Two cliches hovered over Wednesday night’s TV debate between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak – the first that the stakes were high, the second that Sunak had nothing to lose and Starmer had everything to lose, since he was on course for a victory so resounding that its foundations must be fragile. It’s simply not possible for nearly 50% of the country to agree on one leader, the logic goes, so Sunak’s job was to camp on Starmer’s contradictions, and scare away the undecideds with talk of Labour’s tax burden.
It makes sense on paper, but only in a world in which positive change is so unimaginable that the status quo represents safety and prosperity: all the audience questions suggested that it does not. Whatever their prescription, from closing the borders to making a better contract with young people, whether they were battling benefits sanctions or bankrupt local councils, the audience questioners were pretty unanimous on one point: everything’s broken. So Starmer’s job was to stick that broad-spectrum malaise on his Conservative opponent, and try to make sure none of it seeped out into a more generalised, will-sapping pessimism.
This made for a very splenetic debate, with Sunak continually interrupting and Starmer often visibly scornful and out of patience. If Sunak is trying to make this the “things can only get worse” election, Starmer’s territory is “it is literally impossible for anything to get worse”.
The Labour leader was gifted an easy win with a question on the betting scandal: Tory insiders betting on an election date that they may or may not have had advance notice of. It’s a perfect snapshot of what the government has been reduced to – staffers trashing their reputations for trifling sums – and it played to the one thing word-clouds are pretty consistent on regarding Starmer: that whatever you think of his politics, he does seem to be a rule-abider. Sunak doesn’t have the mischief of a natural rule breaker: he’s no Boris Johnson. Rather, he has this remote aspect he can’t shake – a person who doesn’t understand little people’s rules, or how much money they think is “a lot”.
He went in so hard on Labour’s tax plans – they’ll be the party of high tax, high welfare, they’ll give you a retirement tax with a capital R and a capital T – and was met with a sonorous “false” from Starmer multiple times. But their points seemed to slide off each other. Sunak is battling a tax-and-spend Labour identity that was already on the way out, rhetorically speaking, 30 years ago. Starmer, in his endeavour not to lead on redistribution, leans hard on being more competent: he’d make a “better use of existing money”, whether for local government or the NHS. So one guy was tilting at a bygone enemy, like in a civil war re-enactment battle, while the other made the case that where Conservatives were bad at things, Labour would be good at them.
The immigration discussion had a similar rhythm, with Sunak attacking the Labour party as if it had a moral, humane plan for asylum seekers. This, of course, would be great, but it doesn’t represent the candidate he was opposite: Starmer is focused on process. How many have come across by small boat on Sunak’s watch? (50,000 people). How long would the Rwanda plan take to work? (“Literally 300 years”). What would Starmer do differently? He’d process them. Mishal Husain interjected valiantly to point out that, since many of their claims would be valid, they’d be allowed to stay, right? That’s not the point, for Starmer: his point is, he would be good at process; Sunak is bad at it.
“Neither of them seemed to want to say why they were good,” an exasperated audience questioner said afterwards. His question had been pretty rude, I thought: “Are you two the best we’ve got?” What’s a person supposed to say to that? But it captured something of the atmosphere: ideas-lite, heavy on practicals, a lot of contained fury, like a fight over the management of an imperilled golf club.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
