Sunak splutters in BBC interview, but Starmer won’t do much better

Rishi Sunak has started to move on from his D-Day blunder. He probably won’t recover from the electoral damage he caused himself, but he is now able to talk about other things. The question is what is it that he can talk about that will actually get the voters listening? This evening he gave an interview to the BBC’s Nick Robinson where – after making his apology for the way he ‘bunked off’, as Robinson put it – he had to answer questions on why people should believe the promises the Conservatives are making on tax, immigration, the NHS, and so on, when none of the things they’d promised so far had come to fruition. 

Sunak did have to concede that in all those areas, things weren’t where he wanted them to be. He tried to be forthright about this, telling Robinson that he was ‘not going to shy away from what happened’ to cause the tax burden to be at record post-war levels, arguing that this was because of the pandemic and the energy crisis.