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Rishi Sunak defended his faltering election campaign by comparing it to his failed Tory leadership contest against Liz Truss, saying he was “proved right then” and warning Sir Keir Starmer was promising the “same fantasy”.
“I kept going. I kept saying what I thought was right for this country. I kept going to the end,” he told an audience during a special election edition of Question Time for the BBC in York on Thursday evening.
“You can trust me now when I say that what Keir Starmer is promising you is the same fantasy that Liz Truss did — and it’s just going to mean your taxes are going to go up.”
Sunak stood against Truss to become party head and prime minister in September 2022 after the resignation of Boris Johnson. Truss herself resigned the following month in the aftermath of her “mini” Budget and its effect on the UK economy.
The prime minister is reeling after it emerged that three party officials — including two Tory candidates — are under investigation for using insider information to place bets on the date of the election campaign in a scandal that has been pounced on by the Labour party as an example of dishonesty and corruption at the heart of government.
“I was incredibly angry to learn of these allegations,” he said, adding that he would “boot” anyone out of the Tory party if they were found to have broken rules.
The furore erupted a day after three polls indicated that the Tories are headed for a crushing defeat at the general election, with the least-favourable suggesting the party might be left with just 53 MPs and Sunak could lose his own seat.
Then Chris Skidmore, a former Tory energy minister, on Thursday endorsed Labour in an opinion piece for the Guardiancriticising Sunak for siding with climate deniers on net zero.
These latest developments intensified recriminations within the party after what has already been a gaffe-strewn election campaign.
Sunak faced a series of withering questions from audience members in the BBC studio on topics ranging from the state of the health service, why the Tory party is conspicuously silent on any positive effects of Brexit and whether he would admit even a “small amount of embarrassment” about the leadership of the country over the past 14 years.
Meanwhile, Sir Keir Starmer in the same programme defended his decision to U-turn on a number of policies, including scrapping tuition fees and nationalising British energy, saying they were “political decisions”.
“I’m a commonsense politician. I work through the issues, and to me, it did not make sense to nationalise energy and not get the bills down,” he said. “They are political choices. I’m telling you what they are before the election so people can then make their mind up.”
Starmer also sought to present himself as the unity candidate that would seek to repair damaging divisions across the country on issues such as trans rights.
“I want to take the opportunity to bring the country together, because what’s happened in politics, in my view, in the last 10, 15 years or so, is that it has all become more divided and toxic,” he said. “We’re a good country, a reasonable, tolerant country.”
Starmer was unable to answer clearly a question about how he would use the law to block landlords from using bidding wars to push up rent on properties, saying only that it needed to stop.
Speaking after the show, shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said a change in the law would in essence block landlords from charging above the advertised price for a property.
Starmer also said during the show that he believed Jeremy Corbyn would have made a better prime minister than Boris Johnson.
Sir Ed Davey took a new tack during the show, referring on several occasions to the Liberal Democrats’ time in coalition with the Conservatives between 2010 and 2015, a period he has been reticent about.
He took two questions about how the public can trust his party after it pledged to abolish tuition fees and then worked with the Conservative government to triple tariffs.
“I’m not proud of some of the votes we made,” he said, but he argued that “people forget what we stopped as well”, including preventing the Tories from cutting welfare by £12bn.
Davey refused to be drawn on whether he would consider going into any coalition government again.
