations row, for the use of the Prime Minister in the run-up to the election.

The Labour leader also had used Lord Alli’s Covent Garden penthouse, worth £18 million, which he stayed in with his family for a month and a half during the campaign.

Sir Keir said he used the property to let his son study for his GCSE exams “without being disturbed”.

It later emerged that the property was used by the Prime Minister to make a broadcast during the pandemic in which he urged the public to work from home.

One source familiar with the strategy gatherings estimated they were held at the property roughly once every six weeks in the year build-up to the election campaign.

A Number 10 source denied the meetings were that frequent.

Downing Street does not believe the use of the property has to be declared in MP financial registrations since they did not amount to a personal benefit for Sir Keir.

It comes as The Telegraph can reveal a company chaired by Lord Alli gave almost £170,000 in support of Labour and individual MPs across the space of a decade.

The peer made the donations through BM Creative Management Ltd.

Lord Alli is listed on Companies House as a chairman of BM Creative Management – a talent agency based in Bristol – and has been a director of the firm since 2006.

BM Creative Management made 49 donations – 33 in cash and 16 in non-cash support through consultancy services – to Labour and its MPs worth £168,750 from 2010 to 2019.

The company donated £48,000 to Labour between January and March 2015 in the run-up to the general election that was lost under Ed Miliband.

But when Jeremy Corbyn became leader later that year, BM Creative Management stopped donating to the party and instead gave cash to the offices of 10 of its more moderate MPs.

These included David Lammy and Wes Streeting, both of whom are now in the Cabinet and declined to serve under Mr Corbyn.

Other recipients of donations included Stephen Doughty, who resigned as a shadow minister in protest against Mr Corbyn, and Ivan Lewis, who was sacked by the former Labour leader.

BM Creative Management also gave money to Stella Creasy, Ben Bradshaw, Mary Creagh and Stephen Kinnock – four of the most vocal critics of Mr Corbyn.

The Sunday Times reported that the Soho townhouse, purchased by Lord Alli in 2020, was used for regular election strategy meetings with Mr McFadden, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Lord Spencer Livermore, the financial secretary.

Sue Gray also used the property for separate meetings, the nature of which No 10 declined to disclose.

‘Transparency is really important’

The newspaper also reported that the Cabinet Office would not say whether Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, had been present for meetings at either of the luxury properties.

The Soho property is the latest in Lord Alli’s portfolio to come under the spotlight for its use by Labour figures.

Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, stayed at his $2.5 million Manhattan apartment during a holiday in New York over the New Year last year. She was joined by former MP Sam Tarry for parts of the stay, but he was not named in the register of interests entry.

Ms Rayner told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg of the decision: “I get that people are frustrated, in particular the circumstances that we’re in, but donations for gifts and hospitality and monetary donations have been a feature of our politics for a very long time.

“People can look it up and see what people have had donations for, and the transparency is really important.”

The latest revelation comes after Rosie Duffield, a backbench MP, quit the Labour Party accusing the Prime Minister of presiding over “sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice” that is “off the scale”.

She said that he was unfit for office after “inexplicably” choosing to accept designer suits from Lord Alli, while at the same time pursuing “cruel and unnecessary” policies, such as the two-child benefit cap and the scrapping of winter fuel payments.

There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by Lord Alli.

Labour has announced it will change the rules around declarations to equalise expectations for those in government and opposition.

Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of Duchy of Lancaster, said the party will rewrite the ministerial code to ensure ministers are held to the same standards as their opposite numbers.

He said the current rules included a “Tory loophole” brought in to protect Conservative ministers, allowing them to attend the same events as their counterparts without declaring hospitality in the same way.

But Penny Mordaunt, the former Commons leader, branded the claims “completely untrue”, insisting the onus on ministers had always been “more stringent”.

The decision to change the rules shows Labour is under pressure to take action as anger mounts over the “freebies” row, with senior backbencher Rosie Duffield quitting the party on Saturday.

However, it appears the reforms announced by the Government on Sunday, the first day of the Tory Party conference, would not have affected any of the donations to Labour MPs that have been reported in recent weeks. This is because they would tighten the rules for government ministers, rather than MPs in general. The “freebies” scandal has focussed on gifts accepted by Labour figures while they were in opposition.

As it stands, hospitality received by ministers “in a ministerial capacity” is published by departments on a quarterly basis, and does not include the value of the benefit. By contrast, anything accepted “as an MP”, should be declared by individual politicians in the MPs’ register of interests within 28 days, and must include the cost.

Labour claims this is a “loophole” that created an uneven playing field between the previous government and the opposition, whereby Tory ministers were able to attend the same events as their opposite numbers without having to declare it in the same manner.

For example, Dame Priti Patel’s attendance at a James Bond premiere in 2021, when she was home secretary, was declared by the department, rather than on the MPs’ register of interests.

The move was criticised at the time by Sir Chris Bryant, then the Labour chair of the standards committee, who questioned how she could have attended the event in her “ministerial capacity”.

When pressed by Sir Chris on what a Bond premiere “has got to do with her job as Home Secretary”, Michael Ellis, then the minister for the Cabinet Office, said: “Well the nature of the film is, one could argue, is connected to executive functions.” His response prompted laughter among MPs on the committee.

On Sunday, Mr McFadden said that Labour will “make clear going forward in the ministerial code that both ministers and shadow ministers should be under the same declaration rules”.

Speaking to the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme, he added: “This was a Tory loophole, brought in so that you would have an event where the Tory minister, as it was under the last government, there, the Labour shadow opposite number would also be there, and the Tory minister would not have to declare.

“That was the Tory rules, we don’t think that’s fair, so we will close that loophole so ministers and shadow ministers are treated the same going forward.”

It is not clear exactly how Labour would change the rules. One option could be to force ministers to declare all hospitality in the MPs’ register of interests, regardless of whether they attended the event in their capacity as a representative of the government.

‘Transparency’

The transparency data published by departments on a quarterly basis is already broken down by minister, meaning it is possible to see who has attended each event.

Also speaking to the BBC, Ms Mordaunt disputed the idea that the rules were more lax for those in government. 

She said: “What Pat McFadden just said is completely untrue and he clearly doesn’t understand the ministerial code at all. The onus on ministers is much more stringent and has been, and I as a minister reported monthly on my hospitality reporting.”

Transparency International UK welcomed the Government’s proposal to change the rules. Rose Whiffen, senior research officer at the campaign group, said: “We welcome this move to end the two-tier system that has meant ministers, those closest to power, are able to provide less information on their hospitality and provide it less frequently than their backbench colleagues.

“Additionally to show his commitment to improving trust, the Prime Minister should issue his ministerial code with promised changes to strengthen the independent adviser’s role as well as the Nolan principles featuring front and centre in the foreword.”

Sir Oliver Dowden has become the most senior figure to be interviewed by the Gambling Commission over betting on the date of the general election.

The former deputy prime minister is the latest ally of Rishi Sunak to be questioned by the watchdog, which regulates betting in the UK.

Mr Sunak has not yet been interviewed, Sky News reported, although “numerous people” including Conservative Party officials have been.

Hundreds of documents have also been seized as part of the investigation.

A source close to Sir Oliver said the former senior cabinet minister is not and was never under investigation himself.

News of the developments comes on the first day of the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham.

Sir Oliver was knighted in Mr Sunak’s dissolution honours, announced less than an hour before the polls closed on 4 July.

The commission is investigating whether bets were placed that an election would be held in July by people with inside knowledge in the days leading up to the shock announcement of the election date on 22 May. This would be in breach of gambling laws.

‘Case will continue for three to six months’

A source told Sky News: “The general election betting investigation is still ongoing. Hundreds of documents have been seized by the Gambling Commission from CCHQ.

“The Gambling Commission has also employed more ex-police as investigators to take the case forward. It’s expected the case will continue for three to six months.”

Asked if Mr Sunak has been interviewed, the source said: “I don’t believe so. Numerous people have been interviewed, in and out of CCHQ.

“Gambling Commission investigators have made numerous visits to CCHQ. Oliver Dowden was interviewed.”

The scandal erupted in June when Craig Williams, formerly MP for Montgomeryshire and Mr Sunak’s parliamentary private secretary, admitted he was being investigated by the Gambling Commission.

Mr Williams had placed a £100 bet on a July election at Ladbrokes in his constituency just days before Mr Sunak announced on 22 May that the election would be held on 4 July. Based on odds at the time, he would have won £500.

The Conservative Party was approached for comment.

David Cameron threatened to “f—” Boris Johnson up “forever” if he backed Leave in the 2016 referendum, the former prime minister has claimed.

