Absolute garbage

What did I learn from last night’s dismal, ill-tempered and scrappy TV leaders’ debate? That Rishi Sunak is no better than Boris Johnson, except with brushed hair and a (much) more expensive suit.

He is just as happy to campaign on blatant lies and spurious statistics, just as happy to double down on a campaign strategy built on the simple principle that although you might not be able to fool all of the people all of the time, you can fool enough of them to scramble to victory.

Labour will put up your taxes by £2,000 a year, he said. Not once, but a dozen times. What’s more, the figure comes from ‘independent Treasury officials.’

Er, no, Prime Minister, it doesn’t. That’s a lie. Says who? Says the top civil servant at the Treasury, James Bowler. In a letter to the Labour party, he says in terms that the figure ‘should not be presented as having been produced by the civil service.’

Oh, and PS: ‘I have reminded ministers and advisers that this should be the case.’

It took Keir Starmer much too long last night to call it out, but it was, as he eventually remembered to say, ‘absolute garbage.’

Never mind, though. Damage done, mission accomplished. Just look at the headlines in this morning’s newspapers.

Daily Express: Kapow! Feisty Rishi floors Starmer over £2,000 tax rise.

Daily Mail: Fiery Rishi comes out swinging - claims Keir plotting £2,000 of tax rises for every family.

Daily Telegraph: Starmer on the ropes over tax.

The Times: Labour accused on tax as Sunak comes out fighting.

Remember the Brexit referendum battle bus? Leave the EU and give an extra £350m a week to the NHS? That was nonsense too, but it cut through. We remember it to this day. It did its job.

Will Sunak’s £2,000 tax rise lie cut through in the same way? Who knows? But if you thought he was a better man than his mop-haired predecessor, I’m afraid you need to think again.

In the real world, meanwhile, away from the studio lights (although not for long if he can help it), an election time bomb is ticking away, apparently unnoticed by either of the party leaders in Salford. The time bomb is called Nigel Farage and he threatens, not for the first time, to inflict unbearable agonies on the Conservative party.

This is the man, after all, whose relentlesss campaign against the UK’s membership of the European Union so spooked David Cameron that he took the country into a referendum from which neither we, nor his party, have yet recovered.

Now, he seems determined to hammer another nail into the Tory coffin by peeling away enough of their votes to hand a few more seats to Labour and hasten the Tories’ demise.

Farage has made no secret of his medium-term strategy.

1. Help Labour win an overwhelming majority on 4 July.

2. Stir up mayhem in what’s left of the Conservative party and encourage a sizeable number of MPs, councillors and others to defect to Reform UK.

3. Take as many leaves as he can out of the Trump playbook: play up nationalist fears; lie about crime rates, and immigration, and so-called ‘woke’ issues as a way of currying favour from voters who, with some justification, feel that they have been ignored, insulted and belittled by mainstream politicians.

It has happened in Italy, and France, and Argentina. There is no good reason why it cannot happen in the UK.

True, our grossly unfair first-past-the-post system of choosing our members of parliament makes it extremely difficult for new parties to break through. But the Brexit referendum broke the mould (as well as the Red Wall), so it is by no means impossible that by 2029, a new Reform+ party could start winning seats.

It’s still much too early for the Tory post-mortem to be held — after all, the party is not yet quite dead — but on 5 July, it will have to start making some tough choices.

After their crushing defeat at the hands of Tony Blair in 1997, the Tories went through William Hague, Iain Duncan-Smith and Michael Howard before finally alighting upon David Cameron, who actually knew how to appeal to enough voters to be able to form a government. (Admittedly, he had to cobble together a coalition with the Lib Dems, but it was still a lot better from the Tories’ point of view than five more years in opposition.)

This time round, however, defeat may well lead to a Tory split, just as Labour ructions over the EU in the early 1980s, after Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory, led to the breakaway SDP, which for a while looked as if it was about to become a major new voice on the British political scene.

It was not to be, but that’s a story for another time.

Say what you like about Election 2024, but you can’t say it doesn’t matter. So if you haven’t done already, I hope you’ll subscribe to my Substack feed to keep abreast of all the twists and turns.