As I said earlier, Dave, I strongly suspect that receiving gifts is common practice amongst politicians of every stamp. And trying to make an issue of Starmer and others accepting gifts leading up to the GE is an indication of how little the Tories actually have to offer.

It’s reminiscent of the way they tried to make capital out of Liam Byrne’s note that ‘there’s no money left’ in 2010 - it was a long-running joke left by Chancellors ever since Reginald Maudling, a Tory, began the joke by leaving a similar kind of note for Jim Callaghan in 1964.

It’s a sad commentary on our politics nowadays that more energy seems to be put into this kind of nonsense than into the real problems we are facing.