Tory MPs rebel over infected blood vote

It’s another bad day for Rishi Sunak. Hours after the Prime Minister discovered that he is polling worse than his short-lived predecessor Liz Truss and losing supporters to Nigel Farage’s Reform party, he has tonight had to confront a Tory rebellion. The sliver of good news for Sunak is that it has turned out to be a smaller mutiny than first thought.

23 Tory rebels, including former Welsh secretary Sir Robert Buckland, joined forces with the opposition this evening to support a Labour amendment to the Victim and Prisoners Bill – a little less than the 31 MPs who had signed the amendment before the vote. The matter concerns the contaminated blood scandal of the 70s and 80s, where tens of thousands of patients were given infected blood products. The Labour amendment to the bill, brought forward by Home Affairs Committee chair Diana Johnson, seeks to create a new body to help compensate those affected. It