When Rishi Sunak was asked by Loose Women co-host Kaye Adams if he was a fan of the ITV lunchtime show this week, his answer was a sign of things to come.
Admitting the programme was only watched occasionally in No 10 “in the back of the office”, he half-joked that “being here is probably on the more intimidating end of things I’ve had to do”.
If anyone in Downing Street had supposed this was going to be an easy ride on daytime telly, they clearly hadn’t done their homework. Soon enough, the Prime Minister was subjected to a grilling that wiped away his smile and drained the blood from his face.
Although Janet Street Porter grabbed most of the headlines for her brutal question, “Why do you hate pensioners?”, the really uncomfortable exchanges came when Judi Love asked how he could “emotionally connect” with the reality of life for many struggling families in the UK.
Love raised the issues of damp housing, mothers worried about knife crime, NHS staff queuing for food banks and children living in poverty because of welfare cuts. Somewhat surreally, Sunak answered by talking about his online safety legislation instead.
When Adams interjected, “I think she was talking about poverty”, the PM ploughed on regardless. When he did eventually engage with the issue, his language about “financial security” felt robotically technocratic.
It was watch-through-your-fingers TV. For all those in Downing Street who have been planning a “presidential style” general election campaign, it was a raw reminder that such tactics may backfire badly.
Sunak’s out-of-touch awkwardness is nowhere near as damaging as the fact that he is just pretty bad at politics. Having tried at last year’s Tory conference to trash previous Tory prime ministers and to claim “I am the change”, his message is now one of continuity, backed by warnings not to take a risk on Labour.
In a speech on Monday, his messaging was still confused. One minute he was brimming with optimism about curing cancer and the wonders of AI, the next he was full of negativity about scary threats the UK faced.
His attempt to focus the next election on “the future” risked sounding like he was running away from his record, and that of his party. Sometimes he says life has got better since 2010, sometimes he says since 2019, sometimes since he became PM in 2022. For the public, he may instead embody all the faults of the past 14 years.
Labour focus groups show the public really dislike Sunak’s attempts to spin his achievements because they conflict with their daily lives.
Boasts about halving inflation and coming out of recession jar with families still struggling with food, energy and council tax bills. And talk of a “feelgood factor” based on expected interest rate cuts sticks in the throat of every renter facing rent rises and every homeowner whose remortgage will still result in higher bills this year.
At the launch of Labour’s “First Steps” pledge card on Thursday, there was a professionalism and confidence that the Tories currently lack. The endorsements from business leaders, ex-police chiefs and, crucially, former Tory voters (a reminder that defecting voters are more of a prize than defecting MPs) were as important as the pledge card itself.
It’s striking too that Starmer has got a lot better at public speaking, able to riff without notes and to take notably many more media questions than Sunak a few days earlier.
If he becomes PM, Starmer too will be vulnerable to the burdens of incumbency. From small boats to late ambulances, all of Sunak’s current problems will be his problems. And a volatile electorate may quickly turn against his government if they fail to see real change in real time.
With Labour’s own poster of Starmer and his pledges deployed around the country as if we were really in the first week of a “shadow” election campaign, it seems as if the party is also leaning into the idea of a presidential approach.
Sunak will almost certainly want TV debates, just as Joe Biden (another incumbent lagging in the polls) did this week, and his aides have long believed he can beat Starmer on facts and figures on the economy.
The risk, however, is that he comes across as he did in his TV debates with Liz Truss. In 2022 he neatly foretold the dangers of her unfunded tax cuts, but still lost because he was seen as arrogant and aloof. Hoping for a knockout blow against Starmer, he may end up punching himself in the face.
Sunak’s problem is that while he seems convinced that the longer he waits to go to the polls, the more likely it is something – like interest rate cuts, flights to Rwanda or Angela Rayner being charged – will turn up to help him, the equal risk is that something worse may turn up too: more small boats, reoffending prisoners, NHS failures, or scandals involving sleazy backbenchers.
Jeremy Hunt’s botched tax attack on Friday, when he stood in front of a sign warning of “Labour’s tax rises” while admitting “I had to put up taxes by £20bn a year”, suggested that after 14 years in office, all the usual tricks of tax bombshells, Treasury costings and national security warnings simply won’t work this time.
The latest Tory attacks remind me of 1997, when the Conservatives tried to simultaneously claim that Tony Blair was both a weak “Bambi” figure and also a scary “demon eyes” monster. Neither claim tallied with reality.
And there was another reminder of the gulf between the real world and Westminster this week too.
The viral video of 8-year-old Marnie Green from Burnley railing against the cost of ice creams (“bloody £9 for two?”) was a stark contrast to Sunak’s technocratic talk of cutting inflation. Her outrage at not being allowed to pay in cash was also a neat counterpoint to the PM’s own awkward affection for card payments.
In many ways, Sunak is the contactless Prime Minister, in thrall to technology but unable to make a connection between himself and the voters. The heat of an election campaign may expose that more ruthlessly than ever before.
A public that doesn’t feel properly listened to by their Prime Minister is unlikely to want to hear a word he says – on a daytime TV show or in a TV election debate.
Paul Waugh resigned as i’s chief political commentator in January to stand as the Labour candidate for Rochdale, a contest won by Azhar Ali