In his memoirs, Mr Johnson said Lord Cameron also promised him a senior job in Cabinet to back Remain.

But he claimed he threatened him with career ruin if he supported Brexit.

The former premier also alleged that Philip Hammond, the former Chancellor, rang him on the night of Theresa May’s disastrous election to suggest deposing her.

The allegations came in Mr Johnson’s book Unleashed, which details the run-up to the referendum on leaving the European Union.

During a tennis match, which Lord Cameron won, he is said to have urged him: “Come on – go with the campaign to stay in and I’ll make sure you get a top-five job in the Cabinet.”

Mr Johnson said he was also threatened if he decided to join the Leave side.

“The PM had rung me one evening at City Hall, urging me to make up my mind,” he said.

“I was torn, I said. I wanted to back him, but over the years I had written hundreds if not thousands of articles attacking the undemocratic features of the EU. I felt I had to be consistent.

“‘This isn’t about articles!’ he spluttered. ‘It’s about… the future of the country!’

“Well, I said, we were agreed on that but I was still thinking of voting Leave.

“‘If you do that,’ he said – and these were his exact words – ‘I will f— you up forever.’”

He added: “I had to admit that the threat sounded serious. Did I want to be f—ed up? Forever? By a prime minister equipped with all the f—ing-up tools available to a modern government, and thousands of f—er-uppers just waiting to do his bidding?

“It looked as though we were going to lose, and once we lost the failed and defeated Leavers would of course be crushed like bugs: dismissed as Powellite cranks and misfits who had been rejected by the people.”

Mr Johnson also said that Lord Hammond proposed trying to oust Mrs May after the disaster of the 2017 election when the Tories lost their overall majority.

“In the early hours of the morning I got a message from Phil Hammond, the Chancellor – dry as dust but with an excellent political brain – and we talked,” he wrote.

“He thought it was all very unfortunate but Theresa’s goose was cooked. She would have to go sooner or later, and it might as well be now.

“What he was proposing was a Hammond-Johnson partnership, by which I would take the wheel at No10 and he continued to be my economic co-pilot. I thought about it briefly, as dawn started to break, and then said no.”

A spokesman for Lord Cameron declined to comment.

Lord Hammond was contacted for comment.

A Hezbollah chief, tipped as one of Hassan Nasrallah’s successors, has been killed in Lebanon, according to Israel’s military.

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said on Sunday that it killed Nabil Kaouk, the deputy head of Hezbollah’s central council, amid an ongoing exchange of strikes between the two sides.

Kaouk had been tipped as one of Nasrallah’s potential successors after playing a pivotal role in military operations against Israel.

He was a veteran fighter since the 1980s and had previously served as Hezbollah’s military commander in southern Lebanon.

Kaouk often appeared in local media, where he would comment on politics and security developments, and he gave eulogies at the funerals of senior militants. The United States had announced sanctions against him in 2020.

Hezbollah has not yet commented on Kaouk but supporters have been posting mourning messages for him online.

Another senior commander killed

Hezbollah did confirm on Sunday that another of its senior commanders, Ali Karaki, died in the Israeli airstrike that killed Nasrallah on Friday.

Karaki was a member of the group’s Jihad council and the commander of the organisation’s southern front.

He had escaped death last Monday when Israel said it attempted to assassinate him in an airstrike on Dahiyeh.

Hezbollah read a statement announcing his death, saying: “[Karaki] was directly and on the ground responsible for leading the southern front with all its axes and units in the support front from Oct 8 2023, until his blessed martyrdom.”

Hezbollah’s senior military leadership is now almost completely wiped out.

Several senior Hezbollah commanders have been killed in Israeli strikes in recent weeks, including the founding members of the group who had evaded death or detention for decades and were close to Nasrallah himself.

Hezbollah members were also targeted by Israel in a sophisticated attack on its pagers and walkie-talkies that was widely blamed on Israel.

Benjamin Netanyahu has long spoken of achieving a “decisive victory” against Israel’s enemies.

It is a phrase that has been dismissed in Washington and by Yoav Gallant, the prime minister’s own defence minister.

But following the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, the hawks within Israel are celebrating – and even Mr Netanyahu’s critics are wondering if a decisive blow has been struck against the terrorist group.

Could the violent series of strikes by Israel reshape the country’s position in the Middle East, pushing Iran’s proxy forces back from the border and seeing Tehran shy away from conflict?

Israel’s hawks have long argued that only such bombastic military action can protect Israel.

They see a world where Hezbollah and Hamas are degraded to the point they pose no threat to Israel. And one in which Iran is sufficiently cowed that it stops funding its so-called axis of resistance for fear of inviting Israeli strikes on its ports and fragile water infrastructure.

That world remains a long way away, even though Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, has reacted to the carnage wrought upon Hezbollah by Israel in recent days without the blood-curdling threats of old.

In his speech on Saturday, he merely called on Muslims to stand up to “the Zionists” and insisted, despite growing evidence to the contrary, that Hezbollah is far too strong for the Israeli army to damage in any meaningful way.

His call for the 57 countries of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation to come together and hold an “emergency meeting” on the Zionist threat is also unlikely to immediately concern Israel’s generals.

What seems clear is that Iran has miscalculated badly. Its strategy of surrounding Israel with a so-called “ring of fire” – proxy groups in Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – has been directly challenged, and, so far, Tehran has not hit back.

There are limits, it seems, to relying on militias in bankrupt states, with only varying levels of capability. 

According to reports, Hezbollah last week asked Iran to respond to Israel on its behalf, but was refused. Relations between the region’s principal sponsor of terror and its terrorist proxies may be about to unravel, or so the hawks hope.

“We have reestablished our deterrent after Oct. 7 when it seemed to our enemies it was lost,” said Sima Shine, the director of the Iran and the Shi’ite Axis research programme at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv.

“Iran now has a huge problem. Everyone in the regime is in shock. They have no option but to recalibrate.

“Iran and its proxies understand now Israel is not in the mood for an attack from anyone any more and that if it comes, there will be consequences.”

Israel’s strike on Hezbollah’s nerve centre may have “fundamentally altered Iran’s strategic ambitions” in the region, added Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence official.

He said: “This incident offers the Lebanese – previously held hostage by Hezbollah – the chance to liberate themselves from Iranian influence, while also likely compelling Iran to reevaluate its plans for regional control.”

No wonder then that Mr Netanyhu’s popularity ratings are once again approaching a historic high, the turning point being his first assassination of an Iranian general in Damascus in April. 

Taking the fight to the enemy works for him because it distracts from the disaster that was Oct 7, notes Dahlia Scheindlin, the respected Israeli pollster .

All this will be hard to take for the doves – most notably Joe Biden and Antony Blinken, his secretary of state. But it would be dishonest not to give some credit to the hawks’ strategy.

Of course, the war is not over yet, and much could change in the coming days and months. Iran might, for example, choose to invest in its nuclear ambitions more heavily, now that its deterrent by proxy strategy appears to be hanging by a thread.

Israel’s defence establishment typically avoids Mr Netanyahu’s talk of “decisive victory”, operating more in shades of grey.

For example, the Israeli navy is over the moon about Friday night’s much less publicised destruction of Hezbollah’s land-to-sea missile capability, something it has feared for years, not just as a threat to its ships, but to Israel’s offshore gas production.

“The defence establishment of course welcomes the destruction of Hezbollah’s military capability. But this is not the same as its terror capacity. This is where the politicians and the generals differ,” said one Israeli analyst.

“The threats facing Israel have not disappeared but have been transformed” added Orna Mizrahi, a retired lieutenant colonel now a Lebanon and Hezbollah specialist at INSS.

“It is essential for Israel to understand these evolving threats in order to prepare effectively and to identify opportunities that offer strategic advantage.”

There are few modern wars that have been settled decisively with brute force, with perhaps Sri Lanka’s terrible but decisive victory over the Tamil Tigers in 2009 being the most recent example.

Of course, the West’s misadventures in Iraq – where George W Bush got carried away with his own shock and awe and celebrated his own “victory” far too early – show the other side of the coin.

Following what were supposed to be overwhelming and, yes, “decisive”, interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq against the “axis of evil”, the US and its allies spent two decades fighting Islamic State and other terrorist insurgents.

It’s something that British and American troops are still very much involved in to this day.

But Israel’s future need not follow the same path. 

A Hamas tunnel system running for at least 1km under Gaza has been destroyed, according to the Israeli military.

Footage was released on Sunday from inside the tunnel, which the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said ran near residential buildings and contained several rooms and equipment used by Hamas members for prolonged stays.

The video showed the entrance and interior of a concrete-lined passage wide enough for one person. It led down a steep staircase and passed through what looked like a metal blast door.

