Bleary-eyed, confused and with a bad taste in their mouth, viewers of Tuesday night’s ITV debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer no doubt woke on Wednesday morning with the political equivalent of a hangover.

Which version of last night’s events should voters believe? The one where the Prime Minister claimed over a dozen times that if Starmer takes office, he would raise taxes by £2,000 per family? Or the accusation made in the cold light of morning that Sunak had, quite simply, lied?

Arguably, Labour has been less vocal than it needed to be in debunking the Tory claims, circulating for about three weeks. And – so the argument goes – Starmer was slow to shut down Sunak’s claims during the debate, only belatedly dismissing them as “garbage” and “nonsense”.

But the more serious point is whether the Tories should have cooked up the misleading figure in the first place and whether, in the absence of fully costed published manifestos, unconvinced voters will add the prospect of tax rises to any remaining nagging doubts about what Labour would do in office.

The risk is that the £2,000 figure becomes this campaign’s equivalent of Vote Leave’s claim on the side of the Brexit battle-bus that £350m could go to the NHS instead of the EU. When the shouting stopped it became clear that it hadn’t mattered if it was true or not; the claim became emblematic in and of itself.

After the ITV debate, viewers could have switched over to the BBC News, only to find themselves wearily sitting through the now-mandatory fact-checking segment.

Elections can sometimes feel like American record producer Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, a mishmash of instruments designed to bamboozle the listener. In the cacophony, will anyone notice individual claims and counter-claims, which require sustained effort to unpick?

And so we found ourselves on Wednesday morning........

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