As Boris’s team should have predicted, the BBC, via Emily Maitlis, attacked Boris throughout the Tory leadership debate. So did its coverage the following morning. ‘Words are actions,’ said Nick Robinson on Today, sententiously editorialising. ‘Again and again Boris Johnson gets his words wrong.’ Up duly pop Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband, Heathrow airport expansion and the precise wording of the promise to leave on 31 October — all licensed to do so by the weak decision to let Boris go on.
Such debates are structured against Conservatives and conservatism. The actual electorate in this contest will not instinctively defer to a 15-year-old schoolgirl from Glasgow who tells us we should condemn this country to extreme and pointless poverty by achieving ‘zero-carbon’ by 2025. But the ‘optics’ of the programme made it impossible for the candidates to say that.
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