The function of televised election debates is an airing of rival policies by competing candidates, allowing an audience to judge which has more merit. In practice it has become a game in which the object is to project scripted attacks into the public arena – an opportunity to frame the terms of combat for the rest of the campaign. That is not debating in the traditional sense, but it is a legitimate use of a broadcast platform. The whole exercise is corrupted, however, if the power of message amplification is used to spread falsehood.
This is what Rishi Sunak did in the first televised debate of the election campaign when he claimed that “independent Treasury officials” had costed Labour plans and calculated an increased household tax burden of £2,000. That number is a fiscal fiction drawn up by the Conservative campaign. The permanent secretary at the Treasury has made it clear that the civil service does not recognise Mr Sunak’s analysis and that it should not be presented as having official endorsement.
In other words, the prime minister misled the public in the debate. He did it to force Keir Starmer on to the defensive on tax policy and, in purely tactical terms, it worked. Conservative strategists will be satisfied that the £2,000 figure is now swirling around the election discourse. They may go as far as to welcome the controversy around its falsehood, on the grounds that even bad publicity repeats the core accusation that Sir Keir intends to raise taxes.
This is a familiar campaign device. It was deployed with great effect in the Brexit referendum to spread the resonant but dishonest assertion that £350m from UK budgets could be repatriated from Brussels and spent on the NHS instead. The harder that remain campaigners denounced the misrepresentation, the deeper it was embedded in target voters’ minds.
There is a school of political analysis that observes the effectiveness of this technique without passing ethical judgment. It is crafty, and electioneering is a craft. In that view, what matters is what works. But that is a depth of cynicism not shared by voters, even those who have a pretty jaundiced view of the political process. The downfall of Boris Johnson should have been instructive on this point. His chronic, compulsive mendacity was well known by Conservative colleagues for many years, but not considered a disqualification from leadership, because his talent for persuasion and performance was considered more important than integrity.
Loquacity didn’t protect Mr Johnson from public fury when it emerged that he had lied about lockdown parties in Downing Street. Truth-telling matters. Leaders who win power by inventing facts then struggle to manage the complex realities of government. Getting a Brexit deal was so hard because the whole thing had been sold to voters on a false prospectus.
Mr Sunak presents himself as a different type of politician to Mr Johnson, and in style they are distinct. But they are also products of the same political culture. And it is revealing how quickly, under pressure in a campaign, the current prime minister reaches for the tool so often favoured by his predecessor – the lie.
