Who won the ITV Debate? Certainly not the viewers, or anyone keen on the truth.
What is the point of election debates?
Are they meant to help floating voters decide who to support? Enable us to learn a little more about the people likely to be running our country in the coming years? Explore some of the key issues in Britain today, and how the rival parties would approach them?
Or are they just a lousy reality show? An hour-long festival of pointless shouting and meaningless slogans?
The format of this first debate was abysmal. With Sunak and Starmer’s contributions limited to 45 seconds, there was little chance of developing any kind of actual argument.
Egged on by a braying mob in the Commons, this is how the party leaders behave every week — but lose the mob and put them in your living room, and it quickly becomes clear it’s a waste of time for anyone who actually wants to understand what a Labour or Conservative government would mean.
It all hinged on how entertained you are by two socially awkward men in suits shouting at each other. A personality test between two people lacking in personality.
Someone had told Sunak to be aggressive, to get in Starmer’s face. The Tory leader needed a win to jolt his campaign back to life. But do that for an hour and you don’t look tough, you look rude, a hectoring bore in an expensive suit.
Starmer, meanwhile, was happy to dig into the detail of the Conservatives’ failings over the past 14 years, but retreated back to bland generalities when asked about his own plans.
It was mystifying how many times the Labour leader was happy for Sunak to accuse him of plotting a £2,000 tax rise without bothering to rebut it. It’s all the more extraordinary on discovering Labour had a letter that blew a hole in this Tory attack line, and still allowed Sunak to say it over and over again.
The implication is that Sunak knew, or should have known, that it would be untrue to claim the £2,000 figure was independently produced by the civil service. The Prime Minister, it seems, was happy to lie in the first prime-time TV debate of the election campaign.
But Labour was happy to let him, despite having in its possession proof the Tory leader was lying. Why on earth wasn’t that letter in Starmer’s pocket, ready to be produced at the first mention of the figure?
Almost 5-million people watched this first debate, despite its many shortcomings. What will they take away from it? I would imagine that “£2,000 tax hike” claim would be one of the few claims to stick in the mind.
We know political lying can work, because we saw it work eight years ago. The pro-Brexit claim that the UK sent £350-million to Brussels every week was always false, but it stuck in voters’ heads, and every time someone complained it was untrue, they repeated the figure, pushing it even deeper into millions of minds. It’s not impossible that this was a deliberate, if deeply depressing, strategy.
Sunak initially picked up some positive press from this first debate, but will it significantly shift an election that seems to have only one outcome? The public appears determined to put Keir Starmer in Downing Street regardless of whatever he or his rival says.
Imagine how more we could have learned from two separate half-hour interviews with the leaders, with their policies, promises and past performance put under proper scrutiny. Instead, we had an hour that was all heat and no light.
A perfect product for an age where conflict has replaced considered debate. We heard the same over-rehearsed, nonsensical lines again and again, like being trapped in an especially awful and angry amateur dramatic performance.
And we will have more — so many more — of these pointless moments of empty confrontation to come in the next month.
NEXT
Why are both main parties engaged in a “conspiracy of silence” on tax? And why will your tax bill rise regardless of who wins?
