In the first televised general election debate, Rishi Sunak claimed more than ten times that a future Labour government would cost households £2,000 more in tax. It took some time for Keir Starmer to rebut the attack, allowing the idea to fester for almost an hour among 5 million prime time television viewers.
Senior Conservative politicians repeated the claim and said these figures were generated independently by the civil service. But Treasury officials wrote in a letter to Labour that the figures had not been calculated independently, and that it had warned the government about making this misleading claim.
Three days after the debate, the claim had unravelled further. The UK’s statistics watchdog warned the Conservatives that they had not made it clear the £2,000 claim related to a four-year period. But Sunak defended the claim and pushed back against Starmer’s accusations that he had deliberately lied.
