May Wobbles

...and how it was covered.

What happened

Just four days after the Tories launched their election manifesto last week, Theresa May executed a spectacular U-turn and ditched a key commitment on the funding of social care. Reacting to polls which suggested mounting disquiet over what Labour dubbed a “dementia tax”, the Prime Minister watered down the manifesto’s insistence that pensioners would have to meet their entire care costs until left with £100,000 in assets. This week, she promised to set a cap on the amount the elderly might be forced to pay towards their care bills (see page 6). Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn mocked her government for being “mired in chaos”, but May insisted that “nothing had changed” in principle.

Other commitments reverse former Tory policies: the manifesto promises to means-test the winter fuel allowance and to replace the “triple lock”, which protects the value of state pensions, with a “double lock”. The 88-page document also states that the Tories would replace free school lunches with free breakfasts, cut net immigration to below 100,000 a year, and give their MPs a free vote on hunting. But its most remarkable feature is its rhetorical tilt to the left. Its foreword openly declares opposition to “untrammelled free markets” and “the cult of selfish individualism”; it deplores “social division” and “inequality”, and rejects “dogma and ideology”.

What the editorials said