Punchy Keir Starmer is borrowing from the Tories’ box of dirty tricks

The Labour leader has accused Rishi Sunak of ‘crashing the economy’, writes John Rentoul

Keir Starmer believes the party has failed to fight back hard enough against the Tory slander (Getty)

Labour folk are still indignant about the way that David Cameron and George Osborne blamed Gordon Brown’s government for the financial crisis of 2008. It was a problem caused by the US housing market, but the Conservatives cynically used it to attack Labour.

That grudge is still raw, and Greg Hands, the Tory party chair, keeps it so by tweeting and retweeting the “I’m afraid there is no money” letter that Liam Byrne wrote to his successor as chief secretary to the Treasury in 2010.

Rishi Sunak stoked the outrage at Prime Minister’s Questions today by quoting it too: “We all remember the last time they were in power: there was no money left for the country.”