Rejoice - it’s the last election debate. Two angry shouty men shouting at each other.
Whisper it quietly, but it’s nearly over.
For five weeks now, we’ve had to pretend this election is wide open, that anything could happen, even though the face of every Conservative candidate bears witness to their inevitable fate.
But, one last time, we must strap ourselves in for another debate, and again Rishi Sunak had to start by apologising. Last time it was for skipping D-Day events, this time for the gambling scandal engulfing the election’s final days.
This debate, like all the others, was staged in a parallel universe where the outcome is in doubt, where the ruling party isn’t collapsing before our eyes, as investigations continue into politicians and staffers allegedly betting on the date set by Rishi Sunak for the Conservative Party’s ritual slaughter.
The full horror facing the Conservatives, regardless of how shouty Rishi Sunak gets (Financial Times)
After an incalculably bad campaign, finally Sunak has realised he has nothing to lose. Victory is not his aim — it never has been — just to limit the scale of the catastrophe, to win back enough Reform voters to avoid complete meltdown.
The problem for Sunak is that when he’s not apologising, he’s interrupting, hectoring, shouting. He comes across as an arrogant, short-tempered man, outraged that people are asking him questions.
Keir Starmer’s plan, presumably, was to appear prime ministerial, statesmanlike, above the fray. But too often it made him slow to respond to Sunak’s intemperate attacks. Reverting to his lawyerly roots, at times he appeared so nervous of saying the wrong thing he ended up allowing his frankly incompetent rival to look more dynamic, despite a track record of inaction and failure.
Is this deliberate? A boring alternative to the chaotic clown show of recent years? Perhaps. But it explains why Labour is coasting to an extraordinary victory despite a near-total lack of enthusiasm for the party or its leader.
That will remain Starmer’s strategy in the final week of the campaign. Say as little as possible, in the hope of coasting into Downing Street on little more than the promise that, underwhelming as they may be, at least they aren’t the Tories.
Sunak will spend his last days as Prime Minister shouting about tax, not talking about his party’s record in office, or its plans for the future, but hoping the fear of a higher tax bill will dent Labour’s lead. Of course, a vote for either party will almost certainly end in a higher tax bill for almost every voter.
This election was decided before it was even called. Labour’s poll rating has dropped a bit through the campaign, but so has support for the Conservatives. There’s every chance Keir Starmer will get a lower share of the vote than Jeremy Cornyn did when he lost in 2017, but win two-thirds of the seats in Parliament. Debates, no matter how shouty or intolerant, are not going to change that.
