Julie Etchingham, moderating Sunday’s ITV tory leadership debate, started by labouring the format as if it was a quizshow. She would ask some questions. The candidates could ask things of one another. They could play their secret buzzer card only once. It’s a difficult time for TV professionals; you live your whole life thinking about what a viewer might find interesting and gainful, then suddenly you’re dumped with five cats in a sack, and expected to turn it into entertainment. But then, it’s a difficult time for all of us.
There was a debate on Friday, of course, and some lessons were learned: Liz Truss’s people have clearly told her to stop moving her hands like a 90s clubber doing “big fish, little fish, cardboard box”. Team Rishi has begged him to stop smiling all the time and find some steel. Penny Mordaunt’s lot have said, “Change nothing, you’re perfect”, because they are frightened of her, or playing the long game to subvert and humiliate her, or maybe both. Tom Tugendhat’s advisers, unaccountably, have said, “You know how often you mention the army? Well do that again, only this time, more. If a sentence doesn’t contain the word ‘Afghanistan’, that sentence is not over.” Kemi Badenoch is now essaying the complicated double-speak of insider-outsider – she was there at all the Treasury meetings, on the frontline of government, she knows about brute reality and is all seeing, all wise, and yet at the same time, she is a completely clean break from the whole shower. When you really drill into it, this makes her the continuity candidate; she’s in favour of having cake, and eating it, as Boris Johnson was before her. None of them are quite far enough from Johnson for comfort, nor close enough to mimic his ease.
