Johnson wants to have his cake and eat it over public spending – what happened to having no magic money tree?

Inside Westminster: The prime minister wants to splash the cash on the NHS and the police but then admonish Labour for spending more

Both sides are already shaking the tree so hard that its roots are quaking

What a difference two years makes. At the 2017 general election, Theresa May memorably told a nurse struggling to cope after years without a pay rise: “There’s isn’t a magic money tree we can shake that suddenly provides for everything that people want.”

In this election, both the Conservatives and Labour are already shaking the tree so hard that its roots are quaking. The Tories used to bore us into submission by talking about their “long-term economic plan” to reduce the deficit. Today they have a long-term spending plan, and the parties act as if the deficit has been magically waved away. (It’s still there: the gap between government revenue and spending was £41.5bn in the financial year that ended in March.)

The Tories used to warn that Labour’s proposed spending spree would take Britain back to the bad old days of the 1970s, when it was the sick man of Europe until Margaret Thatcher cured it. Today the Conservatives join Labour in proposing a level of public spending not seen since that decade. In this election, the Tories have committed to a fiscal rule on day-to-day spending similar to the 2017 Labour one they attacked as profligate. Improving public services and a higher national living wage are seen by Team Boris as a critical part of its pitch to traditional Labour voters in the north and midlands: Brexit is not enough.