Rosie Duffield's campaign decision highlights nastiness pervading our politics: Jayne Dowle

But as their campaign lurches from bad to worse, so desperate is Conservative high command, and with just three weeks left before the nation goes to the polls, all sense of propriety seems to have gone flying out of Central Office windows.

Sunak is being advised to attack Starmer by the throat, it’s reported, on three very personal fronts; his pro-EU instincts, his previous support for former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his distinguished past life as a leading human rights lawyer.

It is sickening that this approach is being promoted when we have a parliamentary candidate, Rosie Duffield, who is fighting to retain the seat of Canterbury, in Kent for Labour, and has taken the decision not to campaign publicly because she fears for her personal safety.

Ms Duffield, known for taking a firm line on matters of sex and gender, has cancelled hustings because she fears reprisals from trans-activists. As a serving MP, she was already on the receiving end of death threats, intimidation and abuse.

Isn’t this General Election schismatic enough already? Surely allowing parliamentary candidates to feel safe enough to meet potential voters is part of the democratic process.

It doesn’t help that even a Labour peer, Lord Cashman, a former EastEnders actor, has weighed in and called Ms Duffield ‘frit or lazy’ for taking the decision and has had the Labour whip removed as a result. He will now sit as a non-affiliated peer in the House of Lords.

How can it be that a high-profile member of the Labour Party feels it necessary to undermine a female candidate’s well-founded concern for her own personal security?

Those of us in Yorkshire will remember that this week marks the eighth anniversary of the murder of Batley and Spen Labour MP Jo Cox, shot and stabbed repeatedly by a constituent who was found to hold extreme right wing views.

And Essex voters will think of Sir David Amess, Conservative member for Southend West from 1997 until he was murdered at a church surgery in 2021 by an assailant who saw himself as a jihadist and was found in court to have been looking for a British MP to murder for months.

Our country is divided enough as it, without political leaders being urged by advisors to rip each other to shreds.

With the exception of his record on the second ‘front’, which Starmer has defended as a series of pragmatic political decisions – under Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership he served as Shadow Minister for Immigration as part of Andy Burnham’s Shadow Home Secretary team and the Shadow Brexit Secretary – it seems especially cynical of the Tories to take the gloves off now.

And it’s a massive gamble that could backfire. Whilst pro-Brexit Reform UK are nibbling away at the Conservatives’ likely position as the new main Opposition party after July 4, it could be said that much of this has to do with the personal ‘appeal’ of leader Nigel Farage to some voters rather than overwhelming collective hatred towards the European Union.

Brexit has not, as we know, delivered everything it promised, far from it. The aftermath can be massively construed as an example of why people are not trusting what the politicians say.

And to pick on the Labour leader because before becoming a politician, elected as MP for central London constituency Holborn and St Pancras at in 2015, he had a life outside Westminster seems especially snide, considering the number of ‘career politicians’ accused of having had no experience of real life.

As a leading human rights barrister, appointed Queen’s Counsel at the age of 39, Starmer served as a member of the Northern Ireland Policing Board and Association of Chief Police Officers, experiences which he has said led him towards politics.

It seems churlish at best to use and ignorant at worst to use this against him. And it’s difficult to see who the Tory top brass think this might impress, apart from the rabid anti-immigration vote, which as Nigel Farage is finding out to his cost, can be seriously over-estimated.

Whilst so much energy is being expended on whipping up such vitriol, we voters can only ask what is actually happening to supporting policies and plans to make the UK a better, safer and more secure place for everyone. No wonder one of the biggest challenges facing this General Election is concerns over low voter turn-out delivering a skewed result.

With senior advisors telling a Prime Minister to start what amounts to a street fight and parliamentary candidates too scared to actually engage with voters for fear of violence, is it any wonder than the biggest divide is turning into the one between politicians and public? This does not bode well for the polls, or the next Parliament.