I have seen a premonition of the next general election campaign – and it was depressing

Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer have gone head to head in rival interviews, writes John Rentoul, so what can we take away from them?

The Labour leader fumbled the question about whether the Durham constabulary had been back in touch (Dave Nelson/PA)

You know an election is in the offing when Boris Johnson agrees to go on a mass audience TV show. The prime minister was on ITV’s Good Morning Britain this morning, while Keir Starmer was on BBC’s Breakfast and Radio 4. The local elections are on Thursday, and today felt like a preview of the next general election campaign. If that is what the future holds, it was depressing.

Far from a sense of the excitement of the hustings and the thrill of democracy, we had two politicians on the defensive, looking forward to the (interim) verdict of the people with dread rather than with eager optimism. Neither dealt well with tough questions. The prime minister said more than once that the government was doing “all we can” to help people with the cost of living, which is transparently not the case.

He shifted his argument later on in the interview to saying that it wouldn’t be right in the long run to do much more, although he did say that “there is more that we can do”, which suggests another aid package will be on its way from HM Treasury. However, it will be delayed for as long as possible – that is, the chancellor doesn’t want to be forced into another mini-Budget this summer, but would rather deal with it in the actual Budget in the autumn, not least because that would be closer to the general election.