‘It’s not a game for us’: aboard the Labour battle bus

The party’s deputy leader, putting tax furore behind her, is taking her fighting spirit on a 5,000-mile campaign tour, armed with a fridge and a Liz Truss-lookalike lettuce

Labour’s campaign bus is rolling on through the outskirts of Manchester, and Angela Rayner is pointing at me with mock outrage. “Tom! What have you done to my lettuce?” I’m not owning up and insist I never even touched it. “Well, someone has done something,” she says suspiciously.

The vegetable has been decorated to make it resemble the one that infamously triumphed in the Daily Star’s competition to see whether it could outlast Liz Truss as prime minister. Labour’s deputy leader decrees it needs “surgery” and a small operation is performed to replace a missing googly eye. Then the lettuce is put back in a fridge that itself has become an unlikely star of this election.