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. I’ve heard fewer laughs from a Have I Got News For You studio audience than I have from the bunch in tonight’s ITV debate. They seemed to find Mordaunt’s claims utterly hilarious. Whenever she complained that Labour was the party of high taxes, or tried to talk about the Conservatives’ record on the NHS, or immigration, or schools, the audience started laughing. On education, Mordaunt said: ‘I think it is world class and we have improved.’ Laughter. ‘Well,’ she said, trying to quell the chuckles. ‘When we took office, literacy rates were trailing the world, now they are leading them. We have 90 per cent of all schools are good or outstanding.’
When asked by Nigel Farage why should anyone believe in the fifth Tory manifesto promising to cut net migration given none of the previous pledges had been met, Mordaunt elicited more hilarity with this response: ‘Because of the record of this Prime Minister!’ It is not just that voters look back over the past 14 years and don’t see a record to trust, it is also that they include Sunak in that, rather than think he is a fresh start. Speaking of 14 years, Mordaunt totally deserved the laughs she got when she managed to tell Angela Rayner that Labour had wasted 14 years without coming up with a policy. Rayner could hardly believe her luck that Mordaunt had not so much created an open goal, but had taken the ball from one end of the football pitch and kicked it in there herself. ‘You’ve been in government for 14 years!’ she exclaimed.
Mordaunt, who is normally one of the more gifted and confident Conservative performers, had spent the first seven-way debate doing the best she could with a bad situation, but tonight even she didn’t seem to have a grasp of how to handle things. The one thing worse in politics than being laughed at is being pitied, but both are signs of a terminal illness for a party in an election campaign.
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