Starmer will keep shtum til 5 July

Tonight Keir Starmer took another look at Labour’s poll lead, threw caution to the wind, and revealed his radical plans for the government he hopes to lead in a few weeks time. Only kidding.

The Labour leader’s interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson didn’t reveal anything we didn’t know and Starmer won’t be obliging with any more details between now and 5 July. But Robinson did try to give voters as much of an impression as possible of how Starmer as prime minister might behave.

He pressed him repeatedly on how he was going to fund the plans in the Labour manifesto: would there be spending cuts or could Starmer guarantee there would be no cuts to the courts, prisons, council budgets and so on. Starmer replied that there would be ‘a cash injection straightaway into our police, into our hospitals, into our schools’ and then there would be reform. He also said ‘we’re not going back to austerity: I know what that feels like and the damage that it did’, and that ‘none of our plans require any other tax rises’.