It then showed Israeli soldiers carrying what appeared to be explosive charges and wires for demolition in a segment captioned: “Engineering operations of the 252nd Division”.

An aerial shot showed simultaneous explosions rising from the earth in a line presumably showing the route of the tunnel below ground.

The Telegraph was not immediately able to verify the footage.

Israel launched a war against Hamas in Gaza after the terror group killed at least 1,200 people and kidnapped more than 250 others in an attack on Israel’s southern communities on October 7 last year.

Since then, more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks, according to the health ministry in Gaza.

Video from the aftermath of a Russian glide bomb attack on the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia showed the moment when one young woman was reunited with her missing cat.

The footage shows a weary rescue worker with his helmet sitting askew on his head, gingerly stepping over rubble as he holds the cat.

“Where’s the owner?” a rescue worker said before a young woman called Veronika rushed forward to grab and hug the traumatised animal.

The rescue worker then stroked the cat’s head and walked off. 

Later, Veronika described how the walls of her apartment had collapsed after the attack and in the chaos she lost her dog and Megan, the three-year-old cat.

“We quickly took a bag, some things, and started looking for the animals,” she told a Ukrainian news website. “The animals hid under the beds. The worst thing is that we were blocked and couldn’t get out. There was simply no apartment.”

More photos of the attack showed the destructive power of Russian glide bombs, a standard bomb fitted with fins and a basic GPS device.

Several low-slung residential houses have been left twisted and cracked, with their roofs blown off and walls shattered. Cars have been melted into charred lumps. At least 16 people were injured in the attack.

Anastasia, another resident, said that she had had a lucky escape from flying glass.

“I heard a very terrible sound. I felt it was very close now and jumped up,” she said. “The windows and the frames flew all over the room.”

Russian forces stepped up their attacks against Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine this week, firing glide bombs for the first time at the city.

The hard-Right Freedom Party (FPO) secured the first far-right national parliamentary election victory in post-World War II Austria on Sunday, finishing ahead of the governing conservatives after tapping into anxieties about immigration, inflation, Ukraine and other issues. 

But the chances of Herbert Kickl’s anti-immigrant FPO governing were unclear. 

Preliminary official results showed the Freedom Party finishing first with 29.2 per cent of the vote and the Austrian People’s Party (OVP) led by chancellor Karl Nehammer was second with 26.5per cent. 

The centre-left Social Democrats were in third place with 21 per cent. The outgoing government – a coalition of Mr Nehammer’s party and the environmentalist Greens – lost its majority in the lower house of parliament.

“Tomorrow there will be a blue Monday and then we will set about turning that 29 per cent into a political reality in this country,” Mr Kickl told supporters on Sunday evening, playing on the fact blue is the colour associated with his party.

The unprecedented win for Mr Kickl’s FPO could install him as the first hard-Right chancellor in Austria’s post-war history if he manages to build a coalition.

The triumph of the Eurosceptic, Russia-friendly FPO on Sunday was another milestone in the recent rise of Europe’s hard right. But the party immediately suffered a stiff reality check, Reuters reported.

Facing Mr Kickl in a television studio after results came in, leaders of the other parties in parliament dismissed his overtures on forming a coalition.

An FPO-led government would cause a major headache for other EU leaders as they wrestle with growing populism across the bloc.

Earlier this month, the far-right Alternative for Germany won its first state elections in Thuringia.

In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party entered government in May, six months after coming first in parliamentary elections.

Mr Wilders hailed the FPÖ victory as evidence of a far-right surge across the continent.

“The Netherlands, Hungary, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, France, Spain, Czech Republic and today Austria! We are winning! Times are changing!” he wrote on X.

And although Marine Le Pen’s National Rally narrowly lost a snap election in France in July, it gained enough seats to act as kingmaker in the resulting hung parliament.

Meanwhile, Viktor Orban, the president of Hungary, has become a vocal opponent of military support for Ukraine.

The FPO will face an uphill struggle to form a coalition, however, as Austria’s other parties consider Mr Kickl too toxic for high office.

He has been accused of flirting with fascism, including with a 2018 remark that the authorities should “concentrate asylum seekers in one place” in what was widely viewed as an allusion to Nazi death camps.

The hard-Right party could try and lead a coalition with Mr Nehammer’s OVP, which came second. Mr Nehammer has already ruled this out unless Mr Kickl does not serve as chancellor.

“Austrians have made history tonight… you can clearly see that change has come,” Michael Schnedlitz, the FPO general secretary, said on Austrian TV after the exit poll was released.

During the campaign, the FPO – a party with Nazi roots founded in 1956 by a former SS officer – pledged to turn the country into “Fortress Austria” and introduce a controversial “remigration” policy.

Remigration would involve deporting asylum seekers, particularly criminals, and blocking family reunification for migrants already based in Austria.

FPO party chiefs have also vowed to significantly tighten Austrian land border security, scrap Austrian involvement in the EU Sky Shield air-defence scheme, and remain strictly neutral on foreign conflicts.

Friendly towards Russia

The party is friendly towards Russia and has described EU leaders’ close support for Ukraine as “madness”.

In 2018, the party’s nominee for the post of foreign minister danced a waltz with Vladimir Putin at her wedding.

Mr Kickl also agitated against lockdown rules during the pandemic, refusing to wear a face mask in parliament. The party has pledged to enshrine in Austria’s constitution that there are only two genders.

The FPO and OVP parties have previously joined forces in short-lived coalitions where the FPO was the junior partner.

Their first coalition collapsed in 2002 amid FPO infighting, while the second coalition imploded in the wake of the 2019 Ibiza affair.

In that scandal, the FPO’s Heinz-Christian Strache, then leader and vice-chancellor, resigned after he was filmed meeting a woman who was posing as the niece of a Russian media buyer, to discuss swapping government contracts for favourable coverage.

The OVP’s Sebastian Kurz, the chancellor at the time, then lost a no-confidence vote in parliament that brought down the coalition.

‘Only option for voters’

“The FPO will support anti-immigration policies, but the fact that it will likely govern in coalition will prevent a radicalisation of policy,” said Safa Sharif, a political analyst from the Economist Intelligence Unit.

In Vienna, supporters of Mr Kickl’s FPO said it was the only option for voters who wanted drastic action on slowing down the rate of migration and keeping Austria neutral.

“My opinion is it’s the only serious party,” said Nordika, 49. “I’ve voted for them before as well, because I think that closing the borders will work, it is the best solution for European security.”

Also running this year was the anti-establishment Beer Party, which was initially founded as a joke in 2015 by Dominik Wlazny, a rock musician and medical doctor.

Since the Ibiza scandal, the party has vowed to clean up corruption in politics, with the candidates campaigning in leather jackets and hosting beer-hall sessions for potential voters.

“[Our voters] are frustrated with how it is now, it cannot be like this in the future,” said Viktoria Mullner, a Beer Party candidate in Vienna. “Most of them saw our spirit on what we want to do, what we want to achieve, our core values of doing politics that are clean and for the people. It’s not just because the FPO [is rising in the polls].”

Tory leadership rivals turned on Kemi Badenoch on Sunday after she suggested maternity pay was “excessive”.

On the first day of the Tory conference in Birmingham, Mrs Badenoch said regulations around the benefit have “gone too far” and were tying business in too much red tape.

She said families needed to take more “personal responsibility” over their finances when they have children and suggested working people were paying too much in tax to fund statutory maternity pay.

The remarks in a radio interview were quickly rejected by other contenders, with Tom Tugendhat saying he wanted to see “strong maternity and paternity pay”.

Robert Jenrick said he didn’t “agree with Kemi on this one”, while James Cleverley refused to back her by adding: “You need to ask Kemi about Kemi’s comment.”

A source from one rival camp described it as an “Andrea Leadsom moment”, a reference to the former Cabinet minister whose bid to lead the Conservatives in 2016 was derailed when she suggested she would make a better prime minister than Theresa May because she was a mother.

Later, Mrs Badenoch said her comments had been taken out of context, writing on X: “Of course maternity pay isn’t excessive: no mother of three kids thinks that.”

As blue-on-blue attacks dominated the conference, outgoing Tory leader Rishi Sunak pleaded with members to unite.

“We must end the division, the backbiting, the squabbling,” he said. “Because when we turn in on ourselves we lose; and the country ends up with a Labour government.”

The row came as other candidates attempted to woo conference delegates and the party grassroots. Mr Tugenhat vowed to stop the imposing of one-person shortlists for MP candidates in constituencies, while Mr Jenrick warned the party they faced a political death unless they proposed quitting the ECHR.

Meanwhile, a poll found James Cleverly was the preferred candidate among the wider British public.

