I’m not quite sure what to think after the debate last night. I’m not sure that either man came across terribly well, and I’m not sure I could easily declare a “winner”.
I think Sunak’s approach possibly suited the style of the debate a bit better, as he did get some effective sound bites in there (“£2,000 more tax under Labour” was a point that he repeated a lot and Starmer did little to counteract) and he also seemed like he was able to get his plans across a bit better. However, I thought he also seemed a bit tetchy and had a terrible habit of interrupting Keir Starmer an awful lot (similar to how he was with Liz Truss in the Tory leadership debates of 2022), and he also said some things that sounded to me like either conspiracy theories or blatant scaremongering. For instance, he talked about how “they’ll make you spend thousands to convert your house and change your car!” with regard to Labour’s green policies, talked about how Labour were bringing in a “retirement tax” for pensioners, and implied that the CPS was some sort of terrorist organisation when referencing people that Starmer had previously worked with as a reason why he was a threat to national security. I also noticed that Sunak got laughed at or groaned at a few times by the audience (particularly when talking about national service). He also made the notable gaffe of trying to claim that NHS waiting lists had gone down when Starmer reminded him that the waiting list was 7.2 million when he made the promise and 7.5 million now; Sunak claimed that “they have gone down, from when they were higher!” to laughs from the audience…
Starmer said some good stuff, particularly with regard to Great British Energy and housing. I thought he came into his own a bit more later in the debate, and when he was allowed to go into a bit more depth about explaining a policy, I thought that he did this quite well. However, he answered many of the questions by deflecting to the Tories’ record in government even when it was a direct question asking him what he’d do or asking him his reasoning behind a policy stance. When asked by Sunak about “why he wanted to tax pensioners”, Starmer just spoke about how “Liz Truss crashed the economy”. When a voter asked him about what he would do to relate to people struggling with cost of living, he simply spoke about how “the Tories have crashed the economy”. When a voter asked him about what he’d do to solve problems in education and the NHS, he simply spoke about how “the Tories have broken the NHS and public services”. I fear that Starmer just deflecting to the Tories’ record in government only plays into Sunak’s attack line that “Labour have no plan”. I don’t think quickfire suits him very well, either; he seemed in some cases like he was building to a good answer, but was cut off before he could properly get his point across.
