UKAnalysis

Sunak’s tax attack on Starmer leads to a soap opera in Coronation Street spin room

UK election: Tory leader’s jibe that Labour would raise taxes by £2,000 lingered after the leaders’ TV debate but was not the knockout blow he needed

Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer traded blows last night in the leaders’ debate in Salford. Photograph: Jonathan Hordle/ITV/PA Wire
Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer traded blows last night in the leaders’ debate in Salford. Photograph: Jonathan Hordle/ITV/PA Wire
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Mark Paul in Salford
Wed Jun 05 2024 - 08:05

While Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer traded blows last night in the leaders’ debate at ITV’s studios on Salford Quays, most of the Westminster press pack headed in the direction of Coronation Street.

Not for a pint in the Rovers Return but for the media “spin room” where acolytes of the Tory and Labour leaders were primed to leap into propaganda mode the moment the debate finished – the spin room was housed in the building that is ITV’s Coronation Street Experience visitor centre.

What a soap opera it proved to be, as senior Tory cabinet members such as Michael Gove and Claire Coutinho jostled with Labour front benchers including Pat McFadden and Wes Streeting to bleat into the forest of microphones about how good their man had been, and how awful was the other guy.

The most enduring storyline in the spin room following the televised debate last night concerned Sunak’s repeated insistence that Labour under Starmer would “raise everybody’s taxes by £2,000″, and Starmer’s tardiness when it came to denying it.

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The Tory prime minister shoehorned the tax line into the debate up to ten times before his Labour counterpart tried to address it, and even then he did so weakly. As an attack designed to win headlines, Sunak’s Labour tax ploy appeared to have cut through as well as he could have hoped. It dominated the post-debate debates between the party hacks and the media variety grilling them.

Jonathan Ashworth, Labour’s shadow paymaster general who is also defending his seat as the local MP in Salford, appeared to grow impatient when it was pointed out to him that it had taken Starmer a full 26 minutes of the one-hour debate to deny the £2,000 accusation.

Ashworth tried to paint the ploy as a sign of desperation from the Tory leader, whose party is more than 20 points behind in polls. “No wonder they call him tetchy Sunak,” he said, scowling. “You’re getting a bit tetchy yourself,” said a reporter. “Is that because you think the prime minister won?”

The apparent success of the Tories’ tax ploy came even as it emerged that the £2,000 figure they had based it on appeared to be of dubious origin.

The Tories had calculated the number by asking the UK’s treasury to tot up the cost of what the governing party claimed were all of Labour’s spending promises. It then deducted the total of the revenue-raising measures that the Tories said Starmer’s party had announced, leaving a supposed “tax gap” (according to the Tories) of £38 billion over four years.

Finally, that figure was divided by the number of working households in the UK to give a headline of £2,000 per family, which the Tories claimed would have to be met in the form of tax rises.

Labour complained afterwards the calculations by the treasury were made on the basis of a litany of untrue or exaggerated assumptions that were provided by Tory political advisers.

Too late. The damage was done. The tax line was nowhere near the knockout blow that Sunak really needed to resurrect his party’s prospects of avoiding its near-certain defeat in the July 4th election. But it was enough for him to just about shade the televised debate with Starmer that had also focused on issues around the cost of living, defence and security, and climate change.

In the spin room, meanwhile, Gove enjoyed his star turn as Sunak’s top hype man. “Their guy took one hell of a beating tonight,” he said, grinning, of the Labour leader.

Gove is not defending his seat at the upcoming election, and his political career is now essentially over. But on last night’s performance he may have a future as an acerbic political commentator, while his natural fluency in front of the microphones underlined what a loss he is to a Tory party struggling for direction.

Referring to Labour’s so-called Ming vase strategy for Starmer to tip toe his way to Downing Street, Gove, now luxuriating in exaggeration, said the vase was “smashed in pieces on the polished floor”. With tongue firmly in cheek, he declared a “six-nil victory” for his man, whom he said had left Starmer “flat out on the canvas”. He hadn’t really, but it was a good line.

Labour’s cheerleaders, meanwhile, said the party had “no plans to raise people’s taxes”. McFadden, the party’s campaign co-ordinator, accused the Tory party of “setting fire to the remaining embers of its economic credibility”.

Voters will give their verdict on July 4th. If the polls are right, the tax ploy could be Sunak’s last stand.