Mrs Badenoch will address the conference alongside her leadership rivals on Wednesday. After this, the final two candidates will be selected on October 10, with the result declared on Nov 2.

Asked on Times Radio whether maternity pay was set at the right level, Mrs Badenoch said: “Maternity pay varies depending on who you work for, but it is a function – where it’s statutory maternity pay – a function of tax.

“Tax comes from people who are working. We’re taking from one group of people and giving to another. This in my view is excessive.”

Statutory maternity pay is paid for up to 39 weeks. It is worth 90 per cent of average weekly earnings before tax for the first six weeks.

Then for the next 33 weeks, the mother-to-be receives 90 per cent of her average weekly earnings, up to a ceiling of £184.03.

This is one of the lowest levels of statutory maternity pay in the Western world.

Asked whether she thought it was excessive, Mrs Badenoch said: “I think it’s gone too far the other way in terms of general business regulation.

“We need to allow businesses, especially small businesses, to make more of their own decisions.

“The exact amount of maternity pay in my view is neither here nor there. We need to make sure that we are creating an environment where people can work and people can have more freedom to make their individual decisions.”

Pressed on the fact that some families claim not to be able to afford a baby, she said: “We need to have more personal responsibility. There was a time when there wasn’t any maternity pay and people were having more babies.

“We have got to a point where Government isn’t working any more and it’s tinkering everywhere. Me giving you an exact amount of what maternity pay should be when circumstances are different everywhere is not where we’re starting from.”

A supporter of one rival camp said: “This feels like an Andrea Leadsom moment. Beating up on women is totally unnecessary and is always a terrible look. Why is she picking a fight with pregnant women?”

Asked about Mrs Badenoch’s comments, Mr Jenrick said: “I don’t agree with Kemi on this one. I’m a father of three young daughters. I want to see them get the support they need when they enter the workplace.

“Our maternity pay is among the lowest in the OECD. I think the Conservative Party should be firmly on the side of parents and working mums who are trying to get by.

“I know how difficult that is, we should be supporting them, not making their lives more difficult. Nobody says it’s easy having kids; why would we want to make it harder?”

Mr Tugendhat said: “Women must have the ability to choose how they live their lives. It’s not for me to tell you whether you should go to work, stay at home or how many kids you should have. That’s none of my business.

“My job as a politician is ensure you have that choice. I believe in empowering people to make the best choices for their family – that is why I champion families having a greater ability to share tax dependency as well as strong maternity and paternity pay because that means people can make these choices.”

Labour Party chairwoman Ellie Reeves said: “It is symptomatic of the Conservative Party as a whole that this is the kind of intervention that one of their leadership contenders is coming out with.

“The Tories and their continuity candidates are completely unserious about the problems they inflicted on the country over 14 years of chaos and decline.”

Later, Mrs Badenoch tweeted: “Of course maternity pay isn’t excessive… no mother of three kids thinks that.

“But we must talk about the burden of excessive business regulation otherwise we might as well be the Labour Party.

“My campaign is different from others because tell hard truths.  It is how we will renew our party, our thinking and our politics.”

One shadow cabinet minister, a supporter of Ms Badenoch, said: “This was the third time in a day that Robert sought to misinterpret and misconstrue what Kemi has said and undermine his biggest challenger and the members’ favourite.

“It is about time that Robert developed some of his own policies instead of stealing Kemi’s and putting words in her mouth.”

Boris Becker has tied the knot for a third time, with only two of his four kids present at his latest wedding in Italy.

The German tennis star, 56, married 34 year-old Lilian de Carvalho de Monteiro this month in picturesque Portofino, near the northern Italian city of Genoa — without inviting half of his children.

Present were his two eldest sons Noah and Elias, from his first marriage to Barbara Feltus, German-American designer, actress and model.

Absent was his only daughter Anna Ermakova, whom he conceived during a one-night stand with Russian Angela Ermakova – a waitress at London’s Nobu at the time – while Barbara was in labour with Elias.

His 14-year-old son Amadeus, born during Becker’s nine-year marriage to Dutch model Lilly Kerssenberg, wasn’t at the Portofino ceremony either.

According to Becker’s ex, it was because the former Wimbledon champion kept his son in the dark about the upcoming event.

“When I asked Amadeus about it, he was surprised. He didn’t know anything about it,” Lilly Becker told Bunte, a German magazine.

“Of course he’s wondering why he wasn’t invited and that his father didn’t tell him anything about it. He’s not a child anymore. He’s 14!”

Lilly Becker insisted that she wished her ex the best but “behaving that way towards our son really is the last straw. Who doesn’t want him to come?”

Anna Ermakova didn’t get an invite either.

In contrast to her famous father, who was deported from the UK to Germany in 2022 following a conviction for failing to declare assets during bankruptcy proceedings, Ms Ermakova went to Germany willingly in 2023 to compete in – and win – Let’s Dance, Germany’s version of Strictly Come Dancing.

Ms Ermakova was reportedly keen to establish an identity for herself beyond her parents’ infamous liaison. She won Let’s Dance with a record number of public votes and perfect scores from the show’s judges.

“You’ve already conquered the hearts of the Germans. You’ve taken them by storm. Your talent, your discipline, your performance and more – your personality, are amazing. And I couldn’t be prouder,” Becker, who became the youngest man to ever win Wimbledon when he has 17, said in a video message to his daughter just ahead of the 2023 final.

Just over a year later, Ms Ermakova reportedly found out about her father’s latest wedding plans from the newspaper.

Ms Ermakova herself has said little since, telling Austrian newspaper Heute at Oktoberfest in Munich “I’m not here to talk about it today. I’m here for Oktoberfest, to celebrate.”

Becker hasn’t confirmed why two of his children weren’t invited to his wedding to Ms de Carvalho Monteiro – a political risk consultant who he had been seeing since at least the time of his 2022 conviction.

At the time, Judge Deborah Taylor said Becker had shown no remorse for failing to declare over a million pounds in assets as part of bankruptcy proceedings. Becker was sentenced to prison time, but released early and deported to Germany in December 2022 after living in the UK for over a decade.

During that time he lived in an expensive rented house in Wimbledon and shopped lavishly while commentating on tennis for the BBC and coaching Novak Djokovic – who won six Grand Slam titles during his three years of coaching under Becker.

But the former tennis prodigy’s legal problems didn’t begin in the UK. They started 20 years prior to his British conviction, when a court in his native Germany convicted him of tax evasion in 2002.

Becker was found to have spent most of the years between 1991 and 1993 living in Munich, but hadn’t registered an address there for tax purposes. He was convicted of evading an equivalent of about €1.6 million in taxes. He was issued a two-year prison sentence suspended for three years and ordered to pay a €300,000 fine and donate a further €200,000 to charitable organisations.

Becker currently lives in Italy with his new wife. In 2017, he was named head of men’s tennis with the German Tennis Federation. A documentary about his turbulent life, Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2023.

Almost 1,000 British holidaymakers are taking legal action after being struck down with stomach bugs while on holiday in Cape Verde.

A total of 926 people over three years have been struck down with gastrointestinal infections while staying at luxury hotel resorts on the island.

Infections such as Shigella and Salmonella have been reported by holidaymakers with some unable to leave their room for several days.

Cordelia Plummer, 56, from Shard End, Birmingham, and partner Ian Waller, 56, from Kingston-Upon-Hull, are among a new group of holidaymakers to contact lawyers about their holiday.

They were both struck down with serious illness during a two-week stay at a 5-star hotel in Sal, Cape Verde in July this year.

The holiday was booked via tour operator Tui, and the couple paid almost £3,000 for their all-inclusive break.

‘Incredibly concerning’

Jatinder Paul, a specialist international serious injury lawyer at Irwin Mitchell who is representing the holidaymakers, said: “The sheer volume of clients we’re continuing to see coming forward having fallen ill during stays in Cape Verde over the last three years is incredibly concerning.

“The numbers involved show that these aren’t isolated incidents. The fact that significant numbers are still approaching us with similar first-hand accounts points towards a worrying picture of ongoing illness that shows no sign of ending.

“Those we represent rightly have a number of concerns over how such illnesses have occurred over such a period of time,” he said.

“Gastric illness can result in long-term health problems or even death, and the fear is this could end in tragedy if something isn’t done to address the underlying causes.”

It is thought that several different groups fell sick with similar issues at the same time and the lawyers are calling for more people to come forward.

Tui was approached for comment.

Plummer, a customer service assistant, was taken ill a week into the break with severe gastric symptoms, including vomiting and diarrhoea.

She was confined to her room for four days and consulted her GP upon returning to the UK, who initially said her symptoms could be a sign of Shigella.

