Boris Johnson again edged the final televised clash with Jeremy Corbyn with the public putting him 52 points to 48 ahead in a snap post-leaders’ debate poll after he repeatedly sought to pin the Labour leader down on his stance on Brexit.
With just six days to go before polling day, Tory HQ will be best pleased that their man did not make a major gaffe while Labour strategists were hoping for a leap forward for theirs to eat into the continuing double-digit Conservative lead.
As the two leaders clashed on the NHS, the economy, security and anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, the Prime Minister sought to bring the subject back time and again to Brexit, expressing astonishment that Mr Corbyn could not say how he would campaign on the issue of the day or who would lead a Labour Government’s negotiation with Brussels given most Shadow Cabinet members were Remainers.
"How can you get a deal, a new deal from Brussels for Brexit, if you don't actually believe in it? That's the mystery that I fail to understand," declared Mr Johnson.
Mr Corbyn, who has pledged to act as an “honest broker,” insisted he would carry out the will of the people in a second referendum and went on the attack, warning of "chaos" and "huge job losses" if a Tory government was unable to get a free trade deal with the EU by the end of the year.
The Labour leader accused Mr Johnson of being prepared to “walk out of a relationship with the EU and into a relationship with nobody”.
He called for “openness” from his Tory counterpart after earlier in the day releasing confidential Government papers suggesting there would be a customs border down the Irish Sea.
But, appearing before a live studio audience in Maidstone in a debate hosted by the BBC, the Prime Minister insisted the claims were "not true" and added it was “curious to say the least to be lectured about the Union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland by a man who all his political life has campaigned to break up that Union and supported for four decades the IRA in their campaign violently to destroy it".
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