TV debate brought home a terrifying truth: one of these men
will be PM
Jonathan Freedland
Not one of the candidates came away from Tuesday’s debate
looking ready to lead
@Freedland
Tue 18 Jun 2019 23.29 BST Last modified on Wed 19 Jun 2019
00.14 BST
Perhaps the most scathing line of the night was the title.
It was called Our Next Prime Minister and as the hour wore on, those four words
sounded increasingly like a rebuke to the nation. Look at us, they seemed to
say: a fabled country with a long, proud history and one of these five jokers
is actually going to be our next prime minister.
It was a painful hour, delivered via a format that featured
too much cross-talk and too little cross-examination, that saw the candidates
perched awkwardly on gameshow stools, repeatedly talking over each other and
failing to answer the often sharp and pointed questions from members of the
public.
It seems invidious to pick out the most cringeworthy moment,
since there were so many contenders for that prize, but surely one of the most
toe-curling segments came in response to a question about Islamophobia from
Abdullah in Bristol. Each of the five men who would be PM began boasting of
their Muslim-friendly credentials, from Boris Johnson’s invocation of his Muslim
great-grandpa to an earnest salaam alaikum from Rory Stewart. Even Sajid Javid
managed to sound oddly detached when he spoke of having “many Muslim friends
and family.”
And yet, for all that, the hour was not entirely
uninformative or unproductive. That Islamophobia section, for example, bore
valuable fruit when Javid extracted an impromptu pledge from his colleagues to
back an external inquiry into anti-Muslim prejudice in the Conservative party.
Whoever wins will not be able to shake that off, and it could have far-reaching
consequences.
But there were other moments that were revealing. Johnson
may be unstoppable as the bookies’ favourite, but he hardly resembled the
charismatic vote-magnet his supporters like to imagine. His defenders will
doubtless say he was reining it in, opting for a safety-first strategy of
restraint, making no jokes, starting no rows, doing no harm. But he came over
as lacklustre and badly flawed.
Twice he failed to remember Abdullah’s name: not ideal when
trying to demonstrate that he’s no anti-Muslim bigot. He ignored the moderator,
Emily Maitlis, so often, she was eventually forced to ask: “Can you hear me, Mr
Johnson?” Again, not a good look for a party with an all-male top table.
More substantively, he flailed on Brexit, unable to offer
any coherent idea, let alone plan, for how he would deliver British withdrawal
from the European Union by 31 October, still less cope with the multiple
consequences of crashing out without a deal. Pressed on how he would maintain
an open border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, he suggested a
“standstill” in the current arrangements, and then tossed out a reference to “Gatt
24 or whatever it happens to be.” He sounded like he was winging it, hoping
that the so-called Gatt 24 provisions would ensure tariff free trade with the
EU, when they ensure no such thing: both sides would have to agree a trade deal
first.
Jessica Elgot
✔
@jessicaelgot
I'm sure that
exchange about "GATT 24 or whatever it happens to be" has filled the
questioner from Northern Ireland with confidence
136
9:27 PM - Jun 18, 2019
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He came unstuck again and again. His signature tax promise,
raising the threshold for the higher rate – a move that would benefit high
earners – was reduced to a mere “ambition”, downgraded from a policy just eight
days after launch.
More telling still was when Maitlis forced the former
foreign secretary to listen back to his own words, quoting his off-the-cuff
suggestion that the British-Iranian citizen Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe had been
training journalists in Iran. “It didn’t make any difference,” said Johnson.
And yet those words of his were cited by the Iranian judge who extended her
jail sentence. “Words have consequences,” said Maitlis acidly.
Tulip Siddiq
✔
@TulipSiddiq
“It didn’t make any
difference” says Boris Johnson. Tell that to the Iranian Judge who used Boris’
words against Nazanin in court. #liar #wordshaveconsequences
https://twitter.com/peston/status/1141069444229283840 …
Robert Peston
✔
@Peston
.@BorisJohnson insists his remarks to select committee about
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe did not damage her
175
9:46 PM - Jun 18, 2019
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It’s moments like those that Johnson has been so desperate
to avoid in this campaign. The debate may not be enough to deny him the job he
craves, but it will have punctured the belief of those Tories who insist
“Boris” is a political magician, able to hypnotise the electorate with his
sheer charisma. He didn’t look like that tonight.
Not that anyone else was able fully to exploit the opening
Johnson presented. By his actions, Rory Stewart confirmed that he is a spy:
he’s clearly acting as a sleeper agent within the Tory leadership contest both
for the cause of remain and for the opposition parties. Repeatedly, he
separated himself from the other four, casting them as peddlers of fantasies
and lies. “The difference between me and the other candidates,” he said, “is
I’m not setting red lines and making impossible promises on TV.”
Remain-minded viewers would have cheered as Stewart mocked
the pledge to deliver either a new withdrawal deal or a no-deal Brexit by
Halloween. Brussels won’t provide the former and parliament will block the
latter, he said, settling into his favourite niche as the fearless teller of
truths.
But he performed the same service on domestic policy too,
sounding like a proper social democrat when he insisted the priority should be
public services, not tax cuts. “I’m not thinking about promises for the next 15
days, but for the next 15 years,” he said in the closest thing this debate had
to a zinger. At moments like that you had to remind yourself that not only is
Stewart seeking to lead the Tory party, rather than a new centrist grouping,
but that he too is advocating a pretty hard Brexit, in the form of serving up
again the “cold porridge”, as Michael Gove called it, of Theresa May’s
withdrawal agreement. Any liberals still cooing over Stewart will have felt
their infatuation deflate when Stewart unaccountably declined to criticise
Donald Trump’s bigoted Twitter baiting of Sadiq Khan. (As for his body
language, Stewart was caught striking a series of what seemed to be tantric
yoga poses, perhaps picked up on a drowsy afternoon in Kandahar.)
Gove meanwhile leaned into his role as the contest’s swot,
insisting he had a plan for every eventuality – surely an audition for a
detail-heavy top job under Johnson, to compensate for his future boss’s obvious
deficiency in that area. Jeremy Hunt still seems unclear whether he is running
from the right or left, and so left little mark.
It was left for someone else entirely to speak for the
nation. When Carmella from Southampton – anxious that a no-deal Brexit would
put her husband out of a job – rolled her eyes as the candidates failed to
reassure her, or even answer her question, she found the eloquence lacking on
stage. One of these as our next prime minister, her look seemed to say: what
have we done to deserve that?
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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