Robert Peston

I am not going to lie: I am bored sick with Brexit. Like so many of you, I have become that frustrated child in the back of the car moaning, 'are we there yet?' Boris Johnson won’t tell us. Or at least not in precise terms. So on this marathon journey, just days before we leave the EU in a legal sense at 11pm on 31 January, the final destination can only be deduced, and certainly not with any precision. What Johnson says he wants, more than anything, is a trading relationship with the EU that returns to the UK a sovereign ability to set its own rules and regulations for business, such as companies’ duties to employees, their environmental obligations, their safety standards and so on.

Interviewing Boris Johnson last night on my show, I ended up feeling a bit sorry for Jo Swinson, leader of the Liberal Democrats. Because for him the election is a proxy for another referendum. His whole mantra is 'get Brexit done, and move on'. Swinson's position of 'revoke and move on' is a wholly rational response in the context of Johnson's framing. But apparently what is democracy in action for Johnson is anti-democracy when the Lib Dems react. We are truly in the 'age of unreason'. Some of you will be screaming that 'we had a referendum, so the only legitimate way to cancel it is to hold another one'. Except under our unwritten constitution referendums have no legal force, and are certainly inferior in their democratic weight to general elections.

How do you weigh a once-in-a-generation transfer of power from private sector to public sector and from capital to labour, against an irreversible rupture with the European Union? That is the choice being offered to voters, by Labour and the Tories respectively. Talk about chalk and cheese, or bicycles versus fish. How on earth do you decide, if you haven't made up your mind already, which you like best? You could argue that the desire among some voters to squeeze the private sector's pips till they squeak and those that want to take a chainsaw to the UK's ties with the EU – with only a relatively small group apparently wanting both – stem from similar social and economic causes.

There is both a moral and a practical dimension to Labour's desperate slowness to root out anti-Semitism. The moral one, highlighted by the Chief Rabbi last night, is whether Jeremy Corbyn is fit to be prime minister having seemingly been too tolerant for too long of avowed anti-Semites. The practical one is that Labour is offering the most ambitious and complex programme of national reconstruction since 1945 – an expansion of the apparatus of the state on a scale we haven't seen since at least the 1960s and probably not since 1945. It will require management and technocratic expertise of a very high order.

Boris Johnson just took a very big political risk, by not making any serious attempt to compete with Labour on bunging cash at public services and the fabric of the UK. Where Corbyn is pledging £83 billion a year of increased spending on students, the elderly, health, schools, public-sector pay and so on by 2023, the Tories offer £3 billion. For Labour’s £80 billion plus per year on new housing, pension compensation for women born in the 1950s, nationalisations, greening businesses and multiple other projects, Johnson is committing to £8 billion by the end of the next parliament.

I am not sure if it is class war exactly but something very like it is back. Perhaps it is a hybrid of a class, eco and generational war. In that Labour is planning to sting those earning £80,000 a year or more with an additional tax burden just short of £20bn from higher taxes on income, capital and dividends. As for businesses and financial institutions, they are being whacked for almost £50bn, in a dizzying array of increased levies on profits, assets and financial trading, and - eccentrically perhaps for a party saying it wants to encourage a green high-tech economy - a reduction in allowances for spending on research.

An attack line that both Corbyn and Johnson shied away from last night in ITV's debate best characterises the rotten core of this election. I had half expected Corbyn to make a big thing of the risk that even if Johnson gets his self-styled microwaveable Brexit deal zapped and approved by MPs, such that the UK leaves the EU on 31 January, there remains a significant residual risk we'll tumble into something very like a no-deal Brexit by the end of 2020 – since it is stretching credibility that a useful trade deal with the EU could be negotiated and approved by then, for all that Johnson claims the contrary.

A question I don't expect my colleague Julie Etchingham to put to the two party leaders in ITV's debate is the one that has been nagging away at me for days: why is the policy-making that will underpin the election manifestos we'll get from the parties over the next few days so lacking in intellectual rigour? What we have from both parties are big ambitions – 'free broadband for everyone' from Labour, 'Brexit totally done and dusted by the end of 2020' from Boris Johnson – based either on a highly selective use of second-hand research (Labour's analysis of the costs and practicability of nationalising full-fibre broadband roll-out) or predicated on the challenging notion that Johnson has near magical negotiating skills.

I emerged with three thoughts from my interview with the Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson, which is three more thoughts than I often have after interviewing a senior politician. First, her attack on Labour was massively personalised as an attack on Jeremy Corbyn, who she says is not fit to be PM, rather than on the party itself. Second, she refused to “discuss hypotheticals” when I asked whether her condition for Lib Dems propping up a Labour government was that Labour would have to find a way for someone other than Corbyn to move in to No.10.

The poor performance of the NHS relative to government targets is turning into a major headache for the PM. The point is that Johnson and the Vote Leave team won the EU referendum largely on the basis of their controversial promise to invest £350m a week into the health service. They were acutely aware that money for a public health service matters hugely to poorer people and matters disproportionately more than for those on higher incomes – who have the double benefit of being able to afford both private healthcare and healthier lifestyles. Johnson’s consigliere and Vote Leave campaign supremo Cummings has often said it was the £350m promise wot won it for Brexit.