A few months ago I visited a school in my constituency and took part in a question-and-answer session with young pupils. One girl raised her hand and asked me: “Why is everything in the shops so expensive?”

In just eight words she had encapsulated the mood of the country. She had cut through to the core question that people had on their minds when they went to the polls on 4 July last year. If the question wasn’t “why is everything so expensive?”, it was “why are our pay packets not going as far as they used to?”.

The Covid pandemic and war in Ukraine might have pushed up prices, but it was the pure negligence of the Conservatives that squeezed the country’s household finances. They played fast and loose with spending, frittering hard-earned taxpayer money on political gimmicks such as their failed Rwanda scheme. Their carelessness came at a cost, most acutely felt by the lowest paid in the country. It was a dereliction of duty that resulted in their legacy being summed up in one statistic: that people were worse off by the end of the government than they were at the........

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