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Rishi Sunak has issued a humiliating apology after he was accused of a “dereliction of duty” for returning early from D-Day commemorations in France to record an interview attacking Labour’s alleged tax plans.
The episode is highly damaging for the Conservative prime minister, who missed a memorial event on Omaha Beach to return to the UK to repeat his controversial claim that Labour would raise taxes by £2,000 a household.
Sunak apologised for not staying in France for longer, but Labour accused Sunak of a “dereliction of duty”, while Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said he had “brought shame” on the office of prime minister.
Johnny Mercer, Sunak’s own veterans minister, called it a “significant mistake”, while Nigel Farage, Reform UK leader, said of Sunak: “He doesn’t care about this country or its history.”
Speaking on a visit to Wiltshire, Sunak pleaded with his opponents not to “politicise this”, but the appeal is likely to fall on deaf ears, with Tory candidates in despair over the prime minister’s error.
Sunak said he had attended a number of D-Day events in Portsmouth and Normandy and that “the itinerary for these events was set weeks ago, before the start of the general election campaign”.
But he added: “I returned home before the international leaders event later in the day. On reflection, that was a mistake and I apologise.”
Sir Keir Starmer, Labour leader, said: “Rishi Sunak will have to answer for his choice. For me, there was only one choice, which was to be there, to pay my respects, to say thank you and to have to speak to those veterans.”
One Conservative candidate in a “red wall” seat said: “This is an absolute gift to Nigel Farage. I can’t tell you how bad morale is today. This is an absolute catastrophe.”
Sunak doubled down on Thursday evening on his claims about Labour’s tax plans in the television interview with ITV, recorded after he left France.
Asked whether he was willing to lie in order to stay in power, Sunak said: “No.” The prime minister characterised Starmer’s claim that he had lied over the £2,000 tax allegation as “pretty desperate stuff”.
The prime minister attended an event at Ver-sur-Mer in Normandy on Thursday but did not attend the later ceremony at Omaha Beach.
Lord David Cameron, UK foreign secretary, stood in for Sunak at the ceremony, appearing alongside world leaders including US President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron.
Davey said: “One of the greatest privileges of the office of prime minister is to be there to honour those who served, yet Rishi Sunak abandoned them on the beaches of Normandy.”
The Office for Statistics Regulation criticised Sunak on Thursday for claiming that Labour would put up taxes by £2,000 per household without explaining that this was supposedly a cumulative figure spread across four years.
“Without reading the full Conservative party costing document, someone hearing the claim would have no way of knowing that this is an estimate summed together over four years,” the watchdog said.
“We warned against this practice a few days ago, following its use in presenting prospective future increases in defence spending.”
Treasury permanent secretary James Bowler also poured cold water this week on Sunak’s assertion — made in a fiery television debate with the Labour leader on Tuesday evening — that the number was based on independent analysis of the main opposition party’s plans by civil servants.
Bowler wrote to Darren Jones, Labour’s shadow Treasury chief secretary, to say the figures Sunak used “include costs beyond those provided by the civil service and published online by HM Treasury”.
Sunak’s decision to keep repeating the highly contested claim that Labour would increase taxes by £2,000 is reminiscent of tactics used by the Leave campaign in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
In that campaign, led by Dominic Cummings, Leave repeatedly claimed that exiting the EU would release £350mn a week for the NHS, even though the number was widely criticised by economists as untrue.
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