Review
Election debate review: everyone struggled to be
heard in this seven-way brawl
PM’s D-day disaster dominated discourse as Rayner and
Mordaunt engaged in ‘undignified’ clashes
‘Well that
was dignified’: key takeaways of BBC general election debate
Jack Seale
Fri 7 Jun
2024 23.07 BST
Emerging as
the winner of a seven-way brawl is never easy and, in the second of this
election’s televised debates, nobody won. Either because of the strictures
placed on them by their parties’ political situations or because they just
didn’t cope very well with the format, every participant struggled.
Keir
Starmer and Rishi Sunak’s scrappy goalless draw two nights earlier had been
dominated by one prepared line: a dubious Tory contention about Labour raising
taxes. But as the lights went up at the BBC Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House
in London, revealing seven lecterns in a tight V formation, one talking point
was at the front of every viewer’s mind. The day’s discourse had been dominated
by the prime minister being forced to apologise for leaving a D-day
commemoration ceremony early and, perhaps fearing that delaying the inevitable
would leave the audience impatiently drumming their fingers, the BBC let the
audience get straight to business with a question from a veteran’s son about
maintaining the armed forces.
Then came a
moment of dissonance, as Labour’s Angela Rayner, making a halting, robotic
start, answered the question without mentioning Sunak. Daisy Cooper of the
Liberal Democrats, projecting assertively to the back row like a teacher or
amateur dramatics veteran who doesn’t require a microphone, did the same. By
the time the leader and indeed owner of Reform UK, Nigel Farage, took his turn,
his raising of D-day felt a little crow barred in.
The Tory
politician handed the turd sandwich of having to defend their leader was Penny
Mordaunt, who was in full national-tragedy gravity mode as she solemnly intoned
that the prime minister’s actions in Normandy had been “very wrong”. Soon,
though, she was back, firing out preprepared attack lines. The tax claim was to
reappear later, but the defence-themed question brought out another carefully
rehearsed accusation about Labour having not always fully supported the idea of
helping to end humanity by participating in global thermonuclear war: “If your
foe does not believe that you will use these weapons, the deterrent is gone.”
Mordaunt somehow used this atomic attack line again in answer to the night’s
second question, about the NHS.
Rayner had
perhaps the most impossible, or simply pointless, task, of all the seven
talking heads. If it didn’t really matter what Mordaunt said because the Tories
have already lost, Labour having as good as won the election meant the same
applied to Rayner. She seemed grateful for a slanging match with Mordaunt
giving her something to say. The drawing of lots that determined where the
speakers stood had put the pair together: Rayner often turned away from the
other five participants and went at it with Mordaunt until the show’s
presenter, Mishal Husain, told them to stop. Carla Denyer, of the Green party,
got the only proper laugh of the evening for her reaction to one particularly
cacophonous burst of cross-talk: “That was terribly dignified, wasn’t it?”
Denyer
ought to have flourished here, but her crack at Rayner and Mordaunt’s expense
was one of the few occasions when she successfully managed to seem like she was
confidently being herself. Almost always reading her answers from notes and
admittedly not helped by frequent interruptions from Husain, her focus on
individual policy proposals rather than revolutionary political ideas saw her
fall into the trap of sounding small-time, a junior partner in the evening’s
enterprise.
Stephen
Flynn of the Scottish National party and Rhun ap Iorwerth of Plaid Cymru were
also there, in theory, to freshen and expand the debate. They helped Denyer out
by making similar points more pithily, but couldn’t ever quite overcome the
fundamental difficulty of addressing the whole of the UK while only actually
caring about the votes of their own nation. Flynn, fluent but a shade too
intense, brought his every answer straight back to Scotland, which clanged in
the context of what the speaker before him had said; Iorwerth had a more
rounded everyman quality but still didn’t commit to much discourse that wasn’t
confined to Wales.
On the
fringe of the action was Nigel Farage, who might, like Denyer, have expected to
clean up, since his central point about the British political system being
broken is a powerful one, even if his proposed alternative is horrific. As
usual he was the most confident speaker in attendance – but if the reaction of
the cross-section of society making up the studio audience is anything to go
by, no longer being able to argue for Brexit has hamstrung him. His general
scapegoating of migrants didn’t land, and a bizarrely outmoded and irrelevant
rant about windfarm subsidies suggested that his gift for mood-reading and
rabble-rousing has deserted him, or was always a myth. His only consolation is
that, in this hubbub of rote talking points and clashing agendas, everyone
found it hard to make themselves heard.
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