Starmer Will Happily Take This Near-Draw As A Victory

Keir Starmer knew that all he had to do was to get through the debate without making a horrible mistake. No wonder he was nervous, unsure whether to address the audience, his opponent, or presenter Julie Etchingham.

- JOHN RENTOUL

He had a good start, sounding more sympathetic to Paula from Huddersfield, who has to cook in batches to save electricity – although it took him some time to get round to “my dad was a toolmaker; my mother was a nurse; our phone was cut off”.

Sunak knew that he had to disrupt his opponent and unsettle people about the prospect of a Labour government. He seemed relaxed but combative, interrupting Starmer repeatedly and demanding to know why he wanted to make life more difficult for people by putting up their taxes.

The Labour leader was slow, again, to respond, eventually calling the figure of £2,000 in extra taxes that the prime minister used “garbage”. It was, he pointed out, arrived at by feeding assumptions into the Treasury – assumptions that included Tory policies by mistake.

Sunak scored the first win of the debate on the unexpected subject of NHS strikes, drawing applause from the studio audience, saying the junior doctors want “a 35 per cent pay rise and I don’t want to raise your taxes to pay for that”.