Tories ‘fired Ukip candidate because he was leaving’

A former Conservative parliamentary candidate now standing for Ukip in the general election has claimed he was fired in a “pre-emptive strike” because the Tories knew he planned to leave.

Ukip announced Mike Whitehead had defected but the Conservatives said he was sacked last week as the candidate for the Hull West and Hessle constituency.

Nigel Farage described the news as “another hammer blow to Tory pretensions in the north of England”, but a Conservative Party spokesman dismissed Ukip’s announcement as “cynical, misleading, and utterly calculating to try and score political points”.