Rishi Sunak started the election campaign so badly that it sometimes felt like he was still working as a hedge-fund manager hoping to make another fortune, this time by shorting the Conservative Party. But with the first of the leaders’ debates taking place this week, he had a chance to reset the narrative.
While Sunak’s recent public appearances have given the impression that he’s a man who has forgotten his ‘safe word’, this time things were rather different. Within a few minutes of the debate starting, it was instead the studio audience that may have felt – like Mark Menzies (former MP for Fylde) – that they had been locked in a room with some ‘bad people’. I expect anyone attending might have happily paid a couple of thousand pounds in extra tax* to secure their release from enforced confinement with Sunak and Starmer. (*Other calculations are available.)
Starmer keeps calm as Sunak carries on
If it did nothing else, the TV debate must have led to a sigh of relief from most of the country that Sir Keir Starmer has declined to do these on a weekly basis. The format of the ‘debate’ didn’t exactly lend itself to anything nuanced (“How are you going to fix the crisis in Gaza? You have 45 seconds”) but Sunak had clearly decided to come out fighting. He spent the debate shouting, hectoring, and talking over both Starmer and host, Julie Etchingham, who could really have done with a microphone ‘mute’ button. As usual, Sunak repeatedly insisted that Starmer has no plan. I dunno: I thought Starmer had plans to move house and take up a new job?
It still amazes me to see the Tory PR machine putting Sunak front and centre of their campaign, as though seeing more of Sunak’s personality will help the Tories regain ground on Labour. Guys, you may want to sit down for this: I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.
Sunak already has a reputation as being a bit tetchy when questioned, but in the debate he came across more as unpleasantly rude: nasty, brutish and short-tempered. With Sunak constantly haranguing and interrupting Starmer, I started to feel that Sunak had come with a strategy to try to break Starmer’s veneer and get a reaction out of him.
Sunak v Starmer debate as courtroom drama
And so as the debate went on, my mind drifted to that 1992 classic film, A Few Good Men. In my mind, the famous courtroom scene was transformed, with Sunak taking on the Tom Cruise role (only without, y’know, the charisma and the looks – but other than that, just like Tom Cruise). Sunak was badgering Jack Nicholson (Starmer, obviously) about immigration: “What are you going to do about immigration? What are you going to do? WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?”
But if Sunak hoped Starmer was going to react like Nicholson, he was in for a disappointment. There was no chance Starmer was going to lose his temper, though I must admit it would have been fun to see him do so: “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH! YOU’RE GODDAMN RIGHT I’M GOING TO RAISE TAXES BY TWO THOUSAND POUNDS!” Instead, Starmer just looked mildly exasperated, like a secondary school teacher who’d found a silly mistake in a pupil’s geography exam.
Can we handle the truth about tax rises?
Since the debate, it has been the not-made-up-at-all £2,000 tax figure that has dominated the news, with the Tories insisting that it had been arrived at by independent Treasury officials, Treasury civil servants asserting that this is not the case, and Starmer going on record to say that Sunak was a liar. Really, who are we to question Tory maths? We’ve all seen those 40 new hospitals, right? And those 6,000 extra GPs?
But in all seriousness, there is a gaping hole at the core of this issue that neither of the two main parties are willing to address. Both Sunak and Starmer have committed not to raise income tax, national insurance or VAT (with the exception of VAT on private school fees). At the same time, both have committed to reducing national debt. Meanwhile, the major departmental budgets (health, schools and defence) are ring-fenced from cuts.
At some point, a government is going to have to deal with these competing commitments, whether through borrowing money, raising taxes, or cutting more services from a public realm already stretched to breaking point. The IFS has said there is a “conspiracy of silence” between the two parties not to address this. Abolishing non-dom status or vague aspirations to ‘grow the economy’ are not going to cut it as a realistic answer.
Neither Labour nor the Conservatives seem willing or able to speak this truth, probably because anyone suggesting what would be the most effective answer – tax rises – is pilloried and ridiculed. So maybe the problem is us, the public. Maybe we’re the ones playing Tom Cruise in this scenario; and we can’t handle the truth.
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