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Keir Starmer has again refused to say if he really believed in 2019 that Jeremy Corbyn would be a great PM when he said he would. But he has said Corbyn would have made a better PM than Boris Johnson. (See 9.12pm.)
And here is a fact check from Ben Quinn from the QT special, which also featured John Swinney and Ed Davey.
Jeremy Corbyn.
FB: You also said in February 2019 that Jeremy Corbyn would make a great prime minister. You said already, you thought you weren’t going to win that election. Putting that to one side, you said he would make a great prime minister. Did you mean it or did you have your fingers crossed behind your back?
KS: I didn’t think we would win that election.
FB: You said that. Irrespective of that, you said he’d make a great prime minister. Did you mean it?
KS: It wasn’t a question that really arose because I didn’t think we were going to win the election.
FB: We all heard you. We all heard you saying he would be a great prime minister. That was your way of telling the people here to vote for him. Did you not mean that?
KS: I was campaigning for the Labour Party. And I’m glad I did.
FB: But you also campaigned for Jeremy Corbyn to be prime minister.
KS: I was campaigning for the Labour party. I was a Labour politician. I wanted to be elected, or reelected, and I wanted good colleagues to be reelected. Some of the people around the shadow cabinet table were people whose seats were saved because we campaigned hard for the Labour party.
FB: Just answer this, yes or no. When you said Jeremy Corbyn would make a good prime minister, did you mean it?
KS: Look, he would be better prime minister … [pause] … look what we got, Boris Johnson, a man who made massive promises, didn’t keep them and then had to leave parliament in disgrace.
FB: Did you think he’d make a great, not even just a good, a great prime minister?
KS: I didn’t think we were in a position to win that election. And the more I looked at the preparation we’ve now down, the more convinced I am about that.
Question Time leaders’s special, which leads of on Rishi Sunak indicating that young people might face restrictions on access to finance or driving licences if they refuse to do national service, as he faced a TV quizzing from voters.
Who won? Arguably Ed Davey. It sounded as if the audience was more receptive to what he was actually saying than with Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak, and he was good at engaging with the questioners. John Swinney generally got a respectful hearing too. But the first hour felt like a warm up for the two interrogations that mattered most.
Of the two, Sunak was really struggling. It is hard to recall a leader facing such a hostile audience at one of these Question Time specials, and overall the exchanges didn’t do anything to imply all these MRP polls are on the wrong track. Sunak started with a statement about how “incredibly angry” he was about the Tory election date betting scandal. (See 9.36pm.) On paper, the words were strong, and passionate. But if he was really so “incredibly angry”, why did he adopt a very different tone when the story first emerged in the Guardian last week? (Answer: it was not leading the BBC news all day.) And then, when faced with a follow-up question, Sunak resorted to saying the same thing all over again – his standard modus operandi in pooled media clips. He was also lucky not to be asked why he is waiting for the outcome of a Gambling Commission inquiry when, if the allegations are correct, he could very quickly get to the bottom of what happened himself with a phone call.
As the hostile questions continued, Sunak did push back. He argued with Fiona Bruce on various points, and he seeemed happy to have a row with people in the audience over immigration, and the European convention on human rights. Perhaps some Tories will like the combative approach. But he sounded increasingly short-fused and unsympathetic, and when he tried to link Starmer with Liz Truss, that was bizarre and desperate too. It was all a bit unedifying.
Starmer’s most difficult moment in the campaign, until tonight, came when Beth Rigby asked him if he lied about admiring Jeremy Corbyn, and it was understandable why Bruce came back for another go at this. (See 9.12pm.) Starmer was still evasive, but less so than he was last week, and it felt as though this is not a topic that can harm him any more than it has already. After that, he was on stronger ground, and overall it was a solid performance.
Keir Starmer has spent the last three days not saying what he will do about council tax. It will go up. Sunak will fight that, he says.
Bruce points out that the tax take has gone up under the Tories.
Keir Starmer won’t, he says.
Q: Why did you call the election early?
Sunak says his number one job was delivering stability. Once he had got inflation under control, he wanted to give people a choice.
Q: Are you glad you called the election when you did?
It was the right thing to do, he says.
When he was in a leadership contest against Liz Truss, he said she was wrong. He kept going until the end and was proved right. He goes on:
And that’s why you can trust me now when I say that what Keir Starmer is promising you is the same fantasy that Liz Truss did, and it’s just going to mean your taxes are going to go up.
Brexit has denied young people a future.
Sunak says we had these debates a few years ago. He is not going to relitigate them.
You don’t have to go far from here to see the benefits, he claims. He says the Teesside freeport is attracting thousands of good jobs as a result of Brexit.
Bruce says you could have freeports without Brexit.
Not in the same way, says Sunak.
He says he is focused on the future.
the pledge made earlier today about banning landlords from getting renters to engage in a bidding war.
Q: Would landlords have to take the first offer?
Starmer says there would be a scheme in place to stop this.
UPDATE: Dan Bloom from Politico has the full answer.
Source: theguardian.com
