Rishi Sunak has been accused of telling “a desperate lie” after he claimed Labour will put up taxes by £2,000 if the party wins the election.
Jon Ashworth, Labour’s shadow paymaster general, said the prime minister had shown himself to be “no better” than Boris Johnson.
A furious row has erupted in the wake of last night’s first head-to-head debate of the election campaign between the prime minister and Keir Starmer.
Sunak repeatedly claimed that “independent Treasury civil servants” had come up with calculations showing Labour will put taxes up by £2,000 per household.
However, the assumptions behind those figures were made by Tory ministers and politically-appointed special advisers.
On Sky News this morning, Ashworth said: “Last night exposed how desperate Rishi Sunak has become because he lied about Labour’s tax plans.
“What he said is categorically untrue. Labour will not put up income tax, will not put up National Insurance, will not put up VAT, and I think what we saw last night with Rishi Sunak was how desperate he becomes.
“What desperate people do is they lie. It’s what Boris Johnson did over parties in Downing Street when we were in lockdown, and Rishi Sunak last night proved himself to be no better and no different with these lies.”
Cabinet minister Claire Coutinho was also roasted by Victoria Derbyshire last night after she repeated Sunak’s tax claims on Newsnight.
She said: “This is a figure which has come up by Treasury officials, so those are independent, impartial civil servants and what they’ve done is very simple.
“They’ve added up the costs of the policies that the Labour Party have said that they want to put in place in the next parliament, and the figure that that comes out with is an extra £2,000 worth of taxes for working families.”
But Derbyshire told her: “I’m going to pull you up on that - they’re not independent, they’re not impartial.
“The assumptions on which the calculations are based have been made by Tory special advisers. They’re political appointees and that is misleading to voters and therefore very disrespectful.”
During last night’s debate, Starmer dismissed the Tory claims as “absolute garbage”.