Sunak showers voters with promises he'll never deliver

The launch of the Conservative Party manifesto yesterday - with the promise of tax cuts worth £17.2bn a year by the end of the next five-year parliament - represented Rishi Sunak's last throw of the dice.

- ANDREW GRICE

It was his final opportunity to turn around a campaign in which, despite having the advantage of knowing an election was coming when Labour didn’t, he has managed to go backwards.

The prime minister tried to transform the election into a battle over tax, offering another two percentage point cut in employees’ national insurance contributions (NICs) by 2027 and producing one “rabbit” not trailed in advance – the abolition of self-employed NICs within five years, to woo White Van Man.

Other goodies included cuts in stamp duty and a boost to the help-to-buy scheme aimed at the younger adults the Tories have so far neglected in this campaign. But the manifesto did not go as far as some had hoped, including the party’s restive rightwingers and even a few of Sunak’s cabinet ministers. Their lastminute pleas for more red meat went unheeded, and there was no explicit pledge to leave the European Convention on Human Rights.

This grumbling wasn’t really justified because Sunak showered voters with promises like confetti. The blueprint also included campaign pledges to protect pensioners and some child benefit recipients from tax rises; 8,000 new neighbourhood policies officers; and 100 new GP surgeries.