The BBC election debate featured a wider range of opinions than ITV’s version earlier this week, with seven parties represented. Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, and Penny Mordaunt, Leader of the Commons, stood in for their seniors in the two main parties. Nigel Farage featured for the first time as leader of Reform UK. And the smaller parties, including the SNP, Liberal Democrats, Greens and Plaid Cymru, had a podium too.
Here, our writers give their verdicts on who performed best. Sherelle Jacobs argues that Farage is making the Tories look irrelevant, while Tom Harris contends that the nationalist leaders outshone their less confident counterparts.
With the Tory party having so stunningly blown itself up a mere two weeks into the election campaign, this was Nigel Farage’s chance to prove to the nation that he is not just a political wrecker (clearly the Conservatives are quite capable of destroying themselves unassisted) but a contender. That is, the leader of a party capable of not just capturing the people’s mood but its imagination; a party that could not just win millions of votes but scores of seats and, if the polls are to be believed, overtake the Tories as the preferred party of Right.
In this mission, Nigel Farage may just have made real inroads. Tory HQ is already in meltdown following the D-Day debacle. After tonight’s debate all hope of clawing back some positive momentum into the weekend has been reduced to ashes.
Defence was supposed to be the strongest pillar of the Tory election campaign, with the party of patriotism pledging to bring back National Service, and seeding doubt in voters’ minds about whether anti-nuclear Labour is a gift to Putin. And yet before our eyes, it crumbled. Penny Mordaunt was forced onto the defensive, her trademark poise cracking with mortification as she was forced to apologise on behalf of the Prime Minister over his D-Day blunder. Farage did not pull any punches, claiming that the Prime Minister revealed today that he is “disconnected” from the British people, and does not share in its “instincts”. Ouch.
Mordaunt is widely regarded as a champion performer in the Commons, but in the media moshpit tonight she struggled. Usually, her soft self-assurance makes people instantly warm to her, but tonight she had a robotic edge. In the end her convoluted, corporate soliloquies were drowned out by Farage’s trademark staccato rhythm, his populist bid to deliver plain, stark common sense.
She missed opportunities to pick at the weaknesses of her opponents; it was up to the SNP’s Stephen Flynn to, with forensic elegance, demolish Labour’s NHS costings. Nor did she interrogate Farage about the viability of his plan to slash net migration to zero, presenting the Tory strategy as the best way to bring immigration down without harming the economy. There was much speculation that Mordaunt would struggle to get the Tory message on taxation out because she would face a firing squad on all sides. In fact, as Nigel Farage gloried in being attacked by his sparring partners, what was striking was how, in the heat of debate over the existential challenges facing this country, the Tories faded into irrelevance.
The nightmare scenario for the Tories is that, in the eyes of undecided voters, Reform starts to look like a Right-wing party in waiting rather than a mere protest movement. With Farage cutting a lonely yet confident figure as he heretically suggested that the NHS needs a new funding model, and put forward radical plans to overhaul the army in this new geopolitical dark age, there is a real risk that many voters tuning in will start to think so
If Tuesday’s debate between the two main party leaders generated more heat than light, tonight’s seven-way debate proved that more is less.
Intriguingly – but also unsurprising for reasons I will come to – it was the two men representing nationalists in Scotland and Wales who fared best, and emerged happier than their five co-panellists. Stephen Flynn, Westminster leader of the SNP, and Plaid Cymru leader Rhun ap Iorwerth, were confident, articulate and, at least on a superficial level, sensible. But then, when your party cannot actually win this election, it’s easy to smile and swagger your way to a round of applause.
Still, they were both easier to listen to than the main parties, represented here by Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, and Penny Mordaunt, leader of the House of Commons. Both women looked strained and uncomfortable; Rayner must have surprised many by remaining uncharacteristically quiet for most of the debate, only sparking to life when prodded by Mordaunt over tax and spend.
Another reason the smaller parties, including Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, sounded more comfortable, like they were actually enjoying the experience, is simply that they know they will never be held account for their policies; this was one of the few opportunities they will have to broadcast to a national audience and it came risk-free. They saw it as an opportunity, whereas Labour and the Conservatives, the parties with something to lose on polling day and beyond, looked distinctly nervous about the whole occasion.
As well they might, given that neither Rayner nor Mordaunt reassured many who might be worried about their respective tax and spending plans. More heat than light, except this time in 7:1 surround sound.
