Emerging as the winner of a seven-way brawl is never easy and, in the second of this election’s televised debates, nobody won. Either because of the strictures placed on them by their parties’ political situations or because they just didn’t cope very well with the format, every participant struggled.
Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak’s scrappy goalless draw two nights earlier had been dominated by one prepared line: a dubious Tory contention about Labour raising taxes. But as the lights went up at the BBC Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House in London, revealing seven lecterns in a tight V formation, one talking point was at the front of every viewer’s mind. The day’s discourse had been dominated by the prime minister being forced to apologise for leaving a D-day commemoration ceremony early and, perhaps fearing that delaying the inevitable would leave the audience impatiently drumming their fingers, the BBC let the audience get straight to business with a question from a veteran’s son about maintaining the armed forces.
