The Tories have had their first good 24 hours of the election campaign. The £2,000 tax claim made by Rishi Sunak (which we crunch here) is dominating the chatter following last night’s TV debate, and the amount of energy Labour frontbenchers are putting into refuting it shows they feel Keir Starmer failed to squash it in the debate itself.
When Andrew Mitchell, the Deputy Foreign Secretary, was interviewed about the figure by Andrew Neil on Times Radio just now, he suggested that the calculation was probably an ‘understatement’. Significantly, though, he refused to repeat the claim made by Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho this morning that the figure came from ‘independent civil servants’.
‘No,’ he said, firmly, when Neil asked him directly to say the same thing. He then explained that civil servants had produced the figure at the request of ministers – in the same way that Labour would do when in government – but that there were other ‘independent’ inputs into it too.
The main thing that gave it legs was Starmer’s failure to knock it down while live on ITV
He also conceded – eventually – that this £2,000 figure is not for one year but over the five years of the next parliament.
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