Rishi Sunak fails to find the game-changer he needs in final debate

Good morning. With just a week to go until polling day, Rishi Sunak badly needed some kind of game-changer, some event in last night’s televised debate with Keir Starmer to shift the balance of public opinion drastically in his favour.

He didn’t get one. YouGov, which asked debate viewers to say which leader had performed best without reference to their politics, found that half of respondents chose Starmer, and half of respondents picked Sunak. More in Common, which simply ask respondents “who won?” found that Starmer came top by 56 per cent to 44 per cent.

The Labour leader went into last night with a large opinion poll lead that we have every reason to believe is real. That was evident as recently as the local elections in May. Sunak was not campaigning in Suffolk Coastal (a seat the Conservatives won by 35.2 percentage points in 2019) because he loves the beach. At this point, each day that goes by without any significant changes in the election campaign is a major victory for Starmer — and a shattering defeat for Sunak.

The reality is that debates are rarely won or lost in the room — they are lost in the weeks, months and years before they start. That’s really where Sunak missed his chance to change the shape of this election campaign.

Weak to week

Here’s the key chart about last night’s debate from More in Common:

These results are disastrous for the Conservative party. Rishi Sunak trails on the issues where Conservative governments are generally always ahead of Labour.

In April 1997, according to the UK’s oldest pollster Ipsos, the Conservatives enjoyed a 22 point lead over Labour on the question of economic competence. (Because of their longevity, I prefer to reference Ipsos where possible: Ipsos does not do a snap debate poll, however, which is why I have used More in Common instead.)

Here’s what the current picture is from Ipsos, not just on the economy but across all the big vote-moving issues.

It is not particularly surprising, therefore, that people watching the debate thought Starmer performed better across all the issues, when the only issue on which the Conservatives are more trusted than the Labour party is defence.

That’s not because of anything Sunak said last night. It’s because of his record over his 18 months as prime minister. It’s the failure to address the NHS backlog, which is higher now than when Sunak made reducing it one of his five pledges. It is the long periods, particularly in the first half of this year, when the government simply wasn’t doing very much. It’s the Liz Truss experiment. It’s the Rwanda policy and his approach to small boats, which makes liberal voters think he is cruel and conservative ones think he is an open-borders liberal.

It is his failure to grip the issues of policing and criminal justice at all. (That shortcoming is specific to Sunak as prime minister, because the justice secretary, Alex Chalk, did put forward proposals that would have helped if they had been introduced sooner and backed rather than delayed by Downing Street.)

Then you have the more recent failures, such as the betting scandal. Sunak’s new line last night was that he took several days to withdraw support from the Conservative candidates caught up in it because his party held its own independent inquiry into the allegations.

True, this campaign has revealed that the Tory machine is not what it once was. But it stretches credulity to claim that the Conservatives needed several days for Sunak to work out when exactly he told his closest aides that he had made up his mind to call a July election. As I have said before, Sunak is the only person who knows one way or the other if his former aide Craig Williams was acting foolishly or unethically.

This is the combination that has laid Sunak low, not just last night, but in this election campaign. Over the past 18 months he hasn’t focused enough on improving the output of the UK’s public services and so as a result his promises on extra spending simply aren’t believed by most people. He has raised taxes and clearly his spending commitments suggest that there are more to come — despite his promises on tax. And in the short term, his soundbites on both policy and the low politics of the betting scandal are obviously half-baked.

That’s why last night’s debate was not the game-changer he needed: and why he faces the very real risk that he will lead his party to a record-breaking defeat.

Don’t miss our election webinar unpacking the results on July 5. I’ll be joined by Political Fix host Lucy Fisher, political editor George Parker, and columnists Robert Shrimsley and Miranda Green (register here to join the Q&A for free).

Now try this

In the last week of an election campaign, my brain starts to dribble out of my ears — so I turn to books I loved as a child. I am rereading Lucy M. Boston’s Green Knowe books. I go back and forth as to whether A Stranger At Green Knowe, which won the 1961 Carnegie Medal, is my favourite or if I prefer River. They are very much worth reading regardless of your age.

Top stories today

• ‘I do feel a bit weary’ | Reform’s volunteers are stretched thin, candidates are forced to fundraise online, and its bootstrap campaign has been hobbled by a series of racist or misogynist remarks by candidates and a legal furore involving a vetting company. Nigel Farage admitted he is “weary”.

• BCC urges closer EU trade links | The next UK government must stop “walking on eggshells” around improving EU trade ties, the head of the UK’s largest business organisation is to warn.

• Approval on apprenticeship levy change | The Labour party has secured a fresh letter of support from business leaders, this time backing its plans to overhaul the “apprenticeship levy” if it wins the general election.

• Fleet Street feuding | Geordie Greig, editor of the Independent and former editor of the Daily Mail, has accused his ex-newspaper of downplaying scandals and the impact of some policies in its coverage of successive Conservative governments.

Below is the Financial Times’ live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.

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