Why the £2,000 tax claim aimed at ensnaring Labour proves costlier for the Tories

Good morning. Some thoughts on the row over the parties’ tax plans and who, if anyone, benefits from it.

Calculating figures

Who won Tuesday’s debate? When I wrote yesterday’s newsletter, we had one poll suggesting that Rishi Sunak had won it, albeit by the narrowest of margins. Since then we have had two more, one from Savanta and one from JL Partners, both suggesting that he lost by clear margins.

Looking at them all in detail, these polls actually tell us the same thing. Ask people who watched the debate to score it on ‘performance’ and they give it to Sunak; ask them to score it on what actually decides people’s votes and they give it to Starmer.

Another new bit of information we have is just how many, or rather how few, people watched the debate. It was watched by 4.8mn people overnight in various formats (we struggled through ITVX in our flat).

That’s on par with what we’d expect given the general decline in linear, over-the-air TV viewing. A good way to gauge the trend is this: these debates have tended to perform about as well as the BBC’s and ITV’s big fictional juggernauts, Doctor Who and Coronation Street, and this kept to that pattern.

I wrote two weeks ago that I thought this election was best understood as the UK’s first post-TV election, one in which the places that matter will be social media, news websites and the news breaks on commercial radio.

It’s on these places that the spat about the Conservatives’ £2,000 tax rise claim are playing out particularly badly. Yes, it is bad enough that in “the bubble” the working is being pulled apart. But it is worse that on BBC Radio, the phrase I heard repeatedly to describe Sunak’s line was “misleading claims”, or that on Classic FM — listened to by far more swing voters than will have actually watched the debate — they were leading with Henry Zeffman’s story that James Bowler, the Treasury permanent secretary, had cast doubt on the figures.

Now, some people will say, any row is a good row as long as people are talking about it. That’s the lesson that a lot of people in Westminster have taken from the Vote Leave campaign and its claim that the UK paid the European Union “£350mn a week” that could instead have been spent on the NHS.

Seen that way, it doesn’t matter that most people who hear about this argument first hear it as a story of Conservatives cooking up the figures — as long as they also hear the words “Labour” and “tax”.

I think this is a misread of what worked about the “£350mn a week” claim for two reasons. The first is that rebutting the £350mn involved saying that, while much of that cash was given back to the UK, not all of it was. As political messages go, ‘it’s actually £250mn a week’ was not a good one. Labour’s rebuttal to the £2,000 figure is ‘it’s actually zero’, which is a rather different message.

The second is that, broadly speaking, people accepted the Vote Leave theory, which was that if we left the EU we would not be paying membership fees. People do not accept the argument, from either party, that their promises on tax are going to be kept. Just one in four people believe that Labour will keep their pledges on tax, while a mere one in six think the Conservatives will.

There are good reasons for that in my view. The Labour party has never been fond of cutting taxes, or even leaving them flat, while in office. And Rishi Sunak has already raised taxes numerous times, with his policy programme in this election including a slew of new spending commitments from increased defence spending to a new set of tougher jail sentences.

People aren’t stupid, and wherever I go in the country, people understand that these promises on spending cannot be kept alongside promises on tax. They also remember the last five years. One reason why, right at the start of Sunak’s premiership, I wrote that he needed to fight the next election not on a ‘Conservative tax cuts versus Labour tax rises’ platform, but a ‘Conservative tax rises versus Labour tax rises’ one is that it was obvious then that the alternative was not going to be believed. So it has proved, even after £20bn of tax cuts.

Now try this

One of my oldest friends is the chef at the London Shell Co’s branch by Hampstead Heath, so obviously I think that it is one of the best restaurants in the world. I’m always pleased to see that backed up by outsiders, and it had a very good review in the Times yesterday, in addition to its four-star review in the Telegraph last year. I’m off to sniff the air in some marginal constituencies, so do let me know where I should be eating. (Scarborough and Whitby, home to the marvellous Lanterna in Scarborough and the Magpie Café in Whitby are already on my list.)

Top stories today

• What is GB Energy, anyway? | The state-owned energy company hopes to restore Britain’s “energy superpower” status, but Labour has been noticeably light on detail. The FT sheds light on the policy occupying a central role in the Labour manifesto.

• Knighthoods in shining armour | Rishi Sunak puts JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon and Google chair Eric Schmidt forward for honours, as criticisms about his US ties mount.

• Vote red, get green | Former Just Stop Oil backer Dale Vince urges climate-conscious voters to back Labour in the July 4 election, arguing that “it would be a mistake to vote Green”.

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