Rishi may as well have been debating Liz Truss – he lost that one too

Whether it’s his own leadership rival or the general public, Rishi Sunak keeps speaking to people like he’s a British tourist in the Mediterranean struggling with a non-English speaking waiter, says Will Cooling

In a summer contest that he has surprisingly brought forward despite his unpopularity with the electorate, Rishi Sunak impresses journalists by aggressively attacking his wooden opponent’s woolly thinking and loose promises. Only for it to become increasingly clear that viewers at home, even those who believe that he won the debate on points, found him at best unpersuasive and at worst unpleasant. 

That paragraph could as easily be written about Rishi Sunak’s head-to-head debate against Liz Truss in the 2022 Tory Leadership election as it could about Tuesday night’s Prime Ministerial debate. Back then, he couldn’t explain why he resigned from Boris Johnson’s cabinet despite agreeing with that government’s policy platform. On Tuesday night he couldn’t explain why he had called a surprise general election if his policies were working. In the same way he repeatedly mansplained how loose fiscal policy causes higher interest rates to Liz Truss, he repeatedly talked over not just Sir Keir Starmer, but also ITV’s Julie Etchingham. That he got to speak most, and speak loudest, made it easy to grasp his talking points, with his repeated attacks on Labour for supposedly planning to increase everyone’s taxes by £2000 dominating much of the post-debate analysis. But he failed to prove to swing voters that his understanding of politics went beyond his own talking points, let alone extended to empathising with the challenges that people less affluent than the husband of a billionaire heiress face.  

And you see that in the polls; YouGov, Savanta and JLP Partners all produced slightly different answers when asking people who they thought won. Yet dig into the detail and on question after question, people responded better to Starmer than they did to Sunak, whether on personal qualities, debating technique, or on who won specific issues. Respondents tended to find Starmer the calmer, more honest and engaging of the two debaters, whereas Sunak was aggressive, untrustworthy, and patronising. And only on tax did Sunak establish a clear lead, with Starmer even scrapping draws or even narrow wins on traditionally Tory issues such as defence and immigration.  

What would worry me about all this if I were a Tory strategist, is that it’s all so predictable. Rishi Sunak approached his debate against Keir Starmer with the exact set of tactics that he used against Liz Truss, having seemingly forgotten that he lost that leadership election. Whether it’s his own party members or the general public, Sunak keeps speaking to people like he’s a British tourist in the Mediterranean struggling with a non-English speaking waiter, convinced that all he has to do is speak ever more loudly and firmly to get his point across. 

But politics is not, and never has been, as simple as parroting talking points at ever higher volumes. You need to persuade people that you’re on their side, that you have their interests at heart. You have to make them like you – or at the very least dislike you less than your opponent. But above all, if you’re going into an election as an incumbent, you need to be able to have a record that you can defend. Yet again Sunak was forced to beg voters to ignore what he has been doing as a weird aberration and focus on his promises that the future will be different. 

As the old saying goes, it’s the height of insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. For all his poise and passion, Rishi Sunak just does not understand what being a successful politician entails. This is the reason that Liz Truss easily beat him in 2022 and why Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is on the course to do the same.