Tonight saw the penultimate TV exchange involving Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. Both men took part in live-streamed interviews with the Sun’s political editor Harry Cole and a live studio audience, ten days prior to polling day. Sunak was up first and had a difficult balancing act in the 30-minute exchange, seeking to embrace the Tory successes of the past 14 years while distancing himself from its failures. ‘This election is about the future,’ he insisted at one point – moments after praising the coalition’s education reforms. Three times he repeated his seven-word defence that: ‘I’ve been Prime Minister for 18 months.’ It was a line which sounded plausible on migration, when he could claim to have cut legal numbers since coming to office. Yet on the NHS, Sunak was unable to address the case of a voter whose father recently died due to negligence in the health service.
Sir Keir Starmer in some ways got a more difficult ride from the audience. Credibility was at the core of their questioning. ‘You said you backed Corbyn because you didn’t think he would win’ said one voter. ‘That means you were lying to us. Why should we believe you now?’ Cole’s line of questioning initially focused on Starmer’s role as shadow Brexit secretary from 2016 to 2019, with the Labour leader arguing it was ‘right to fight’ from within Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. Audience questions subsequently focused on small boat crossings, the use of private healthcare in the NHS and Labour‘s plans to make it easier to allow people to change gender. Starmer handled each of these potential hot potatoes with care, and even committed to a meeting with J. K. Rowling after she said he was ‘dismissive and often offensive’ about the concerns of women.
But perhaps the most striking contrast of the night was shown by how the two men handled their respective predecessors. Keir Starmer was able to shrug off criticism of Jeremy Corbyn by noting that he has now been both stripped of the whip and expelled from the Labour party. Rishi Sunak meanwhile delivered his best line of the night when he was pressed on Liz Truss‘s mini-Budget. He argued that he was right in the summer of 2022 to warn about Liz Truss – and that is why people should therefore trust his warnings about Keir Starmer. Yet even when Sunak was on the attack, the audience was reminded of the problems of the past.
The performance of both men tonight was sober, if not spectacular. But the fact that Starmer can escape his party’s recent history, while Sunak remains trapped by it, neatly explains why the former is on course to win a landslide victory next week.
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