Waller was struck down a few days later with the same symptoms which continued for the remainder of the holiday and upon his return to the UK.

‘I’ve never felt so ill’

The couple said they were shocked to read negative reviews of the resort online after returning home and had noticed that food was often served uncovered and lukewarm.

Plummer said: “What was meant to be a dream two weeks on a wonderful island turned into a holiday Ian and myself will now do our best to forget.

“What started as headaches and a feeling of nausea, became the worst sickness and diarrhoea I’ve ever known.

“I think everyone has probably had an upset stomach at one time or another, but I have never felt so ill.”

The couple are among a new group of ten holidaymakers who stayed at a five-star hotel this summer to instruct Irwin Mitchell.

Meanwhile, hundreds of other holidaymakers have instructed the firm following an illness at other Cape Verde hotels.

In 2022, a total of 806 people came forward followed by 65 in 2023 and 55 so far this year.

Taxpayers must fund sex reassignment surgery for an inmate who murdered an 11-month-old baby, a judge in Indiana has ruled.

Born Jonathan C Richardson, the inmate now known as Autumn Cordellionè is serving a 55-year prison sentence after being convicted of murder by strangulation in 2001. The victim was Cordellionè’s stepdaughter.

The inmate has sought sex reassignment surgery, including an orchiectomy and vaginoplasty, arguing it is the “only remedy” to treat “persistent gender dysphoria”.

The state of Indiana prohibits its prison service from funding gender reassignment surgeries for its inmates.

But the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the Indiana Department of Corrections on Cordellionè’s behalf, arguing the state law violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment”.

The lawsuit, first brought in 2023, said Cordellionè has identified as a woman since the age of six but was only diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2020 and has been prescribed female hormones and testosterone blockers.

Cordellionè has “consistently taken” the hormone medications ever since and has been receiving other accommodations behind bars in an all-male facility, including women’s “panties, make-up, and form-fitting clothing”, the lawsuit said.

Attempted castration

Court filings revealed Cordellionè has a history of self-harm, including an attempted castration.

The ACLU argued the next step of receiving sex reassignment surgery, or gender-affirming surgery, was “a medical necessity”.

“She believes that the only remedy for her persistent gender dysphoria, and the serious harm it causes her, is to receive gender-affirming surgery, specifically an orchiectomy and vaginoplasty,” it said in court filings.

A federal judge in Indiana has now agreed that denying the surgery would be unconstitutional.

“Specifically, Ms Cordellioné has shown that her gender dysphoria is a serious medical need, and that, despite other treatments … provided her to treat her gender dysphoria, she requires gender-affirming surgery to prevent a risk of serious bodily and psychological harm,” Judge Richard Young said in his ruling.

He ordered Indiana’s Department of Corrections to take “all reasonable actions” to ensure the killer receives the sex reassignment surgery.

The state’s attorney-general vowed to fight the ruling. Todd Rokita, a Republican, told Fox News: “Taxpayers do not want to pay for these kinds of surgeries.

“The science is not at all settled that this is a proper procedure or that not doing this procedure amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.”

“You can undoubtedly expect our office to appeal this decision,” he added in a post on X.

Ken Falk, the ACLU of Indiana’s legal director, said the ruling marked “a significant victory for transgender individuals” in the state’s prisons.

“Denying evidence-based medical care to incarcerated people simply because they are transgender is unconstitutional. We are pleased that the court agreed,” he said.

Cordellionè was convicted of strangling the 11-month-old baby while her mother — the murderer’s then wife — was out at work on Sept 12, 2001.

According to Fox News, Cordellionè filed a separate lawsuit last year against a prison chaplain for allegedly preventing the inmate from wearing a hijab outside of a cell despite identifying as a Muslim woman.

Sir Keir Starmer has warned that opposition to the Government’s plans to build more pylons across the countryside would force him to put taxes up.

The Prime Minister said burying new electricity cables underground “costs much more money” which would have to be raised from taxpayers.

Speaking during a trip to New York he said that voters would have to accept “trade-offs” including more development in return for better services.

Sir Keir made the remarks after using his Labour conference speech earlier this week to say he was willing to take “unpopular” decisions in the pursuit of growth.

He has backed plans to construct a massive new line of pylons across Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex to connect North Sea wind farms to the grid.

The Prime Minister was asked whether campaigners against the scheme were right to accuse him of “throwing rural communities under the bus”.

He said: “No they’re not. That section of my speech was intended to be an honest levelling with the country, which is to say: ‘If you want XYZ, then we’ve got to face up to the fact that there are a number of consequences for that’.

“If you want lower energy bills, we’re going to have to have pylons above the ground. Yes, there is the option to put them below the ground [but] it costs much more money.

He added that “most people feel they’re already paying too much tax, and I don’t think many would put their hand up to pay more”.

A report by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) previously found that it is five times more expensive to use underground cabling.

Sir Keir’s remarks come amid another major row over a proposed East Anglia pylon project which has caused significant controversy over the years.

Many of the constituencies it passes through were previously Tory strongholds but flipped to Labour in July’s landslide election.

That means the Prime Minister is now facing opposition from his own backbenchers to the scheme, which locals have warned would ruin the areas it passes through.

‘Areas of considerable natural beauty’

Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, the new MP for Suffolk Coastal, has attended anti-pylon protests in her constituency and Ben Godsborough, for South Norfolk, has also expressed opposition.

Weeks before the election, Dame Nia Griffith, now a minister in the Wales Office, said in Parliament that there was “huge concern that enormous pylon projects will spoil areas of considerable natural beauty”.

She also warned that pylons “take up space on agricultural land” and said she wanted “to take our communities with us” in the transition to renewable energy.

Before the election, Tory ministers were considering plans to introduce incentives, such as money off energy bills, for communities near new pylons.

They were an attempt to address local opposition which has often seen energy projects snagged in the planning process for years or even decades.

It is not yet clear whether Labour will press ahead with the plans or simply change planning laws so that it can override local objections.

Sir Keir said that as well as pylons, some neighbourhoods would also have to accept living near new housing developments and prisons.

The Prime Minister insisted that increased building was the only way to address the lack of capacity in the justice system and the housing crisis.

He added: “Of course, we will consult with people, there are always options. But I do want to be clear – these are serious trade-offs that we’re going to have to make and we’re going to have to take those decisions.

“I think we just shied away from these trade-offs for too long. We’ve got to be serious about it.”

A set of colourful road markings painted outside two schools are dangerous and resemble a game of “Twister”, parents said.

The collage of brightly coloured triangles, circles and other shapes has been painted outside two schools in the town of Frome, Somerset. A cycling charity was given more than £146,000 of taxpayers’ money to design and build the markings.

The markings were introduced as part of a scheme by Frome town council to slow down traffic and make streets safer outside Oakfield Academy and Critchill School.

However, parents have criticised the scheme, saying the markings are confusing and make it more dangerous for children, especially those with special educational needs.

Craig Adams, whose eight-year-old autistic son attends Critchill School, told ITV Westcountry: “They’re round dots, they mirror a lot of the things in the playground.

“My son has autism, additional needs, so to try and explain to him that it’s safe to play in the playground, but the same colours, the same shapes and things on the road are not a safe space to play.

‘‘That can be very difficult for him to understand.”

Another parent said: “I think it’s very dangerous. I feel like it’s an accident waiting to happen. None of these road markings are in the Highway Code.

“Personally, I feel that the coloured markings in the roads are confusing for children, especially special needs children and first school children.

“It’s like a playground. They feel that they can jump in the spots. My daughter thought it looked like Twister in the road.”

The Safer School Streets scheme, for which the council was awarded a £350,0000 grant from the Department for Transport, includes a 20mph zone, pedestrian and cycle zone, new crossings, changes to traffic priorities, planters, benches and bike racks.

Sustrans, a cycling charity that has repeatedly lobbied politicians to introduce more low-traffic neighbourhoods, was paid £146,766.30 to design and carry out the work near the schools, financial statements on the council website show.

‘We desperately want feedback’

Cllr Anita Collier, from Frome town council, said: “We want desperately to have that feedback. These things can be changed.

“Sustrans have actually made changes to their designs throughout the country. We know that that’s possible.

“It will come as a cost. But this whole scheme has been funded by government money that comes from the Department of Transport.”

A spokesman for Sustrans said: “Colourful street markings are a common proposal in school street designs.

“They alert drivers to the fact that there may be people around the street and, as part of a larger package of traffic-calming measures, encourage them to slow down.

“The street markings around Frome safer school streets were created through a collaborative co-design process with the community including pupils from the local schools. Residents from the local streets helped to choose the designs.”

