The Tory manifesto was launched on Sunday, with little fanfare and very little detail. At eight thousand words, forty-three pages shorter than Labour’s offering, the party not only expected much less scrutiny of its plans — their costings document was ten pages to Labour’s forty-four — but strategically planned to minimize media scrutiny, with a weekend launch that avoided coverage in the papers and Sunday political programs, and with reporters waiting hours for the downloadable link.

Despite being bereft of any new or interesting policies, simply stating the Conservatives would “get Brexit done” and inject a smidgen of public spending to ameliorate the billions they had slashed in a decade of austerity, the numbers and central messages quickly came unstuck. The National Health Service (NHS) has come ahead of Brexit in many polls of voters’ concerns, so the Tories promised “50,000 new nurses” in the NHS. After a minute or two of scrutiny, journalists discovered the figure included “retaining” 19,000 current nurses rather than creating 50,000 new jobs and training the nurses, prompting the party to continue to try to define the word “more” in a barely believable example of political spin.

That analysis and the Tory response was hardly surprising: the Conservatives and their campaign team have become arrogantly accustomed to the minimal scrutiny their policies and candidates receive in contrast to Labour, and when challenged, from the leader down to ordinary members, they simply lie.