Rishi Sunak is not stealing from the poor to give to the rich

Until this morning this had been Rishi Sunak’s week. While Liz Truss found herself trying to talk her way out of her rapidly-abandoned policy for regional pay boards – which she accused others of misrepresenting but couldn’t seem to explain herself – Rishi Sunak emerged the surprise winner from a show of hands among Sky’s hand-picked audience last night. But no sooner had Sunak started his comeback than he was knocked down with an embarrassment of his own: the New Statesman obtained footage of him boasting to an audience in Tunbridge Wells last Friday that:

I managed to start changing the funding formulas to make sure that areas like this receive the funding they deserve. We inherited a bunch of formulas from the Labour party that shoved all the funding into depressed urban areas. That needed to be done. I started the work of undoing it.