For the 2008 televised vice-presidential debate in the United States, Sarah Palin was opposite Joe Biden. Reportedly, she’d so frustrated the efforts of her team to get her on point with her arguments that they’d simply taught her 40 minutes’ worth of script. She says at one point, “I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear”, which is to say, I can’t answer the question unless it corresponds directly to a gobbet I prepared earlier.
The transcript is extremely revealing of the chemistry of political debate. When you put one agile politician, summoning his powers to answer the question, against one who has learned some patriotic lines by rote and has no intention of engaging with the questions, the whole thing is inert, its elements don’t connect. So nobody can win in the classic sense, which means the less impressive party has scored a victory by definition. You can commentate the life out of it, ask a sample of the audience for verdicts in real time, but you’ll never get to the heart of what happened because there was no button for “I got bored and stopped listening”.
So the real jeopardy of a TV debate, especially in these times when politicians will say literally anything – the Conservatives are toying with “Sir Sleepy” to attack Keir Starmer, a line as ludicrous as it is plagiarised – is to enter the studio as the more serious figure. You’ll go in with your galaxy brain, and you’ll come out no better than anyone else. Or were you better? Nobody will be able to remember. They got bored and stopped listening.
Rishi Sunak knew that his demand of six debates against Starmer between now and 4 July was unreasonable and pointless; it would eat up a huge amount of campaign time, and whatever substance there was would get less and less appetising the more it was reheated. And the calculation is threefold: if Starmer refuses, he’s a chicken; it will give the Tories some grist for the contention that he is sleepy; and if in some brain-melt moment he actually agrees, by the sixth debate voters will be equally sick of everyone involved. It has elements in common with Boris Johnson’s 2019 strategy – he made us all hate politics and offered us the chance to walk away.
Historically, British prime ministers have refused to debate for precisely this reason – the format is at least as likely to alienate voters as to convince them. In 2017, Theresa May, being the rare Conservative with a memory, thought she could revive that dignity of refusal and sent Amber Rudd in her place – but that made both Rudd and May look ridiculous, May for being “frit”, Rudd for looking like the acquaintance who’d unaccountably sat at the top table at the world’s worst wedding.
Gordon Brown’s motivation, in being the first prime minister to agree to a debate in 2010, is opaque. Not because he’s a secretive man, but because the dense interplay of pros and cons must have changed day by day – some mornings he must have woken up feeling he had nothing to gain; others he must have thought he was up against such lightweights, in David Cameron and Nick Clegg, that all the country needed was to see a giant among pipsqueaks and we’d understand.
The result, of course, was Cleggmania. The opportunist Liberal Democrat, genuinely having nothing to lose, came off as so relaxed, unaggressive, reasonable and human compared with his opponents that they found themselves in competition to see who could most plausibly “agree with Nick”. Farce was replayed as tragedy a few weeks later, as Brown and Cameron battled to see who could agree with him so well they got to be prime minister.
That first debate had an ersatz quality, its conventions newly minted but so pilfered from the US that they made sense the way a secondary school graduation prom makes sense: we don’t graduate. We don’t have prom kings and queens. But we know we have to squish our sons into a suit from Topman because we’ve seen it on the telly. So we watch our politicians in these strangely lit neon caverns, with an audience made up of randoms – not too political, guys, otherwise you wouldn’t be true members of the British public! – and simply accept that this is part of our political landscape, stretching all the way back to not very far.
If I were Starmer, I would refuse to debate with Sunak at all, and instead, offer to debate the Greens, the Lib Dems and Reform (the SNP and Plaid Cymru also welcome). That could yield quite an interesting four-way, in which the progressive parties made an honest account for once of how much tactical voting and campaigning they were hoping for from their supporters, and what kind of goodwill and consensus they could build in return, with Richard Tice as the star turn, saying crazy things about how there wasn’t any immigration in 1066.
Instead, Starmer has already agreed to two debates, despite having said many times that he already knows what Sunak is going to say. So he’s setting us up for boredom, perhaps even hoping to dent the viewing figures. On current form, though, none of us can guess what Sunak will say: by June, he’ll probably be offering his core vote the organs of their grandchildren. Bring back national transplants. That’s what they’d have done in 1066.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
