Hundreds of miles away in North Yorkshire, Rishi Sunak, who had cancelled a press event on Saturday amid the fallout from his D-day blunder, spent a quiet day in his constituency, nursing his wounds.
“We need to win everywhere. We lost very badly in 2019, so our strategy has always been that we’ve got to win everywhere. I“There are plenty of voters who didn’t vote for us before in places like this, you might call the blue wall … who will be prepared to look again at a changed Labour party and say, ‘That better aligns with what I care about.’
“But plenty times in history we’ve had pretty awful Conservative governments and yet Labour hasn’t got it over the line. It’s not automatic that people get to the position that I think they’re coming to now, of wanting to put their belief in Labour.”Starmer agreed the manifesto would just be the baseline of what a Labour government would hope to achieve. In 1997, Tony Blair promised to cut NHS waiting lists by 100,000 but ended up eradicating them. “Absolutely. Exactly that.
“What we don’t want is something that’s still being talked about in five or 10 years. I want to make sure that on day one, we can start on the most pressing problem, which is the staff problem.” “Businesses are feeling the effect of that. Our education research is feeling the effects of that. Increasingly, in light of what’s happened in Ukraine, it’s clear we need a better set of defence and security arrangements with Europe.”