There it was. Not a slip of the tongue, not a mis-speak. A wilful, deliberate statement. And I never thought I’d hear it in a debate between two men at the very apex of public life. It was like a blow, only the man on the receiving end didn’t seem to feel it. Sir Keir Starmer called Rishi Sunak a liar.
First he responded to the PM’s allegations about Labour’s tax plans by saying “that’s a lie”. That’s when I thought to myself that no other leader of a political party in this country would ever have said that, and certainly not without it causing national outrage: front page stuff. And then he said it again, during the PM’s closing statement: “Lies, liar”, he said.