The hard-Right Freedom Party (FPO) secured the first far-right national parliamentary election victory in post-World War II Austria on Sunday, finishing ahead of the governing conservatives after tapping into anxieties about immigration, inflation, Ukraine and other issues. 

But the chances of Herbert Kickl’s anti-immigrant FPO governing were unclear. 

Preliminary official results showed the Freedom Party finishing first with 29.2 per cent of the vote and the Austrian People’s Party (OVP) led by chancellor Karl Nehammer was second with 26.5per cent. 

The centre-left Social Democrats were in third place with 21 per cent. The outgoing government – a coalition of Mr Nehammer’s party and the environmentalist Greens – lost its majority in the lower house of parliament.

“Tomorrow there will be a blue Monday and then we will set about turning that 29 per cent into a political reality in this country,” Mr Kickl told supporters on Sunday evening, playing on the fact blue is the colour associated with his party.

The unprecedented win for Mr Kickl’s FPO could install him as the first hard-Right chancellor in Austria’s post-war history if he manages to build a coalition.

The triumph of the Eurosceptic, Russia-friendly FPO on Sunday was another milestone in the recent rise of Europe’s hard right. But the party immediately suffered a stiff reality check, Reuters reported.

Facing Mr Kickl in a television studio after results came in, leaders of the other parties in parliament dismissed his overtures on forming a coalition.

An FPO-led government would cause a major headache for other EU leaders as they wrestle with growing populism across the bloc.

Earlier this month, the far-right Alternative for Germany won its first state elections in Thuringia.

In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party entered government in May, six months after coming first in parliamentary elections.

Mr Wilders hailed the FPÖ victory as evidence of a far-right surge across the continent.

“The Netherlands, Hungary, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, France, Spain, Czech Republic and today Austria! We are winning! Times are changing!” he wrote on X.

And although Marine Le Pen’s National Rally narrowly lost a snap election in France in July, it gained enough seats to act as kingmaker in the resulting hung parliament.

Meanwhile, Viktor Orban, the president of Hungary, has become a vocal opponent of military support for Ukraine.

The FPO will face an uphill struggle to form a coalition, however, as Austria’s other parties consider Mr Kickl too toxic for high office.

He has been accused of flirting with fascism, including with a 2018 remark that the authorities should “concentrate asylum seekers in one place” in what was widely viewed as an allusion to Nazi death camps.

The hard-Right party could try and lead a coalition with Mr Nehammer’s OVP, which came second. Mr Nehammer has already ruled this out unless Mr Kickl does not serve as chancellor.

“Austrians have made history tonight… you can clearly see that change has come,” Michael Schnedlitz, the FPO general secretary, said on Austrian TV after the exit poll was released.

During the campaign, the FPO – a party with Nazi roots founded in 1956 by a former SS officer – pledged to turn the country into “Fortress Austria” and introduce a controversial “remigration” policy.

Remigration would involve deporting asylum seekers, particularly criminals, and blocking family reunification for migrants already based in Austria.

FPO party chiefs have also vowed to significantly tighten Austrian land border security, scrap Austrian involvement in the EU Sky Shield air-defence scheme, and remain strictly neutral on foreign conflicts.

Friendly towards Russia

The party is friendly towards Russia and has described EU leaders’ close support for Ukraine as “madness”.

In 2018, the party’s nominee for the post of foreign minister danced a waltz with Vladimir Putin at her wedding.

Mr Kickl also agitated against lockdown rules during the pandemic, refusing to wear a face mask in parliament. The party has pledged to enshrine in Austria’s constitution that there are only two genders.

The FPO and OVP parties have previously joined forces in short-lived coalitions where the FPO was the junior partner.

Their first coalition collapsed in 2002 amid FPO infighting, while the second coalition imploded in the wake of the 2019 Ibiza affair.

In that scandal, the FPO’s Heinz-Christian Strache, then leader and vice-chancellor, resigned after he was filmed meeting a woman who was posing as the niece of a Russian media buyer, to discuss swapping government contracts for favourable coverage.

The OVP’s Sebastian Kurz, the chancellor at the time, then lost a no-confidence vote in parliament that brought down the coalition.

‘Only option for voters’

“The FPO will support anti-immigration policies, but the fact that it will likely govern in coalition will prevent a radicalisation of policy,” said Safa Sharif, a political analyst from the Economist Intelligence Unit.

In Vienna, supporters of Mr Kickl’s FPO said it was the only option for voters who wanted drastic action on slowing down the rate of migration and keeping Austria neutral.

“My opinion is it’s the only serious party,” said Nordika, 49. “I’ve voted for them before as well, because I think that closing the borders will work, it is the best solution for European security.”

Also running this year was the anti-establishment Beer Party, which was initially founded as a joke in 2015 by Dominik Wlazny, a rock musician and medical doctor.

Since the Ibiza scandal, the party has vowed to clean up corruption in politics, with the candidates campaigning in leather jackets and hosting beer-hall sessions for potential voters.

“[Our voters] are frustrated with how it is now, it cannot be like this in the future,” said Viktoria Mullner, a Beer Party candidate in Vienna. “Most of them saw our spirit on what we want to do, what we want to achieve, our core values of doing politics that are clean and for the people. It’s not just because the FPO [is rising in the polls].”

The Star of David should be displayed at every point of entry to the UK to show “we stand with Israel”, Robert Jenrick has said.

The Tory leadership frontrunner said he wanted Britain to be “the most welcoming country in the world for Israelis and the Jewish community”.

Speaking to a Conservative Friends of Israel reception at the Tory conference on Sunday night, he said he pushed as immigration minister for Israeli citizens travelling to the UK to be able to enter through the e-gates.

This would mean that at “every airport and point of entry to our great country”, there was a Star of David, as a “symbol that we support Israel”, he said.

Taking to the stage in a black hoodie emblazoned with the words “Hamas Are Terrorists”, he also pledged to move the British embassy to Jerusalem if he became Prime Minister, adding: “If the Foreign Office or the civil servants don’t want to do it, I will build it myself.”

The fringe event heard from all four remaining Tory leadership candidates, with Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat also declaring their strong support for Israel.

Mr Jenrick told the audience: “I want this country to be the most welcoming country in the world for Israelis and for the Jewish community. 

“And a small thing that I fought for when I was the immigration minister was to ensure that every Israeli citizen could enter our country through the e-gate, through the easy access. 

“So that at every airport and point of entry to our great country there is the Star of David there as a symbol that we support Israel, we stand with Israel. We are friends and allies of Israel, and Israelis are welcome in our country.”

Those who fought Hitler would turn in their graves, says shadow foreign secretary

Also speaking at Sunday night’s event in Birmingham, Andrew Mitchell, the shadow foreign secretary, said that people who fought against Hitler would “turn in their graves” if they heard the words “apartheid” and “genocide” being used to describe the events in Gaza.

He said the “reality” of the conflict in the Middle East has been “lost in the cacophony of criticism” that engulfied Israel in the aftermath of the Oct 7 terror attacks.

“In Parliament, on the streets of London, in university campuses around the world, we have witnessed a form of hysteria. Words like apartheid, genocide,” he said.

“Words that would make those who fought against Hitler and against the apartheid in South Africa turn in their graves. The vitriolic outpouring of hostility has crossed all boundaries of sane debate.

“Some of it may be well intentioned, people must be free to express their anger and protest the government of Israel and the genuine humanitarian concerns for the suffering we are witnessing.”

He added: “There is a deeply toxic trend that has spread like wildfire, a desire not only to demonise but to de-legitimise the Jewish state to the point of turning back the clock to the time it did not exist.”

‘Nowadays, D-Day would be seen as illegitimate’

Defending Israel, he also said that nowadays D-Day would be branded “illegitimate” because of the scale of civilian death.

In her speech, Ms Badenoch described the new group of pro-Gaza MPs in Parliament as a “new threat”, claiming they were “elected on the back of sectarianism”.

“We must not pretend that these people are a minority,” she said.

Mr Cleverly, the former foreign secretary, said Israel has his “personal support” in the “defence of your democracy”, while Mr Tugendhat said the Conservatives should be “absolutely clear that we will always stand with democracies defending themselves”.

Grammy-winning singer and actor Kris Kristofferson has been remembered as an “inspiration” who left a “resounding legacy” following his death at 88.

The American country music star died “peacefully” at his home in Maui, Hawaii on Saturday, a statement issued on behalf of his family said.

During his career, the veteran musician wrote a host of classic standards which were covered by artists including Janis Joplin and Johnny Cash and he worked with film directors including Martin Scorsese.

His family also confirmed the news on his Instagram account, writing in the statement: “We’re all so blessed for our time with him.

