‘Why Keir Starmer shouldn’t aim for a ‘knockout blow’ in the election debates’

Parties that are on course to lose elections want TV debates, and parties that are ahead would rather avoid them. Underdogs need game-changers; leaders need to minimise volatility.

If you hadn’t seen any opinion polls, the news that Rishi Sunak was demanding six TV debates with Keir Starmer, one for every week of the campaign, would give you a pretty good idea of the state of the race.

It is not only for partisan reasons that I am relieved that this request has been rebuffed: frankly, I would rather be watching the Euros, or indeed almost anything. TV debates do not, for my money, make good TV. But for better or worse (it’s for worse) they are now an established part of UK general elections, and so we all have to take them seriously, and the leaders and their teams have to take them especially seriously.

Preparing for debate

It is good news, both for general watchability and for the Labour Party, that both of this campaign’s leaders’ debates are straightforward Conservative versus Labour affairs (there will be a seven-way debate, but without the main leaders involved). Rishi Sunak has chosen to try to frame the election as a presidential choice between himself and Keir Starmer, which is… bold, for someone so unpopular.

A one-on-one debate may be what the Tories wanted, but it is far better for Starmer than any alternative format. Putting the smaller parties on the stage elevates them and gives them equal status with the main contenders.

That helped “I agree with Nick” Clegg to be seen to “win” the leaders’ debates in 2010 and made Ed Miliband’s job much harder in 2015, when the attacks on him from the Greens, Plaid Cymru and especially the SNP could neither be fully ignored (you can’t just let attacks land unanswered) nor fully taken on (every moment spent addressing the smaller parties’ criticisms was a proof-point for David Cameron’s argument that a Labour win risked a “coalition of chaos” with parties of the left arguing amongst themselves).

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In both of these cases, the parties knew this was going to happen before it did. Playing Cameron in Labour’s rehearsals for the seven-way debate in 2015, I realised pretty quickly that I had the easiest job in the room: look prime ministerial, rise above the inter-party bickering and occasionally sigh and say “just look at this lot”.

Those who witnessed the Tory rehearsals in 2010 similarly talk about Cameron’s exasperation with Jeremy Hunt, the Tories’ Clegg stand-in, and his ability to pose as a fresh alternative to the tired old parties. Debates rarely change election campaigns. Parties and their supporters may fantasise about a knockout blow, a moment that redefines the contest and shifts perceptions of their leader or destroys the reputation of their opponent: that’s why underdogs want more debates and frontrunners want fewer.

But while all the participants will rightly be thinking about killer lines and effective rebuttals, and while these will be clipped for later news broadcasts and get a wider audience than the debates themselves, the truth is that because they are all doing it, the most likely result is that they will cancel each other out.

Staying on message

Everyone will be equally prepared, everyone will say what they wanted to say, and everyone will have something good to point to afterwards. There is an exception to this, of course. Any half-decent politician should be able to hold their own in a debate, and so choosing not to take part in any debates sends the public a strong message that a leader is weak.

Theresa May’s team failed to wargame the consequences of non-participation in 2017, and proved an important rule of election debates: the only losing move is not to play.

Starmer and Sunak are both playing, so how should they play it?

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One of the reasons TV debates are so often underwhelming is that they are not really debates: they are opportunities for the two leaders to give their own answers to the same questions, with a bit of back and forth at the end of each one, rather than making a sustained argument on opposite sides of a position.

That means that they will be thinking about what their one- or two-minute answers on each area of policy are, as well as the main attacks they want to make on their opponents, and the main ways they are going to be attacked themselves.

If that sounds superficial, that’s because it is, but there’s a value to having well-honed election messages. TV debates tell us quite literally whether the leaders, and their lines, are ready for primetime.

Looking for a ‘knockout blow’

So far in the campaign, the Conservatives have been leaning hard into the argument that they have a plan and Labour doesn’t. There is an obvious weakness here, which is that Labour has set out its plans for the next parliament in considerably more detail than the Tories have. A party that wants to go in hard on “We have a plan and they don’t” should probably have a better answer to “So when will these National Insurance cuts actually happen?” and “So how will this National Service policy actually work?” than “We don’t know”.

If Sunak wants to lead with “Labour has no plan”, that gives Starmer a perfect springboard to say what his plans are: such a good opportunity that I find it hard to believe that Sunak will actually stick to this top line in the debates. That Tory line is based on a real insight, though: too many voters still say that they don’t know what Labour will do, and so Labour’s job in this campaign is to tell them.

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In the TV debates, showing that he does have a plan and setting out what it looks like should matter more to Starmer than landing attacks on Sunak, although he has to do that too. Starmer is not just there to be a prosecutor, but to be a prime minister: the balance of what he says needs to be weighted towards his positive case, because that’s what voters most want to hear from him.

Keir Starmer should not be going into the TV debate looking for a knockout blow. His job is to make a fair-minded, undecided voter think that he knows what he’s doing and that he would make a better prime minister than the current one.

Coincidentally, that is also his job across the whole of the election campaign. As I say, for all the attention that gets paid to them, TV debates don’t change much.

Read more of our 2024 general election coverage here.

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