In the first leadership debate last week, Rishi Sunak was keen to tell the nation that Labour would increase their tax bill by £2000 a year. He claimed that independent civil servants had analysed Labour’s policies and that only tax rises could pay for them. Again and again he came back to it. He was determined to shoehorn the main criticism he had of Labour into almost every answer, doing whatever he could to plant this seed of scepticism in the voters’ minds.

The problem with this claim is that it isn’t true. Conservative special advisers had looked at Labour’s policies so far and come up with a rough calculation on what they might cost. They then took advantage of being in office to ask Treasury civil servants to analyse their figures so as to pretend that the whole project was independent. This duplicity was acknowledged by James Bowler, the Treasury’s Permanent Secretary, in a letter to Labour’s shadow minister the day before the debate. In it, he wrote that ‘civil servants were not involved in the…calculation of the total figure used’, going on to say that costings like this ‘should not be presented as having been produced by the Civil Service’, and that he had ‘reminded Ministers and advisers that this should be the case.’

Even before Bowler’s involvement, Sunak will have been well aware of the fact that he was lying to the nation. He knew that the analysis had been undertaken by Conservative special advisers, and that any involvement from Treasury Officials was at the margins. But he and his advisers calculated that the claim was true – and scary – enough to justify the deception. Keir Starmer should have called Sunak’s bluff immediately, rebutting his claim that the figure was the result of independent Treasury analysis. The figures Sunak used had been published the day before, and Starmer should have known the lie was coming and should have been prepared for it.

But the bigger issue is that Starmer should not have had to dispute an outright lie in the first place. Politics has always been a game of shadows and distortions, but the introduction of blatant and constant dishonesty is relatively new. Sunak’s premiership was supposed to be a return to mature, responsible politics. After the deceptive, duplicitous government of Boris Johnson and the chaos and delusion of Liz Truss, competency was to become the government’s watchword. All the nation has got, however, is more of the same, just now delivered by a technocrat in a too-small suit.

The failure of Starmer to hold Sunak to account for his deceit is reflective of the broader state of British politics. On the day that Sunak called the snap general election, Paula Vennells, former CEO of the Post Office, was giving evidence to the Post Office Horizon Inquiry. She was unable to explain how she remained ignorant about the flaws in the Horizon system, left flailing before Jason Beer QC’s questioning and reduced to claiming she had been ‘too trusting’. Her face should have been splashed across the papers’ front pages the next day, forcing the public to reckon with how her negligence had ruined hundreds of lives, to say nothing of those it took. Rather than Vennells’ crocodile tears, photographs of Sunak announcing the election dripping wet in a rainstorm took her place.

Vennells and the other Post Office executives will have been delighted. No longer was public attention on their wrongful pursuit of the postmasters for fraud, and Vennells’ part in one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history. Keeping public scandals off the front pages until the public forgets about them is something that the modern British state excels at. Three weeks ago, the Infected Blood Inquiry, which investigated wrongdoing that led to the premature deaths of thousands and stigmatised thousands more with the taint of HIV, reported its findings. The conclusions were damning. Sir Brian Langstaff wrote that ‘the infections happened because those in authority – doctors, the blood services and successive governments – did not put patient safety first’. Longstaff directly criticised Sir Ken Clarke, then Margaret Thatcher’s health minister and now a Conservative peer, for misleading the nation. Rather than respond to the growing evidence that contaminated blood was infecting patients with HIV, Clarke offered ‘false assurances [and] lacked candour’ taking an ‘indefensible’ approach to the soon-to-be scandal.

But there will be no accountability for this. While there have been calls for Lord Clarke to be stripped of his knighthood and peerage, there will be no real investigation into his actions while in government, or into those of any other still-living members of Margaret Thatcher’s government. Much the same will come of the soon-to-be-published Grenfell Report. Originally scheduled for publication in late 2023, already six years after the fire, the Inquiry’s obligation to contact all those criticised in the report in advance has delayed its release by almost a year. Regardless of what the report concludes or who it blames, there will be little accountability. Those found to be responsible for the deaths of the people living in the North Kensington tower block will almost certainly be left burdened by guilt, but not by consequence.

In part, this is because the British state takes an age to move into action. Almost half the British population wasn’t born when Clarke and Thatcher were negligently handling infected blood. It is almost ancient history. Holding Clarke to account for something most people can’t remember doesn’t seem worth the candle. At least in the case of Sunak’s lies last night, Labour has already gone on the attack. One of the top ‘live’ stories on the BBC News website is, at the time of writing, on how Bowler’s letter ‘casts doubt’ on Sunak’s tax claim.

Inconsequential though it may be when set against crises like the infected blood scandal, Grenfell and Horizon, Sunak’s willingness to stand before the nation and lie is a vivid symptom of the disease wracking Britain’s body politic. It is symptomatic of a political class who think they can say what they want and do what they want . Politicians and senior public officials are able to lie when it comes to little things and when it comes to big things, knowing that any consequences that come will be too little and too late. They act with impunity because they know they can.