Who won? Who won? Up and down the country, people were banging on neighbours’ windows to ask who had come out ahead in the gajillionth (or, as some claim, second) televised confrontation between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. As it came to a close, children being carried upstairs after staying up past their bedtimes sleepily muttered into parents’ shoulders: “Who had the better grasp of detail?”

Did the prime minister come out punching? Did Starmer struggle, or was his icy calm impressive? The people trying to answer these questions largely fell into two categories: those arguing for a side, and those trying to imagine what a voter with no prior view who had stumbled upon the debate might say (aside, obviously, from “Which channel is the football on?”). However much integrity anyone brings to trying to that attempt, it’s surely pointless.

Broadcasters love these events, but then they would. In a decade and a half of watching them, I’ve found them frustrating and unenlightening. But here goes.

There was an opening question about “lack of honesty and integrity in politics”, which was taken as a reference to Gamblegate, but could be most of the last five years. The prime minister explained that he’d set up an inquiry to find out who he’d discussed the election date with (he didn’t quite put it like that). And when the inquiry had told him, he’d acted. 

Sunak’s general approach, as at the start of the campaign on ITV, was to keep interrupting his Labour opponent, peppering him with questions to put him off his stride. Also working to discombobulate both men were strange noises off. We did not adjust our sets, though some of us messaged friends who were watching to ask if they too could hear weird cries and clanks in the background, and eventually we learned that there were protestors outside the debate venue. 

Starmer this time had prepared a way to shut the prime minister up. As Sunak launched into yet another round of heckling, the Labour leader went silent and gave his best Disappointed Headmaster stare before telling him: “If you listened to people in the audience more often, you might not be so out of touch.” The audience applauded quite loudly, and the prime minister went very quiet, with the look of someone who realises they’re one provocation away from being banned from the sixth form common room. 

It came as they were discussing welfare. An audience member had asked how the pair would get people off benefits, and Sunak, feeling that he was on safe ground, had been telling her what she wanted to hear, that malingerers would be herded into workhouses with pitchforks. But it was a trap. The next question was from a woman who was now unable to work and feared having her benefits cut. “I believe in a compassionate welfare system,” the prime minister assured her, which is a good thing, because quite a lot of the audience will have sustained whiplash injuries in that screeching u-turn. 

There was the usual long argument on illegal immigration, with Sunak arguing that we are days away from asylum seekers paying gangs to take them back to France for fear of deportation to Rwanda, and Starmer saying that better policework was the answer. As with tax, as with public spending, as with pretty much every complex difficult issue, we had two people before us dancing around points of difference while ignoring vast complex problems. 

“Will you match our triple lock plus?” shouted the prime minister, sounding like a demented soap salesman. Triple-lock plus, you will remember, shifts even burnt-in food without pre-soaking. “YES OR NO?”

Starmer promised he would have “a team on the pitch who are all batting together”. Cricket is not his sport. Sunak explained that he had two daughters. “I want them to grow up in a country where they are safe, where they can have the healthcare they need,” he said. “That’s the place I believe in.” California really does sound brilliant.

We did, finally, get a question about the impact of Brexit on small exporters, though it’s possible that the business example the BBC chose, a shop selling jazz vinyl, faces deeper structural problems than a customs barrier.

And we finished with a plea from the prime minister. “I get it,” he said. People were angry. “But this is not a by-election.” As ever, you wondered who he was talking to. It was a political nerd’s argument. 

… this was a strange move from a party whose leader was assuring us all that he understood the need for honesty and integrity

Does he get it, anyway? Throughout the debate, the Tory press Twitter account had been putting out the usual lines, having disguised itself as “Tax Check UK”. There’s a place for fun and games in politics, just as there’s a place for betting on elections. But this was a strange move from a party whose leader was assuring us all that he understood the need for honesty and integrity. Perhaps tomorrow he’ll announce an inquiry to find out who leads the Conservative Party. 

Who won? Who cares?