Coffee House Shots
Question Time special – who came out on top?
If you don't subscribe to The Spectator now is the perfect time to give us a try. We're having an election time offer, three pounds for three months, that's a pretty good deal, magazine, digital access, and to top it off you get a free mug with Morton Moreland's election artwork. So to get the software, go to spectator.co.uk/ mug. Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shuts, The Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Oscar Edmondson and I'm joined today by James Hill and Isabelle Hardman. So last night saw a relatively stale television spectacle, which commentators have described as tired, limp, and lifeless. And no, I'm not talking about England's display against Denmark, but the question time leaders debate on the BBC. Joking aside Isabelle, even though there were no revelatory moments, you say, in your piece on Coffee House. You do argue this is probably the best debate of the campaign so far. Could you take us through some of the top lines? Yeah, and I also think that was one of the best intros to Coffee House Shuts so far. So thanks for setting us up with that. Thank you very much as well. I do try. I mean, the reason I thought it was the best was that there was actually space to talk about things. It wasn't like the first ITV debate where it was, how are you going to solve the myriad problems in the NHS in 45 seconds, which I think left everyone feeling a bit as though they'd just eaten a KFC, not very satisfied. And this one did give space because there wasn't a head to head between leaders because they came on one after the other, because they had half an hour, and the audience questions were being marshalled by Fiona Bruce, who had some pretty, I would say brutal follow-ups. They were incisive follow-up questions to really pin the leaders down. And so I think we learned quite a lot. I would say that, and I think the son's leader column makes this point this morning, that a lot of it is about how badly the conservatives are going to lose and how big is labor going to win rather than the policy issues that are at stake in this election. That's partly because labor has basically produced a manifesto that's got the sort of the stop body text, the kind of Laura Mips and stuff in it, rather than actually any detail. So they don't have that much to talk about. But it is also because of our sort of shock and awe at what may be about to unfold in terms of seat numbers. But I thought last night, again, we did have some decent policy discussions, but it was fascinating how much the audience are just, and I suppose I shouldn't be fascinated or surprised by this, but how disillusioned they are with politicians as a group, but also that each leader had their own serious trust issues that they had to answer questions on. So for Ed Davie, it was still tuition fees. We had a very long and slightly emotional passage where he talked about the impact of that U-turn on his party 14 years ago now. And for John Sweeney, it was the many scandals in the SMP. For Keir Starmer, it was his support of Corbyn, which I'll come back to. For Rishi T now, it was the Conservative record. And with Keir Starmer, I think he really, would I say he messed up? Because actually, I'm not sure he had anywhere else to go with his answers to these questions, but he had a very rough time. And so initially, he was asked about his support for Corbyn. Why did he campaign for him in 2017, 2019? And he had his prepared answer, which was, I didn't think we were going to win. And so I just needed us to get through these elections. But Fiona Bruce then came in with what I thought was the absolute killer question here, which was, but you said he'd make a great prime minister. And you didn't actually need to say that. And Starmer just had no answer to that. He kept saying, I didn't think we were going to win. So the question didn't arise. Well, why did you say it? He eventually blurted out. Well, Corbyn would have been better. Well, look what we got. We got Boris Johnson. And I think that's a real firstly, a misreading of what happened in 2019. And I think a lot of Boris Johnson's supporters are guilty of this as well, which is that actually the electorate, yes, they were excited by Boris Johnson to an extent, but they were also terrified of a guy who seemed to be accidentally friends with a huge number of the anti-Semites in Britain. And he wanted to turn on the include a tear into a fleet of taxis. And they didn't want him as prime minister. And so they had to go to the Conservatives to stop this guy from getting into power. Now, if you're telling them that actually Corbyn would have been better than that, you're insulting the choice they made at the ballot box last time around. And you're also suggesting you don't understand the depth of the problem that you've just spent the past five years trying to deal within your own party, the past four years trying to deal within your own party. So I think that's, you know, I think that's that's an issue now. I think it was also a miscalculation in terms of his language. But as I suggested at the start of this, I don't think he has anywhere else to go. Because if you have said, I think this guy would make a great prime minister, you sealed your fate because unless you actually think you'd make a great prime minister, you're lying. And you can't then say to a studio audience, you know, several years later, actually I was lying. Because then the Tories can say, well, why can we believe anything that you say now? And so that's, I thought that was the most telling bit of the whole of the programme. But I thought there was some really interesting bits for all of the leaders, actually. Yeah. And James, well, as bad as it might be for Starmer, there seemed to be some outright contempt for Rishi Sunak in the room. And a couple of shouts of shame on you at the prime minister when he was talking about threatening to leave the UCHR. Yeah, I think it was a difficult night for Rishi Sunak. I think that it perhaps said something when he got the most kind of synthetic hearing was when he was distancing himself from this trust. And I think the most reading of that is that people think that he's going to get credit for being different from this trust when actually I think a lot of the electorate just blame the Tories and they don't really distinguish between the two. And I think the most and kind of newsworthy line from Sunak was when he was making clear his obvious anger at the kind of way in which people around him seem to have been placing bets on the election timing. And I think you could see that he was clearly very annoyed by that. I think the danger of course is that, you know, basically you're having to criticise your own side. You're not going to get any credit as a result of that. And that's the thing that leaves most of the newspapers today. They're saying, you know, Sunak will potentially boot out these candidates if they're found guilty of having done anything wrong. But