Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss opened their debate side by side with two forced smiles to the audience, the scene as ritualistic as a duel, as random a fight to the death as Squid Game. Only the hostility felt real, and boy, was it. It seems like only a week ago that wise heads were explaining why all the popular candidates had been eliminated; to avoid this very scene, where the party of government attacks itself relentlessly for its woeful record in government. They tore each other apart on levelling up, on attitudes to China, on economic competence, on the cost of living, on their backgrounds, on Brexit. Each could barely get to the end of a sentence on their record or plans before the other tore it to shreds, with a chaser of 17 examples in the recent past of their saying the exact opposite. It was in many ways an extraordinary performance, in which Sunak seemed genuinely riled and Truss showed an uncharacteristic boxer’s agility, but it was destructive and unrestrained, with no sense of anything worthwhile or worth preserving at the centre of it. Solomon himself could have stepped in and offered to cut the Conservative party in half and give them a piece each, and they both would have asked for the big half.
Truss presents as the Boris Johnson loyalist, yet said more than once: “There was no strategy for economic growth in the past two and a half years.” Sunak recycled Osbornomics, rationalising his plans – such as they are – as the only way not to pass debt on “to our children and grandchildren, stick it on the nation’s credit card. That’s not Conservatism”. Even before they started fighting, the proposition was impossible; each is absolutely certain of what to do now, yet nothing has been done right at all by the government they’ve both been running.
Late last week, it emerged that one of Truss’s economic advisers had said, with regard to her plan, that he expected interest rates to go up to 7%. Finally, a hardship for the ordinary Joe that Sunak could comprehend – mystified by why a person on universal credit might notice 20 quid one way or the other, he could nevertheless get why six grand a month on a mortgage might be worse than one. He ran with it and would not stop running – “7%, Liz!” – and some of the audience were a little discomfited that he wouldn’t let Truss speak, and maybe others thought she was a bit of a steamroller herself – but, wait, those of us who are older than Sunak were thinking. This reminds me of the last time interest rates were out of control, and people were trapped in negative equity, or made homeless or often both. Wasn’t that also a Conservative government? Could this just be who they are, bringers of chaos, dressed in pinstripes? It’s actually quite the achievement, for one debate, to trash not just your own 12 years in government, but tarnish or at least refresh to the point of terror the reputation of Conservatism right back into the last century.
The lowest blow of the format was to ask each to rank Boris Johnson out of 10 – Liz Truss gave him a seven. The Corbyn seven, they call it. Whatever the answer should be, it is never seven. Rishi ducked and dived a bit, giving him a 10 for delivering Brexit, and passing gracefully over everything else, which earned him one of the evening’s only rounds of applause. I wouldn’t infer too much from that; it sounded as if the audience were just tired. Naturally, the section on the environment was the most depressing. Liz Truss was apparently the nation’s first environmentalist, “campaigning against damage to the ozone layer” as a teenager, which may or may not belong in the same fairytale category as her sink estate comprehensive. But her first move, hitting the ground running, will be to end the green energy levy, and her best ideas to tackle climate change are being thrifty, the way she is, and wasting less food. It is tin-eared, at a time of real food scarcity, to make not wasting what you already can’t afford the main plank of climate salvation. Rishi Sunak, meanwhile, said he learned everything he knew from his daughters, which is of course great to know, because why ask experts when there are children available and they are really keen on recycling? Innovation is brilliant, too – “that amazing British thing that we always do” – like, I don’t know, invent fossil fuel exploitation in the first place. I mean, give them another half-hour, and they could have dispatched not only their entire party to the bonfire of terrible ideas, but the nation itself. It looks very unlikely that anyone’s ever going to give them another half an hour.