Keir Starmer has hit out at the “ridiculous, chaotic circus” of the Conservative leadership contest, as he pitched Labour in contrast as the party of sound money.
The Labour leader, who is pushing for a general election, said the Tory party was failing Britain with its contest while the country was struggling to cope with the financial situation.
Starmer told BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show that people were “fed up to the back teeth” with the leadership turmoil.
“My focus is on the millions of people who are struggling to pay their bills, have now got additional anxieties about their mortgage. I know what it feels like not to be able to pay your bills, that happened to me and my family when I was growing up,” he said.
Labour has soared to a record 30 point-plus lead in the opinion polls since Liz Truss’s disastrous and short-lived premiership. The polls show the party ahead on all metrics against the Tory leadership frontrunners, Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson. However, it is uncertain whether either would fare better against Starmer.
Sunak, the favourite to win the Tory leadership contest and a former chancellor, has made fixing the economy a key part of his pitch, but Starmer said an incoming government was going to have to “pick up a real mess of our economy of the Tories’ making”.
The Labour leader would not elaborate on his party’s financial policies but said an incoming Labour government would face “tough choices” that meant it could not do some of the things it wanted to do as quickly as it would have liked.
Asked what that would involve, Starmer said: “I’m not going to write our manifesto on this programme.”
The shadow communities secretary, Lisa Nandy, told Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday show that even considering bringing Johnson back as prime minister was a sign of “absolute utter desperation” in the Conservative party.
Nandy said: “I wouldn’t trust Boris Johnson to run a bath, let alone run the country. He degraded and debased our politics. He lost all of that goodwill from the country and from his own colleagues in a very short space of time.
“It’s extraordinary watching Tory MPs who put in letter of no confidence in him just a few weeks ago saying he wasn’t fit to hold the highest office now talking openly about trying to bring him back. It is a sign of absolute utter desperation in the Tory party.”
Starmer also told the Sunday Times Labour was the party of “sound money” while the Conservative chaos was spooking the markets.
The remarks came as reports suggested the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, could target high earners in his medium-term fiscal plan in an effort to address an estimated £40bn gap in public finances. Hunt is said to be looking at raising as much as £20bn through changes in taxation, possibly including tightening the capital gains regime.
He may also reintroduce green levies on energy bills, according to the Sunday Telegraph, while savings could be found through scrapping the plan to raise defence spending to 3% of gross domestic product.