I think really it was a very difficult one for Sunak. And I think that, you know, the point about the ECHR as well, there was one bit where a man proudly told him that there were only two countries in the world that don't sign up to the ECHR. And of course that's just not true. You know, obviously it's a European call, but you could see on Sunak's face the kind of frustration they're having to be frankly have points labelled to them that were simply wrong. The question is, then, is how do you respond to that? And he obviously sort of said, sort of, he shied away from a confrontation. He could have sort of took it on to say that's completely wrong and, you know, slapped the most down. And I think perhaps there's an interesting piece from Andrew Gibson saying, instead of him, he suggested that, you know, the kind of tetchy half in half-hour approach doesn't really work. Actually, he should have gone either full blood commitment and passion there, or he should have just, you know, sort of, tried to diffuse it. But this kind of sense of irritation doesn't really seem to play well with the electorate. So I think at a difficult time, and I think, as you said, I asked the audience, I think a lot of them summed up the kind of overall set of the campaign, which they simply weren't listening. I mean, there was one bit, I think, where he was actually, when the music was playing at the start, and someone was over saying on the program, I effing hate him. And I think that, unfortunately, for the Tories right now, that sums up a lot of the electorate and where they are. They're not really listening to what's the next thing in these debates. And Isabel, what are your thoughts on Rishi Sunay's performance last night? You were talking just before we started recording about just how tired he seemed? Yeah, which is not a surprise, not just because we're in an election campaign, but because this election campaign has been terrible for him. And he had to come in and talk from the outset about the betting allegations around his own PPS, Parliamentary Private Secretary Craig Williams, and Laura Saunders, who's also a candidate, who was married to Tony Lee, the Director of Campaigns, CCHQ, who's now on a leave of absence after it was alleged that his wife had placed a bet on the date of the election. Now, she has said that she's cooperating with the gambling commission and has instructed lawyers, actually, to make sure that there's no infringement of her privacy around this case, which is quite curious. But yeah, Sunay had to come in and talk about that, which, you know, is not a great start. It's not really where you want to start your picture, and just underlined where the campaign has gone and how utterly surprised the Tories appear to be by their own election. I think that was the first thing that struck me. And then towards the end on the ECHR, I mean, I would say that you're more likely to get a rough ride from a studio audience or this kind of thing, because people who care about this tend to be very, very vocal. And so he did get the shouts of shame when he talked about being prepared to leave the ECHR, the European Convention on Human Rights. And there was also a guy who confronted him with the point that, you know, he said the only two countries that are not part of the Convention are Russia and Belarus. And then the guy pulled quite an entertaining face at Rishi Sino. Well, the Prime Minister looked at that point. He looked to say he just wished he wasn't there. And, you know, he did mount an argument in response to that. But there was an expression in his eyes, which was how many hours left of this campaign do I have. And I think that's sort of where he is psychologically, you know, he would have to be delusional to the point of, you know, not being fit to stand in an election if he thought he was going to be winning this election and continuing as Prime Minister. So naturally, his thoughts will be turning to life afterwards. And I could sort of see in the way that you do with somebody, I don't know, who's towards the end of a marathon or some other sort of ruling experience who's thinking this is nearly over. I think we're all thinking that in fairness. But part of those of us, you know, election junkies, I think we are also at that stage where it's sort of, you know, this has gone on for quite a while. We've been going around in circles on which taxes labor, you know, are not going to rule out putting up and it'd be quite nice to fought for to holding say now. Yeah. Well, moving on to someone who's perhaps a little bit more enthused. I mean, if the promo shots or anything to go by is Ed Davie. James, we had our political editor, Katie Balls, right, her politics come for the magazine about the Lib Dems, their tactics and their aspirations to become the party of opposition. Did we see any of that last night? I thought it was a rather weak performance by Davie. And I think, look, his campaign managers have obviously decided the best way to spend the six weeks electoral campaign is by inflicting as much physical and water-based punishment on him as possible, because that plays very well on the cameras. You know, he's obviously done lots of stunts falling about. I had a makeover on, I think, ITV's flagship morning show. And that kind of stuff, obviously, is better for him than I think more substantive questioning because, you know, obviously, you've had the question last week on Laura Coonsburg's show about the post office scandal. Previously, there was a bit of an awkward exchange with term coats over whether he thought austerity was a good thing on articles. Ed Davie being one of the longstanding survivors of British politics, having actually been first elected in 1997, and then, of course, actually serving as a coalition cabinet minister. And the very few of those left in British politics these days. So I think that, you know, last night, he wasn't particularly assured performance. He didn't really seem to, he still got a laugh about tuition fees, but it was the bare minimum, you know, he didn't gain anything, he didn't lose anything. And I think, frankly, they'll be happy for that. Basically, the Lib Dems are just very happy in this campaign to rather than present themselves as sort of an alternative prime minister, like last time around the Joe Swinson, they're very happy to just be seen as, you know, a happy home for anti-tory sentiment. And given that the predominant sentiment selection is get the Tories out, GTTO, the Lib Dems will be the beneficiaries of that in the southwest and southeast of England, where they could make, you know, potentially double number of seats, probably, you know, maybe even sort of 20 games. And so I think that it was, you know, there's nothing reason why at home about last night, not a great performance, but he doesn't have to be, frankly, he's happy being a third-party leader. And that's where they want to be after the election. Great. Well, thank you, Isabelle. Thank you, James. And thank you very much for listening. [Music]