Good afternoon. Hope you’re pumped for the debate tonight and ready for one candidate or another to completely change your mind via the force of their reasoned argument! Ha ha. More on this election’s television surfeit, plus a satisfying leaflet disaster, after the headlines.
What happened today
Democracy | Labour is set to introduce automatic registration for voting if it wins next month’s election under plans to add millions more people to the electoral roll for future elections, the Guardian has learned. Electoral Commission data shows that while 96% of people aged 65-plus are registered, this falls to 60% for those aged 18 and 19.
Parliament | A Labour member in Islington has been arrested over the Westminster honeytrap plot and has been suspended, the party has said. A man was detained in Islington in relation to the case, which saw as many as 20 MPs and others in politics receive unsolicited messages with sexual content.
Gambling scandal | Keir Starmer has said he is not in favour of changing the rules around betting on politics for MPs, saying: “This is quite simple. It’s about the behaviour of the individuals under the current rules.” He also said that the Labour candidate who has been suspended, Kevin Craig, was a “materially different” case because the allegation is that he bet against himself, rather than use insider information.
Analysis: Too much TV?
Two debates with the seven leading political parties. Seven Panorama interviews with party leaders, with a similar roster on ITV’s Tonight. Question Time audiences asking the leading candidates questions. Sky News audiences asking the leading candidates questions. The Sun’s readers asking the leading candidates questions on YouTube. A BBC Scotland leaders’ debate. An STV leaders’ debate. A BBC Wales election debate. A Wales Online election debate. A UTV Northern Ireland leaders’ debate. A BBC Northern Ireland leaders’ debate. A Channel 4 immigration and law and order debate. A BBC Woman’s Hour debate. Woman’s Hour interviews with party leaders. A Wildlife Trusts climate and nature debate on YouTube. An LBC immigration debate. LBC phone-ins with Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak. An ITV debate with Starmer and Sunak. And, tonight, Starmer and Sunak reprising the act for the BBC. I’m probably missing loads.
If a busy broadcast schedule is a barometer of a democracy’s health, ours is absolutely flourishing. But is this, perhaps, a bit much? At one point on Monday night, you might have found yourself watching Nigel Farage interviewed on ITV, turned over to find Green co-leader Adrian Ramsay with Nick Robinson on BBC One, and turned in despair to the Sun’s YouTube channel, where Sunak and Starmer would have met you. At one point, Sunak tried to suggest that he and Starmer should debate six times. Suddenly I know how sportsphobes feel in an Olympic/Euros/Wimbledon summer.
All to the good, you might think: plenty of opportunities to interrogate the various parties’ policy platforms, and to get a better sense of the people hoping to represent us. But if you do think that, you clearly haven’t watched a lot of it. That wouldn’t be terribly surprising. While the first Sunak/Starmer debate was the most watched programme that week and the follow-up is likely to do well tonight, most of the other broadcasts have failed to threaten the football or Coronation Street at the top of the charts: the week after the ITV debate, no election programme hit the top 50.
In fairness, the one-on-one studio interview slots do reveal details and omissions that party leaders might prefer were glossed over. But the debates and audience-based formats have so far told us much less about the manifestos than they have about the general grumpiness of the British electorate, which views a chance to question their would-be leaders roughly as some England fans view an encounter with Gareth Southgate: a chance to throw things. I already knew this.
There’s a certain schadenfreude in seeing politicians laughed at and insulted, but it gets old pretty quickly. Call it disappointment television. The most watched of all these, the ITV Sunak/Starmer debate, was chiefly notable for the absurdity of its 45-second stopwatch on their answers, making a bad-tempered interruptathon inevitable, and the introduction of a spurious claim – Sunak’s £2,000 tax allegation – to the electoral discourse.
When she interrogates Sunak and Starmer tonight, Mishal Husain says she will be “aiming to get voters’ questions answered – and as fully as possible”, and the widely acknowledged flaws of the first round does suggest that the BBC will work hard to provide a more substantive conversation. (She also says “These events come around rarely,” which is more of a stretch.)
Will any of it change any minds? Probably not, barring some epochal howler from one side or the other. The broad course of this election appears to be set, and, as we noted last time, there is good evidence that debates don’t typically have much impact on how people vote anyway. There will be clips for social media, soundbites for the news bulletins, and snap polls in which people largely confirm that they thought their preferred candidate did better than the other one. In any case, the first debate is always the one that makes the most impact. Other than some headlines about the betting scandal, the returns are likely to be truly diminished.
How can all this be fixed? One answer might be the introduction of a neutral debate commission that works to ensure the various parties get a fair shake, and makes some judicious choices to avoid such oversaturation. Your mileage may vary, but two chunky debates with the two potential prime ministers and two featuring representatives from the seven leading parties, plus a tough interview strand on one broadcaster or another, sounds about right to me. Thus pared back, some of this might even get watched.
