Sunak took the fight to Starmer in the last debate, but can’t progress with a party smothered by sleaze

Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak during the BBC election TV debate at Nottingham Trent University, 26 June 2024. Photograph: BBC/Getty Images

Freedom, as the song has it, is “just another word for nothing left to lose”. So, with most voters having long since made up their minds (and millions of postal ballots already cast), was last night’s bravura debate performance a belated glimpse of the sort of prime minister Rishi Sunak might have been? It will certainly aid the revisionists who wish to try to see his tenure in another light. But there is a world of difference between delivering a good debate performance, which Sunak did last night, and a programme for government.

Sunak has always seemed to me a better speaker than some give him credit for. In person, at the London hustings against Liz Truss during the 2022 Conservative leadership contest, he struck me as genuinely impressive at the town hall format (and not just because of his opponent, who was so wooden one suspects the sorcerer’s apprentice had enchanted a mop as a stand-in).

But he didn’t live up to it, and that same problem dogs him now. In last night’s leadership debate, Sunak repeated the line ad nauseam that Labour is going to raise taxes. There may have been a world in which the Tories got some mileage out of Rachel Reeves’s tax plans, but it’s hard to run the old 1992 playbook when your own government has raised the tax burden to its highest level since 1948. It is also difficult for Tory messaging to cut through when the party’s own failure to grip the gambling scandal means even potentially promising stories, such as Wes Streeting’s refusal to rule out council tax rises, get smothered by sleaze.

Ditto on migration. Yes, Labour doesn’t have anything resembling a clear plan for how it will either get a grip on Channel crossings or bring net migration down to more sustainable levels. Yet the prime minister has wholly failed to get even one flight to Rwanda off the ground, and annual legal migration has tripled since the Conservatives took office in 2010. Voters aren’t stupid. Those who care have noticed.

Last night’s debate was, perhaps, a salutary reminder to the Conservatives of how beatable Starmer ought to have been. Unforced errors, such as attacking Sunak for loyally supporting an unsuitable leader when he himself served under Corbyn, might have been telling in an election where the voters were minded to give the Tories a hearing.

Given the state of things, however, that’s no boast or comfort. It might be right that Starmer isn’t remotely as popular with the public as Tony Blair was back in the day. But given that the nation is probably about to hand him a larger majority than his predecessor ever won, the implications of that are so embarrassing it’s a wonder any Tory minister brings it up voluntarily.

The main question I was asking after the debate was over, however, was this: how much do these televisual events actually add to our democratic process? Like opinion polls, they give journalists something obvious to get their teeth into and thus play an outsize role in shaping coverage, and that matters. But how many viewers have come away from any of them better informed about a question of real substance? Politicians posturing in front of a panto crowd is an easy spectacle for broadcasters to lay on. But politics isn’t just a game, and networks should aim to inform and educate as well as entertain.

If we must have debates, let’s do them better. France disposes of the audience and pits two politicians face to face across a table, with only a moderator to set the topics and balance the timing. Other than that, the candidates talk to each other face to face. Not only is that setup much more informative, but I’m sure it produces more than enough gladiatorial spectacle to keep the broadcasters’ social media teams happy. Please, someone, try it next time.

Henry Hill is deputy editor of ConservativeHome

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