Work and pensions secretary Mel Stride was left squirming after being told the Tories had put up taxes by £13,000 per household since the last election.
The cabinet minister was confronted with the figure by Kay Burley on Sky News this morning.
She told him the total had been calculated by the channel’s economics editor, Ed Conway, using the same method the Conservatives used to accuse Labour of planning to hike taxes by £2,000 per family.
The claim was repeatedly made by Rishi Sunak during Tuesday night’s TV debate with Keir Starmer, sparking a furious row.
Burley told Stride: ”[Ed Conway] found that since 2019, we’ve all experienced £13,000 of extras in taxes if we were to add things up the same way you’ve added things up for Labour.
“So in other words, the Tories have cost us an extra £13,000 extra in taxes since the last election. It’s a lot more than £2,000, isn’t it?”
Stride dismissed the figure as “another number out of context that I haven’t had a chance to properly look at”.
He went on: “This country has been through two once-in-a-generation, once-in-a-century, external events - one was the Covid crisis that shrank the economy by 10% overnight, the other was a war in Ukraine that spikes inflation up to over 11%.
“We supported the economy through furlough, millions of jobs, all that unemployment that never happened because Rishi Sunak did the right thing. And we also supported people through those cost of living pressures with inflation. That totalled £400 billion-worth of support.
’Now I think most of your viewers would think it wasn’t unreasonable for us to have to pay that down, so we have seen some tax increases.”
Burley hit back: “Some tax increases? £13,000 extra.”
The minister insisted the Tories would bring taxes down if they win the election, but Burley told him: ”£13,000 extra in taxes - that is an actual fact.”