“Does the road wind uphill all the way?” Rishi Sunak must have asked himself during this general election campaign. On the evidence of his half hour last night on Question Time on BBC1, the answer is, “Yes, to the very end.”
The Prime Minister began in his usual polite and lucid way, though with the vexed look of a man who has been polite and lucid for weeks, and feels he has not made a single convert.
Did Sunak feel the slightest sense of embarrassment, a questioner called Kevin asked, that the country has had five Prime Ministers in the last seven years, one of whom only lasted six weeks?
“Judge me on the 18 months I have been in office,” Sunak demanded, looking even more vexed.
Next came a question about the betting story, and whether he agreed that this was “the absolute epitome of the lack of ethics that we’ve had to tolerate from the Conservative Party for years and years”.
Sunak was forced to eat humble pie: “Well like you I was immensely angry to learn of these allegations,” he said, his brow darkening.
On NHS waiting lists he said, of course, that “I come from an NHS family”, but had to concede: “We haven’t made as much progress as I would have liked.”
An Asian in the audience, an NHS doctor, was furious with the PM about the neglect of child patients and accused him of talking “eyewash”. A social worker confronted Sunak about his refusal to admit to this country the families of care workers.
“We may disagree on that,” Sunak replied, beginning to bridle, for his tactful answers were not convincing anyone.
He was talking sense, but what is the point of talking sense if not a single person is won over? He started to become more assertive. “We will become the soft touch of Europe,” he warned, if unlike other European countries we take no action to stop illegal migration.
Fiona Bruce beamed as she called on members of the audience to put their tough questions. She was having an easy time, while the Prime Minister was being given a hard time.
She herself asked him, in the tone of voice one might use when making friendly conversation at a garden party, if he was glad to have called the election when he did.
Suddenly he was talking about his contest with Liz Truss for the leadership of the Conservative Party. “I kept going to the end,” he declared, “and you know what I was proud right then.”
For he had warned people that Truss’s policies would harm them, and would mean that their taxes had to go up.
“What Keir Starmer is promising you,” he said in an indignant tone, “is the same fantasy that Liz Truss did, and that means your taxes are going to go up.”
Starmer as bad as Truss! This at last was fighting talk. The camera panned to the audience, where several of the younger members could be seen shaking their heads.
“Are you really considering leaving the ECHR?” someone asked.
Yes, Sunak replied, he really is, for “we do not need a foreign court to tell us how to police our borders and our security”.
The questioner, a young woman, was furious: “You put words in my mouth there.” A student at York University wondered what Sunak was offering him. Sunak started to ask him questions and was told by Bruce, “We don’t have time for those niceties.”
The time for niceties had indeed passed. Loud applause mingled with furious cries of “shame” was audible through the Question Time theme tune as the programme came to an end.
Sunak had cast aside his Mr Nice Guy manners and begun to make a fight of it. Why not? He has nothing to lose.
When John Major was going down to defeat, according to the pundits and pollsters, during the 1992 general election campaign, he waded into hostile crowds, got on his soap box, and to general astonishment turned things around.
Only if Sunak can get away from these stilted studio occasions and engage directly with the public does he have the faintest chance of turning this election round, and by the end of last night’s programme he looked as if in his anger and disappointment at getting nowhere he has begun to realise this.
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Author: Andrew Gimson
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