“Thank you for loving him all these many years, and when you see a rainbow, know he’s smiling down at us all.”

Born in 1936 to an Air Force major general, Kristofferson served as an army ranger who flew helicopters in the US Army during his own stint in the service.

He also studied literature at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar after finishing his undergraduate degree at Pomona College in California.

Kristofferson later pivoted his career to music and headed to Nashville to pursue being a professional songwriter.

He went on to write standards such as Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down, which became a hit for Cash, For The Good Times, which became a number one for Ray Price, and Me And Bobby McGee, which was covered by Joplin.

“There’s no better songwriter alive than Kris Kristofferson,” Willie Nelson said during a November 2009 award ceremony for Kristofferson held by BMI. 

“Everything he writes is a standard and we’re all just going to have to live with that.”

Kristofferson was awarded a Golden Globe for his work opposite Barbra Streisand in the 1976 remake of musical romantic drama A Star is Born.

Among those paying tribute was Grammy-winning singer Travis Tritt who hailed him as an “inspiration”.

He added: “I was fortunate to get to know him on the set of “Outlaw Justice” that we filmed in Spain in 1998.

“My heartfelt condolences go out to Kris’s wife Lisa and all of his family, friends and fans.”

In 2004, Kristofferson was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

The chief executive for the Country Music Hall of Fame, Kyle Young, said: “Kris Kristofferson believed creativity is God-given, and those who ignore such a gift are doomed to unhappiness.

“He preached that a life of the mind gives voice to the soul, and his work gave voice not only to his soul but to ours. He leaves a resounding legacy.”

Donald Trump ignored the advice of one of his staunchest allies by repeating his claim that Kamala Harris is “mentally impaired”.

Hours after Lindsey Graham, the hardline senator for South Carolina, rebuked Trump for the personal attack on Ms Harris, the former president doubled down at a rally in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania.

In a speech stretching beyond 100 minutes, Trump, 78, told his supporters gathered at the convention centre in Erie County on Sunday: “Crooked Joe Biden became mentally impaired. But lying Kamala Harris, honestly, I believe she was born that way.”

He went on to insist “there’s something wrong with Kamala”, echoing a speech made the day before in Wisconsin, another swing state in the Rust Belt where he pontificated on President Biden and Ms Harris’s term in office, saying: “And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country.”

Trump has previously made racially inflammatory comments about Ms Harris’s dual heritage, claiming she only recently “turned black”, as well as calling her “stupid,” “weak” and “dumb as a rock”.

The comments made on Saturday earned widespread opprobrium, including from within the Republican Party, most notably from the loyalist Mr Graham. Asked what he thought of the latest personal attack, the influential senator told CNN on Sunday morning: “I just think the better course to take is to prosecute the case that her policies are destroying the country.”

Mr Graham described Ms Harris and her policies as “crazy liberal” but his rebuke to Trump mirrors advice from Republican strategists to avoid  personal attacks on his rival amid fears it is alienating moderate swing voters.

Tom Emmer, a Minnesota Congressman who has been working with Trump’s running mate JD Vance ahead of Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, told ABC News: “I think we should stick to the issues.”

Larry Hogan, a former Republican governor of Maryland who is running for the Senate on a platform distancing himself from Trump, said: “I think that’s insulting not only to the vice-president, but to people that actually do have mental disabilities. I’ve said for years that Trump’s divisive rhetoric is something we can do without.”

In a statement, Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, declined to respond to the criticism of his boss, preferring instead to criticise the vice-president, saying her record on immigration made her unfit to serve as president.

The American Association of People with Disabilities condemned Trump. In a statement issued on Sunday, Maria Town, the organisation’s chief executive  said: “Donald Trump’s ableist comments yesterday say far more about him and his inaccurate, hateful biases against disabled people than it does about Vice-President Harris, or any person with a disability.

“Trump holds the ableist, false belief that if a person has a disability, they are less human and less worthy of dignity. These perceptions are incorrect, and are harmful to people with disabilities.”

She pointed out that “Abraham Lincoln had depression. George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, and others were all known to have learning disabilities”, adding: “I hope all of those examples can disabuse our nation of the idea that the presence of a disability alone can or should be disqualifying for a president.”

Kamala Harris should stop her “incessant focus” on Donald Trump and “take more risks” with her presidential campaign, a former senior aide has said.

Ashley Etienne, Ms Harris’s first White House communications director, warned her former boss she had “more work to do” if she was to win over the undecided voters who will determine the fate of the race.

Ms Etienne set out her advice in an op-ed for The New York Times, in which she said Ms Harris’s first priority should be to “cut back on the incessant focus on Mr Trump”.

“By now, almost everyone who could be persuaded by the case against him has heard it,” she wrote.

The Harris campaign has relentlessly focused on her Republican rival’s comments, frequently sharing clips of Trump speaking on social media.

In the last few days, the official social media accounts of the campaign have shared no fewer than a dozen clips of Trump, as well as a meme of him with a walking frame and the caption: “Okay grandpa let’s get you to bed.”

The warning mirrors advice from Republican strategists to Trump to avoid his personal attacks on his rival amid fears it is alienating moderate swing voters.

Trump, 78, has not heeded the advice, once again ramping up his ad-hominem attacks on Ms Harris over the weekend by calling her “mentally disabled”.

“Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way,” he told a rally in Wisconsin. “And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country.”

He has previously made racially inflammatory comments about Ms Harris’s dual heritage, claiming she only recently “turned black”, as well as calling her “stupid,” “weak” and “dumb as a rock”.

It has prompted unease among Republicans, including close allies of Trump who have urged him to focus on bread and butter issues rather than hurling insults.

Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s closest allies in the Senate, said: “The better course to take is to prosecute the case that her policies are destroying the country.”

In her New York Times op-ed, Ms Etienne said her second piece of advice to Ms Harris was to swap the large-scale rallies she has been holding on the campaign trail in favour of “smaller, town-hall-style events in battleground states”.

She acknowledged the political jeopardy of taking such an approach, adding: “Town halls are a riskier format — and the campaign knows that.”

However, she said, “the town hall format plays to Ms Harris’s strengths”, describing how she had witnessed the US vice-president’s warmth and compassion first-hand.

“The intimate setting of a town hall will expose voters to those qualities and add more dimensions to what already excites them about her,” she said of the 59-year-old Ms Harris.

Unqualified praise

Ms Etienne, an experienced Democratic adviser who has previously worked for Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, served as the US vice-president’s communications director for much of her first year in office.

Her opinion piece represents a rare intervention into the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign strategy by a former senior adviser.

Most senior figures within the party have offered unqualified praise for Ms Harris’s approach to the race.

Her ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket following Joe Biden’s withdrawal on July 21 has dramatically altered the party’s fortunes. She leads Trump in most national polls and is locked in a virtual dead heat in many of the battleground states.

Ms Etienne acknowledged that it was a “remarkable” feat given her late entry into the race.

However, she warned Ms Harris needed to do more to further introduce herself to voters and explain why she was “the right leader for this moment”.

She argued Ms Harris “needs to do more interviews to close voters’ knowledge gap about her” after largely dodging the traditional stable of US media rounds to which most presidential candidates submit.

In Ms Harris’s defence, she argued that the US national media “often have a set narrative” around her former boss and “a penchant for revisiting her past missteps”, but she said evading press scrutiny had left voters with “unanswered questions about her”.

She advised Ms Harris to bypass the traditional, national media landscape in favour of conducting interviews with small, local outlets in the critical swing states.

Ms Harris should also accept invitations from “niche media that appeal to key demographics she needs to shore up, such as the dozens of podcasts targeted to suburban mothers and black men”, she wrote.

To win control of the White House, Ms Etienne concluded, the Democrat does not need to give the public a reason “to vote against the former president, but rather a reason to vote for the next one”.

Legendary drug lord Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada was expecting it to be a routine, private meeting with state governor Rubén Rocha.

But as he headed to the gaudy conference centre on the dusty outskirts of Culiacán, the capital of Mexico’s ultra-violent Sinaloa state, he was in fact walking into a trap worthy of a Hollywood script.

Zambada, 76, had been asked to arbitrate, he says, in a dispute over a local university, involving Mr Rocha and his political rival Héctor Cuén, a former Culiacán mayor and ex-rector of the university.

For the co-founder of the Sinaloa cartel, Mexico’s most feared organised crime syndicate, such clandestine dealings with elected powerbrokers were part of his job description – funnelling huge volumes of cocaine, heroin and fentanyl into the United States – as he kept the authorities onside with a combination of lavish bribes and extreme brutality.

But instead of the business meeting he was expecting, Zambada was ambushed, his four bodyguards overpowered by armed and hooded men. He was then bound, blindfolded and driven to a nearby airstrip.

