Question Time leaders' special: May under fire over NHS and education –as it happened

A man says she called the election for her own political gains. She replies:

No, it’s not sir.

Then she says (we think) she had “the balls” to call an election.

The man said the Tories called the EU referendum for the good of the Conservative party.

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A woman in the audience asks who was stopping May implementing Brexit.

May says it is true she got article 50 through the Commons, but it was clear the other parties wanted to frustrate her.

A man in the audience asks if she regrets calling the election. He is a Tory, he says.

May says the only poll that matter is the one on polling day. This is about who has the best Brexit deal.

Dimbleby asks if May was surprised what happened.

May says she is never surprised.

Q: Why should the public trust anything you say when you have a track record of backtracking or broken promises as home secretary or prime minister?

(Superb question.)

May says she wants to tell the questioner about her record. She mentions addressing stop and search, being tough on crime and criminals, and keeping DNA details on the database. Diane Abbott does not want to do that, she says.

She does not address the question.

Q: You have backtracked. You said there would be no election and there was. You have not debated Jeremy Corbyn. You backtracked over social care.

May says she is taking questions.

On the election question, she says it became clear other parties wanted to frustrate the will the the people. It would have been easy to hang on. But she called an election because of Brexit.

David Dimbleby introduces the programme.

He says a third of the audience intend to vote Conservative, a third intend to vote Labour, and a third support other parties or have not yet made up their minds.

Question Time is about to start.

As it goes along, I may post some tweets from journalists and political commentators. It is not possible to post all the interesting Twitter commentary. I’ll be choosing ones that seem interesting, but the selection will be relatively random.

At the end I will do a more systematic round-up showing what the Twitter commentariat is saying.

Boris Johnson v Andrew Gwynne is starting to become a TV fixture. The foreign secretary and the Labour election coordinator had an entertaining on-screen barney at the Sky/Channel 4 TV showdown on Monday, and they have just had a rematch on Sky.