Campaigning on hold
series of TV interviews with party leaders conducted by veteran broadcaster Andrew Neil will also be put on hold .
Mr Neil interviewed Prime Minister Theresa May on Monday and was due to record a half-hour segment with Mr Nuttall for broadcast last night.
Decisions on planned interviews with Mr Farron tonight, Ms Sturgeon on Thursday and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn on Friday will depend on when campaigning is resumed. Decisions on rescheduling are yet to be made.
A BBC spokeswoman said: “Following the tragic events in Manchester, the Andrew Neil interviews will not go ahead as planned while election campaigning is suspended.”
No atrocity on the scale of the Manchester attack has ever disrupted a British General Election.
But several campaigns have been thrown off track by unforeseen events that affected the political world. In 2001, prime minister Tony Blair postponed the entire election by a month because of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. Mr Blair had pencilled in the election for May 3 to coincide with local council polls. But he delayed the votes until June 7 because of the difficulty of campaigning while the deadly disease was being contained.
Candidates in the French presidential contest earlier this year suspended campaigning in the wake of a shooting in Paris two days before the first round vote, which left one police officer dead and another injured.
In the United States, Republican presidential candidate John McCain briefly suspended his 2008 campaign to work on the erupting financial crisis.
And candidates in the 2004 race halted all activities in the days after Ronald Reagan’s death.