Isabel Hardman

It’s a measure of how weird the past few years in British politics have been that Keir Starmer’s claim that his Labour predecessor would have made a better prime minister than Boris Johnson has received so much coverage. Starmer made the comment during last night’s Question Time programme. It was a line that got blurted out under some pressure and it was a mistake.  The public evidently did not think Corbyn would have made a better prime minister than Johnson Starmer has initially said he had never really believed that Labour was going to win in 2019, but that he campaigned for the party. This would have held, had he not said during the campaign five years ago that Corbyn would make a ‘great’ prime minister. How do you walk back from that?

Tonight's election Question Time programme was probably the best of the campaign in that it gave space for proper discussion while making all the leaders uncomfortable. None of the four men questioned over the two hour programme – Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Ed Davey and John Swinney – did badly: in fact, given what a mess his wider campaign is in, Sunak acquitted himself pretty well. There were some good revelatory comments, both in terms of the arguments used and the reactions of the audience. But there wasn't one defining moment that will sum up the election once we know the results.  All faced questions about whether the public could trust politicians and specifically why voters should trust their particular parties.

There is, to put it mildly, a lack of candour in this election campaign when it comes to tax rises and spending cuts. The Conservatives are trying to force Labour into a game of Whac-a-mole over which taxes it would put up and which rises the party is happy to rule out. Whoever is in power will have to find the money from somewhere, whether that’s through hiking tax or slashing spending. Neither party is being very open about that, though. Perhaps the power is draining away so rapidly from the Tories that their own assertions about spending aren’t getting the scrutiny they deserve Perhaps the power is draining away so rapidly from the Tories that their own assertions about spending aren’t getting the scrutiny they deserve.

Tonight Keir Starmer took another look at Labour’s poll lead, threw caution to the wind, and revealed his radical plans for the government he hopes to lead in a few weeks time. Only kidding. The Labour leader’s interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson didn’t reveal anything we didn’t know and Starmer won’t be obliging with any more details between now and 5 July. But Robinson did try to give voters as much of an impression as possible of how Starmer as prime minister might behave. He pressed him repeatedly on how he was going to fund the plans in the Labour manifesto: would there be spending cuts or could Starmer guarantee there would be no cuts to the courts, prisons, council budgets and so on.

Keir Starmer has deliberately pursued a strategy of revealing as little as possible, boasting today that his manifesto didn’t contain any surprises. In between his verbal tic about his father being a toolmaker, Starmer has been least at ease in the TV debates, and it was in the first of these that he said more than he probably intended to. Asked by ITV’s Julie Etchingham whether he had any advice for ‘Gareth on his way to Berlin [for the Euros]’ about leadership, Starmer replied: ‘You need a strategy for winning. So it depends on your opponent and what the issue is.’ It isn’t telling us what it is going to do in detail because that would scare the horses The Labour leader is of course right. You need to win first.

Rishi Sunak’s manifesto launch was necessarily defensive: the Prime Minister is trying to stem the losses in this election campaign rather than present an exciting vision of a new Britain. It was striking how much Sunak talked about Labour in his speech at Silverstone. Almost every Tory policy he referred to was immediately contrasted with what Labour would or wouldn’t do. His best line was that ‘if you don’t know what Labour will do, don’t vote for them. If you’re concerned about what Starmer isn’t telling you, don’t vote for them’.

Rishi Sunak has started to move on from his D-Day blunder. He probably won’t recover from the electoral damage he caused himself, but he is now able to talk about other things. The question is what is it that he can talk about that will actually get the voters listening? This evening he gave an interview to the BBC’s Nick Robinson where – after making his apology for the way he ‘bunked off’, as Robinson put it – he had to answer questions on why people should believe the promises the Conservatives are making on tax, immigration, the NHS, and so on, when none of the things they’d promised so far had come to fruition.  Sunak did have to concede that in all those areas, things weren’t where he wanted them to be.

How is it possible that a seven-way debate between the main parties in this election was more civilised than the two-way stand-off between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak earlier this week? Tonight's BBC debate was bizarrely better viewing. Sure, the party representatives interrupted one another, attacked each other, and flung about fake figures. But it was easier to follow. Mordaunt did not defend or praise Rishi Sunak It was also fascinating to see who attacked who. Penny Mordaunt largely pretended Nigel Farage didn't exist, but interrupted Angela Rayner frequently.

Is Alex Salmond feasting on the misery of an SNP that, having hit its high watermark, is now having to work hard to hold onto its Westminster seats? Not at all, according to the Alba leader, who told Andrew Neil on Times Radio today that he was in fact trying to help the cause of his former party by going after pro-independence voters who would otherwise have stayed at home. In so doing, of course, he was not-so-subtly suggesting that the SNP aren’t giving voters a reason to turn out at all.  There’s 20 per cent of people who are either going to stay at home or going to vote for a unionist party.