Nigel Farage tried to claim at the start of Thursday’s TV debate that Reform was the real threat to Keir Starmer, given it has just passed the Conservatives in the polls (more from Katy on that here). Penny Mordaunt, of course, didn’t want to entertain the idea of her party being in opposition, but she did want to accuse Farage of being a ‘Labour enabler’, something he threw right back in her face by claiming that actually voting Tory was a vote for Labour.
It was striking that in this debate, Mordaunt was prepared to acknowledge Farage was actually in the room: in the first one, she had pretended he wasn’t there at all and had directed all her attacks at Angela Rayner.
Mordaunt had a much bigger problem than the Reform leader, though. It was, like Farage himself, a noisy problem, but it was coming from the audience. They kept laughing at her.
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