That isn’t very likely to happen, because the broadcasters all want a piece, and the politicians are loathe to look like cowards by not turning up: in other words, it is in nobody’s interests except the public’s.
What’s at stake
In Hitchin, a new and mostly rural constituency 35 minutes by rail from central London, private rents are up 36% since the last election, and house prices are up 13%. In the latest piece from the Path to Power series, Robert Booth writes: “If Labour and the Conservatives are to meet their respective pledges to build 1.5m and 1.6m new homes in the next parliament, then constituencies such as Hitchin will need to find room.”
Locals describe a picture of new arrivals from London since the pandemic pricing out those with deep roots in the area – and putting unsustainable pressure on public services:
“The local population has to compete with the effect of gentrification caused by people moving here from London,” said Jack Taylor, 31, a charity director who is among the many struggling to buy. “Everyone born in Hitchin or Stevenage is moving farther afield as they just can’t afford it.”
Voters also get frustrated about congested roads, patchy rail services, overwhelmed GPs and stretched schools. A place that was a pressure valve for London’s housing crisis is itself starting to boil over.
The constituency could also be a candidate for a new town, viewed as a realistic way to alleviate housing pressure – but none of the main candidates locally are prepared to say they would support it. Residents are unsurprisingly sceptical of a solution any time soon:
Dave, 36, an insurance worker, moved to Hitchin from London so he could afford to buy a £200,000 one bed flat. Now he wants to move in with his partner and the cost of a two-bed flat here means they must consider moving farther afield again.
“I can’t see any political party getting to grips with the housing crisis,” he said. “It seems to have a force behind it that normal politics won’t be able to stop.”
Winner of the day
The Birmingham Dispatch, whose reporter Kate Knowles asked Sutton Coldfield MP Andrew Mitchell if he thinks he is out of touch with constituents earning an average of £38,000. “You wouldn’t know what the average salary is,” Mitchell said. “It’s much higher than that … we are fortunate to be in quite a wealthy area.” The ONS says that the average salary in Sutton Coldfield is £37,506, Knowles drily notes.
Loser of the day
Sophie Raworth, who was supposed to be presenting the BBC’s Sunak-Starmer debate tonight – but misses out because she broke her ankle while running the London Marathon.
This is the one thing we didn’t want to happen on our leaflet of the day
Goes to Lucy Trimnell, Conservative candidate for Frome and East Somerset, who had a typo right where she didn’t want it (see above) but did at least emphasise her point. Thanks to the Guardian’s Keith Stuart for the spot.
Quote of the day
I thought we might do quite well and I was wrong, I’m afraid, so I lost that bet.
Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey confesses to an optimistic flutter in 2010. Crucially, he was betting in line with his own party’s interests – unlike his late predecessor, Charles Kennedy, who won £2,500 in 1994 by betting £50 at 50-1 that they would win only two seats in the European elections.
Number of the day
***
552,000
Average views for every video put out on TikTok by Nigel Farage’s account – making the Reform UK leader more popular on the platform than any of the party’s rivals. Read more here from Carmen Aguilar García, Michael Goodier and Pamela Duncan.
Dubious photo opportunity of the day
John Swinney with florist Lorraine Graham. He can’t send them to all the voters.
Andrew Sparrow explains it all
The pick of the posts from the king of the live blogs
15.13 BST | Martin Lewis, the journalist, campaigner and founder of the MoneySavingExpert website, has accused the Conservative party of misrepresenting him in a clip it has used on social media.
The clip showed Lewis saying that he had been told a policy not included in the manifesto was nevertheless an “aim” over the next parliament. The Conservatives used this to illustrate its claim that Labour is “not telling you the full truth about taxes”. Lewis said: “NO WHERE in this comment do I talk about taxes … it was about something that would be a positive change.”
Despite being told it misrepresents what Lewis was saying, CCHQ has not removed the post.
Picking a fight with Lewis might be unwise. The official CCHQ account has 627,000 followers on X. Rishi Sunak has 2.3m. Lewis has 3.1m. He has also been described as the most trusted man in Britain.
Follow Andrew Sparrow’s politics live blog every day here
Read more
Watch this
14 years of drawing Tory sleaze and blunder: the life of a political cartoonist
On a tour of his studio, Ben Jennings reveals how he captures the leading players in Westminster – and the role of satire in political discourse
What’s on the grid
Tonight, 8.15pm | Second head-to-head debate between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak on BBC One.
Tomorrow, 7am | Junior doctors’ strike begins, lasting until Tuesday next week.
Tomorrow, 8.30pm | Keir Starmer appears on ITV as part of interview series The Leader.
Tomorrow, 9pm | Northern Ireland Leaders’ Debate on BBC One Northern Ireland.
