Labour is paying the price for Starmer’s failure to refute the £2,000 tax claim

The Tories have had their first good 24 hours of the election campaign. The £2,000 tax claim made by Rishi Sunak (which we crunch here) is dominating the chatter following last night’s TV debate, and the amount of energy Labour frontbenchers are putting into refuting it shows they feel Keir Starmer failed to squash it in the debate itself.

When Andrew Mitchell, the Deputy Foreign Secretary, was interviewed about the figure by Andrew Neil on Times Radio just now, he suggested that the calculation was probably an ‘understatement’. Significantly, though, he refused to repeat the claim made by Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho this morning that the figure came from ‘independent civil servants’.

‘No,’ he said, firmly, when Neil asked him directly to say the same thing. He then explained that civil servants had produced the figure at the request of ministers – in the same way that Labour would do when in government – but that there were other ‘independent’ inputs into it too.

He also conceded – eventually – that this £2,000 figure is not for one year but over the five years of the next parliament. That is still a lot of money for some people, but it feels like rather less of a bombshell, particularly given over that period more households will be subject to fiscal drag which the Tories have already said they will not act to prevent. 

The basic reason Mitchell refused to make the claim about civil servants is that Labour has now – very belatedly – produced the letter from Treasury permanent secretary James Bowler to shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones in which he says that ministers should not be claiming that these costings had been ‘produced by the civil service’. 

But there is another reason: now that the figure is out there, the Tories don’t feel they need to talk too much about who produced it. It has its own legs. Like the £350 million on the Brexit bus, it will benefit from the fury of those who don’t agree with it as much as it does from its initial insertion into the debate by Sunak. And the main thing that gave it legs was Starmer’s failure to knock it down while live on ITV: his party already had the letter from the Treasury, and to produce it at the first moment Sunak mentioned £2,000 of tax rises would have made it considerably less powerful. The Labour leader spent a lot of last night’s debate looking rather unsure of himself, but this was his biggest mistake.