Does it matter, any more, which one of them wins? Will anyone even know? The next election is only two years away, by which point anyone who watched the BBC leadership debate will still be so haunted by the programme’s first 15 seconds that they will be incapable of any meaningful interaction with the world around them.
I’ve watched it more than 20 times now and I still don’t get quite how they did it. The camera moves. Someone in the audience can be seen moving their hand on their lap. So it’s definitely real life. But the two people, one of whom really will be prime minister in six weeks’ time, had been frozen in aspic. Liz Truss stared ahead, her face fixed in a grin every bit as rictus as her arms, which stopped motionless, as if her puppet master had just seen a ghost.
