Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride insisted on Thursday that Sir Keir Starmer was wrong to accuse the PM of lying over a tax dispute that is rocking the campaign for next month’s election.
"He's completely misplaced, and he shouldn't be doing it at all, frankly,” Mr Stride told Times Radio, insisting that Rishi Sunak’s claim that Labour would raise taxes on UK households by more than £2,000 was “robust”.
It came as Chancellor Jeremy Hunt called on Sir Keir to match a new Tory election pledge not to increase capital gains tax, stamp duty or the number of council tax bands.
The Labour leader on Wednesday branded Mr Sunak a liar and claimed he had broken the ministerial code, arguing that his actions had given an “insight into his character”. The PM has yet to respond as he attends events in England and France to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day.
But Mr Stride said of the Tory campaign figures: “They're very, very realistic. I think those numbers are very cautious in that document. The vast majority of them have been analysed by the Treasury.”
The £2,000 claim was levelled by the Prime Minister during Tuesday’s first televised campaign debate with the Labour leader, who did not push back until late in the debate, before an orchestrated barrage of attacks on Mr Sunak’s honesty by the opposition party the next day.
Labour’s attacks were turbo-charged by the publication of a letter from the Treasury’s top mandarin, James Bowler, who stressed that he had told ministers not to suggest that civil servants produced the Tory figures. Independent fact-checkers also rubbished Mr Sunak’s analysis.
But Mr Stride said that Treasury analysis of opposition spending commitments was “nothing new”, insisting that then Labour chancellor Alastair Darling had instructed his officials to do “exactly the same thing” in 2010.
He added: "What Labour now need to do is to stop saying all these ridiculous things about the prime minister and his motivations and so on, and start actually answering questions about whether those numbers are correct or not."
Shadow defence secretary John Healey was adamant that the numbers were indeed incorrect.
“It is indeed a sad place when we will not be raising taxes on working people and we've got a prime minister, the deeper into the election he gets, the more desperate he gets,” he said.
“And he has indeed lied to British people before over Partygate,” Mr Healey added, after Mr Sunak was fined by police for attending a lockdown-busting birthday gathering for Boris Johnson in Number 10.
“He's lying to them again on waiting lists, NHS waiting lists. They've gone up, not down since he promised to bring them down. On small boats, the numbers are at record levels this year. They haven't gone down. And on taxes, the Tories have set the highest rate of tax and burden of tax for 70 years.”
