There’s no debate – the cult of personality serves no purpose
How impolite do things have to get before we can get to the so-called truth? I watched the Starmer/ Sunak debate last week and realised that it was fraught from the start. You can’t ask two professional politicians who are seriously ambitious about the next election to debate coolly, when among the audience are many who have been injured by the political and economic processes of the last dozen years or more.
That adversarial kind of TV is a joke anyway, an extension of the joke that you have in the Commons at Prime Minister’s Questions. The contest of the shouting mouths. If we were sure that we needed to elect shouting mouths – talking and disagreeingly mocking leaders – then ‘Combatants’ TV’ might be a good way of establishing the skills necessary for that leadership. If you were watching the Rugby World Cup last summer you could have seen the forerunner of last week’s first debate when the New Zealand All Blacks came out to mock and threaten the opposing side with their warriors’ ritual. But there was of course a true purpose to these insulting gestures and sounds: to demonstrate their prowess ahead of the game. I didn’t see political prowess or any kind of transferable skill shown on last week’s piece of theatrical TV. No one, as my Irish mother would have said, “came off handsome” – that is, impressive.
Last week’s debate doesn’t get you very far down the line to understanding what these two leaders have planned for us if they get the levers of power again, or for the first time. The incumbent defending their record whilst the aspirant defends their ability to take the country somewhere new. An insulting few weeks are before us. But will we at the end be any the wiser in our decision making? Abraham Lincoln, in the early days of trying to rise from being a dirt-poor local politician, would I believe wrestle with political opponents; and in those rough-hewn days never lost a contest. It probably did him no harm as he rose to become the 16th president of the United States. Last week’s wrangle was a variation on that theme. But the world has got more serious since then, and the fate of the UK will not be decided by big mouth over small mouth.
What will decide our future together in these isles will be who looks out for our security, laying
