TV debates can give parties an edge, but this one is unlikely to shift any ground

Good morning. Analysing elections comes with a “small n problem” — there aren’t many of them, so we are making judgments on limited data and with ever-changing precedents. (Do check out this fun webcomic by the delightful Randall Munroe on the subject but in an American context.)

Televised debates between party leaders in the UK have an even smaller n problem: they were only introduced in 2010. Since then there has been no consistency of format, and they have happened during a period of time when the role of TV and how we Britons get our news has been in constant and significant flux.

(Here’s a fun fact for you: Labour hasn’t won a general election since the introduction of the iPlayer in 2007, and the last time it did, by my count a majority of the electorate had only five channels. I’m not saying these things are linked, but it is illustrative of how much the UK media ecosystem has changed since the 2005 election.)

So today’s newsletter, inevitably, is going to be long on my hunches about the significance of last night’s debate and low on fact. Some more thoughts below.

Stupid TV, be more funny!

My inkling is that last night’s debate will be the only one that matters — the fall-off between the first debate and the ones that follow has always been significant. I don’t think anyone who watched last night’s debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer is going to be rushing out to buy the DVD or to recommend to a friend they check out the sequel on BBC One on June 26.

(As a case in point: everyone remembers that Nick Clegg won the first TV debate in 2010 in the YouGov instant poll, but no one remembers that David Cameron won the second one a week later, per the same pollster.)

Last night, Sunak joined the select group of “first debate winners”, along with Clegg in 2010, Nicola Sturgeon in 2015 and Boris Johnson in 2019. The same question was asked of a sample of viewers: Sunak led with 46 per cent, Starmer received 45 per cent. Nine per cent responded with “don’t know”.

Of course, the first thing to note is that Sunak’s win is much narrower, a statistical tie, than Clegg in 2010 or Nicola Sturgeon in 2015.

The second important observation is that, of these debate winners, only Clegg’s really changed the direction of the election campaign.

Sunak’s narrow win over Starmer looks a lot more like the November 2019 TV debate to me, which made little difference to the shape of the election. Jeremy Corbyn, who did almost as well as Johnson among respondents to YouGov’s overnight poll, did not do almost as well when it came to the election itself. Fifty-one per cent of viewers in the snap poll said Johnson performed best and 49 per cent opted for Corbyn, excluding “don’t knows”.

The underlying numbers from last night’s debate, also from YouGov, look troubling to me from a Conservative perspective: essentially respondents seem to have liked how Sunak performed, but they disliked the part he was playing.

My feeling about TV debates is that they can matter when they do something to shift what the election is about. In 2010, Clegg’s performances in the debates stopped the Liberal Democrats getting squeezed. In 2015, Sturgeon, already riding high in the polls, didn’t change much about the election in Scotland, but she did help crystallise fears that some voters in England had about a hung parliament, to the benefit of Cameron.

I don’t think anything in yesterday’s debate changed the direction of the election. It reminded us that the Conservatives’ best argument is about tax, which has been at the core of their strongest and best attacks in this election. But unless the Tories can find some way to make next month’s ballot about tax and not much else, the winner of yesterday’s scrappy debate is the party who was ahead in the polls at the start.

Thanks for voting in yesterday’s poll on Nigel Farage’s impact on Conservative MPs: 74 per cent of you said, yes, he will trigger panic, 11 per cent said no, he won’t make a difference to the mood and 15 per cent were on the fence.

Now try this

During elections, I listen to Classic FM a lot, because I love classical music, but also because it gives me a useful guide to how the election is playing out on Global, the UK’s most important commercial radio company. As a result, I came across a lovely piece of music I had never heard before: Ignacy Jan Paderewski’s piano concerto in A minor.

Top stories today

• Cold light on a soundbite | Senior Labour figures were at pains to insist in the media “spin room” after the debate that Rishi Sunak’s claim of a £2,000 Labour tax rise was factually untrue. “The figure he was pushing was absolute garbage,” said Jonathan Ashworth, a member of the shadow cabinet. 

• Power to the pupils | Labour is beating the Conservatives on the social media battleground of TikTok, achieving more than twice as many plays of its videos since both parties launched official accounts on the platform less than a fortnight ago.

• Delayed NHS repairs pose risks | A long-standing lack of capital spending is leaving England’s hospitals crumbling. The NHS is struggling with an accumulated maintenance backlog worth more than £11.6bn, the highest since records began. Separately, a cyber attack affected the pathology departments of King’s College Hospital and of Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, which runs three sites, leading operations and other procedures to be cancelled.

• ‘Strange priority’ | Sunak could pledge big cuts to inheritance tax as “one big throw of the tax dice” before July 4, according to former Tory chancellor George Osborne, a move that would further strain public finances.

• Fight it out | Sunak has been warned he would face a mutiny if he made an election threat to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, after he proposed “toughening up” the party’s policy on the ECHR to Tory ministers.

Below is the Financial Times’ live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.