After a three-hour flight in a small plane, he landed in El Paso, Texas, where he was arrested by federal agents. Separately, his friend Cuén was found dead in Culiacán that evening, shot, according to an official account disputed by the abducted cartel kingpin, during a botched attempt to steal his pickup.

The fallout from Zambada’s betrayal on July 25 – apparently at the behest of Joaquín Guzmán López, the 38-year-old son of his former business partner and fellow Sinaloa Cartel boss, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán – has been both spectacular and savage.

Not just has it landed Zambada in a federal court in New York, where he faces a laundry list of extremely serious charges.

It has also triggered a bloodbath on the streets of Culiacán as the Sinaloa Cartel descends into a civil war that could reshape the booming Mexican drugs trade.

And it has laid bare the alleged cosy relationship between officials, including allies of outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and the immensely profitable drugs trade while sparking a diplomatic row with the United States.

In a letter released by his lawyer, Zambada blamed Guzmán López, whom he has known since the latter was a child, implying that he had used him as a bargaining chip with US law enforcement, apparently to strike a plea deal.

Guzmán López, who has been filling in for his father since “El Chapo” – the name means Shorty – was extradited to the US where he is now serving life plus 30 years, accompanied Zambada on the flight to Texas and handed himself in, along with his prized captive, on arrival.

Ever since, thugs from the two factions of the cartel, the Chapitos and Mayitos, have been massacring each other in Culiacán, bringing life in the city to a blood-spattered halt.

The streets have been littered with burning vehicles, bullet casings, graffitied death messages and mutilated corpses. Last Saturday hit a new record, with a reported 10 homicides in a single day in the city of 800,000.

Schools and businesses have been shuttered for weeks as residents cower at home. Cartel foot soldiers openly parade in pickup trucks with mounted machine guns in the city centre with the police and military often nowhere to be seen.

The official death toll is now 60 but that is likely an underestimate. The cartels typically take their dead with them lest they be used as macabre trophies by their enemies, hung from bridges or strategically placed in public squares.

In one case earlier this month, five partially-naked corpses showing signs of torture were found propped up against a wall, with messages pinned to their chests and sporting new sombreros, with the price tags still attached.

Zambada’s arrest has also had huge political fallout. At one point, López Obrador, rather than welcoming the cartel boss’s arrest, bitterly blamed Washington for the mayhem now unfolding in Culiacán.

Mexican prosecutors even opened a “treason” investigation over the kidnapping of a Mexican citizen.

Yet the president has also downplayed the violence as a turf war between criminals that barely touches the general population. He has called on the press to avoid “alarmism” in its coverage.

Meanwhile, Rocha, the governor of Sinaloa and an ally of López Obrador, has denied any involvement, saying that he had flown in a private jet to Los Angeles two hours before Zambada’s abduction.

He has been backed by López Obrador, who insisted: “We have all the confidence in the governor.” Yet Rocha has failed to provide confirmation of his flight or details of what he was doing in California.

Although Zambada’s account is that of a notorious career criminal, his public letter provides times, dates and other specifics that Rocha’s claims lack.

The Conservative Party will “die” unless it proposes pulling Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), Robert Jenrick will claim on Monday.

In a speech at a rally at the Tory conference in Birmingham, Mr Jenrick, the front-runner in the party’s leadership race, will further harden his rhetoric on immigration.

He will warn that Nigel Farage’s Reform party will “grow and grow and condemn us to obscurity” unless the Tories somehow regain trust on bringing down numbers.

The warning is Mr Jenrick’s latest attempt to put the UK’s membership of the ECHR at the centre of the leadership contest.

Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat, the other three candidates vying to replace Rishi Sunak, have declined to explicitly call to leave the convention.

Instead, they have argued that the UK immigration system needs to be overhauled first. 

The ECHR, which defends universal human rights and was shaped in part by Winston Churchill, has been increasingly debated amid the Channel migrant crisis.

‘Restoring our credibility’

Mr Jenrick, who quit as Mr Sunak’s immigration minister last year, argues the convention is too limiting on the UK’s ability to deport those who arrive by such crossings.

In a speech tomorrow, Mr Jenrick will point to both his promise to cap annual net migration at 100,000 and to leave the ECHR, warning of the consequences of not pursuing the two policies.

Mr Jenrick will say: “Our party’s survival rests on restoring our credibility on immigration. If we continue to duck and dance around this question our party has no future.

“Despite what others might falsely claim, we’ve never had a legal cap on legal migration. Unless we introduce one – where no visas will be issued unless net migration is in the tens of thousands or lower – we will be powerless to end the cycle of broken promises. Anyone who is not prepared to commit to a specific cap just doesn’t understand the depth of public anger.

“I am not prepared to gamble the house on some five-year review process that may or may not see us doing what is obviously necessary. I have a plan ready now: leave the ECHR and introduce a legally binding cap on legal migration.

“The choice is clear, it’s leave or remain. In fact it’s more than that – it is leave or die. If we don’t do this now, we’ll never restore the public’s trust and there’s every chance that Reform will grow and grow and condemn us to obscurity.”

The “leave or remain” phrase appears to be a deliberate attempt to echo the rhetoric of the Brexit referendum. Most Tory members voted to leave the EU back in the 2016 vote, according to polling analysis.

‘Not out of conviction’

On Sunday, Mr Farage took a swipe at Mr Jenrick, saying: “Formerly a man that believed in nothing, Robert Jenrick now pitches himself as the great hardliner. This is almost certainly done for political gain and not out of conviction.”

Mr Jenrick topped the last round of Tory MP voting, with Ms Badenoch in second place. Tory MPs will whittle the list down to two next month before party members pick the winner.

Ms Badenoch, the former business secretary, countered Mr Jenrick’s position in an article for The Telegraph this weekend.

Ms Badenoch wrote: “We will end illegal migration by proper enforcement and inserting whatever deterrent is necessary into the system. And, yes: if necessary, we will leave international frameworks like the ECHR which were built for another age and are being bent out of shape by legal activism.

“But that will be part of a full plan, not just a throwaway promise to win a leadership contest. Reducing immigration is our objective. We lost sight of that in government.”

Ms Badenoch, appearing on BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, was also made to defend another aspect of her article.

She was questioned on her remark that “numbers matter, culture matters even more” when it comes to immigration.

Pressed on this, Ms Badenoch said: “We are not a dormitory. This is our home. People from all around the world just living here in their little bubbles and little groups is a recipe for disaster.

“I have seen it… I grew up in a country with 300 ethnic groups. This is a recipe for conflict, and the government needs to work hard on integration.”

But Mr Jenrick, who has committed to capping net migration in the tens of thousands or below, said he disagreed with her approach because “numbers also matter”.

More flooding is expected in the coming week after a fresh deluge of rain.

The Environment Agency had 32 flood warnings in place on Sunday evening, which indicated that flooding “is expected”. It also had 98 live “flood alerts” in place where flooding was considered a possibility.

It comes after areas across England suffered heavy rain and localised flooding in recent days, with commuters facing widespread disruption on road and rail services.

Mark Garratt, a flood risk manager at the Environment Agency, said heavy rain on Sunday night and into Monday would bring a risk of surface water flooding in large parts of the South West, the South of England and some of the Midlands.

“It is especially important that people do not drive through flood-water – it is often deeper than it looks and just 30cm of flowing water is enough to float your car,” he said.

“Across the country, Environment Agency teams have been out checking flood defences and clearing any debris from storm drains and are also supporting local authorities in responding to surface water flooding.

“The advice to the public [is] to keep checking their flood risk, and search ‘check for flooding’ and to sign up for free flood warnings on the latest situation or follow @‌EnvAgency on X for the latest flood updates.”

According to the Met Office, some counties in southern and central England have already had more than 250 per cent of their average September rainfall.

About 650 properties were flooded in Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and the Home Counties, according to the Environment Agency, which estimated that around 8,200 properties had been protected.

The Met Office issued two new weather warnings for heavy rain on Sunday afternoon, with high levels of precipitation expected in eastern England, North Wales and North-West England.

It said up to 3in could fall in the eastern England region, with 2.4in possible in the North West and parts of Wales.

Liam Eslick, a meteorologist at the Met Office, said “pretty heavy persistent rain” would be expected and that the downpour would be likely to cause some travel delays.

By Tuesday night, higher pressure would move in, meaning a drier, sunnier spell, the forecaster said.

Mr Eslick added: “Come Tuesday night into Wednesday, we’re starting to see higher pressure, so turning a lot drier and plenty of sunny spells.

“But the following weekend, it does look like there’s a further low pressure coming in, but we’re still keeping an eye on that.”