Crass, tactless – could Rishi Sunak’s trans blunder lose him the election?

When prime ministers lose general elections there is often, looking back, a moment that defined when public opinion turned against them. When, for example, a chance exchange involving a member of the public shows them in their true light.

It happened to Gordon Brown in 2010 when he was recorded by a live microphone calling Gillian Duffy, a Labour voter he met on an election walkabout, a “bigoted woman”. Brown duly led Labour to defeat after 13 years in power.

Today may have been Rishi Sunak’s “Gillian Duffy” moment. Making a crass jibe at Keir Starmer about “defining a woman” on the day that Esther Ghey, the mother of murdered trans teenager Brianna Ghey, visited the Commons was Sunak at his most unempathetic.

Sunak could have had a good week. He has solved Northern Ireland (again), responded to people’s concerns about NHS dentistry with a scheme doling out new incentives next month, and Labour doesn’t know whether it is coming or going on its £28bn green plan.

But he blew it by accepting a £1,000 bet with Piers Morgan yesterday, and he made sure it stayed blown at Prime Minister’s Questions today. For someone who is so good at politics, Sunak is very, very bad at politics.

He was good enough to rise incredibly quickly, by sheer grasp of policy detail, command of the House of Commons and a personable manner on TV. But he never had time to acquire that essential sixth sense that protects a top rank politician from threats that have to be felt more than understood.

Thus he didn’t see the danger in the standard Tory list of subjects on which Keir Starmer had changed his mind – not even when the Labour leader drew his attention in advance to the presence in the public gallery of Ms Ghey.

So the prime minister blundered into the cheap line about Starmer “not knowing what a woman is” – a simplification of the debate over trans rights that helps no one – and compounded it by mocking Starmer’s line about 99.9 per cent of women being born female, by saying that on that subject he had made “only 99 per cent of a U-turn”.

Starmer appeared to be genuinely outraged. “Of all the weeks to say that,” he said, “when Brianna’s mother is in the chamber.” He sternly lectured Sunak on the role of the prime minister being to ensure that every single citizen – he did not need to spell out “including trans people” – “feels safe and respected”.

Sometimes Starmer can overdo the pious, but on this occasion he seemed to be shaking with authentic rage, and the prime minister’s crassness was undeniable. So much so that Sunak, with what was left of his political antennae twitching, realised he would have to return to the subject. He ignored a Labour MP, Liz Twist, who asked him to apologise, but in answer to the last question of the session, he said: “If I could just say also to Brianna Ghey’s mum, who is here, as I said earlier this week, what happened was an unspeakable and shocking tragedy.” He repeated his view that her “compassion and empathy … demonstrated the very best of humanity”.

But it seemed a little like pro-forma empathy, much like his response to the astonishingly moving question earlier from Elliot Colburn, in which the Tory MP told the Commons in a voice shaking with emotion about his attempt to take his own life and how he hoped his recovery would help people suffering from similar feelings of despair and worthlessness. Sunak replied with many of the right words, but they seemed somewhat emotionally detached. (Some Scottish National Party MPs responded more fittingly in a way, by breaking with Commons protocol to applaud.)

By the end of the session, it was obvious that there would be only one headline on Prime Minister’s Questions today, just as by the end of Sunak’s interview with Piers Morgan it was obvious that the £1,000 bet, right at the end of the long interrogation, would be the only news story that would matter.

Previews of the Piers Morgan interview had already generated headlines about the prime minister admitting that he had “failed” to get NHS waiting lists down, but the bet was the story that cut through. My informal focus groups reported two responses. An older traditional voter thought it was “trivial SW1 nonsense” when there was “far more important stuff going on”. But a younger source reported that it was the talk of the staff room at school.

When Sunak took over as prime minister, amid the wreckage of Liz Truss’s premiership, his plan was to rebuild the government and the country through patient hard work and attention to detail. He has got many things right, but the economy, the NHS, immigration and the small boats have proved more difficult to turn round than he thought. His response to adversity has been to work harder, to go out on visits more often, to do more interviews, to keep trying. But he keeps getting the more intangible side of being prime minister wrong, and has watched in helpless dismay as his personal popular rating, initially far better than that of the Conservative Party, steadily declined.

He appears so rattled by his dwindling ratings he can barely appear in public these days without displaying his lack of judgement. On the evidence of the last two days, things can get a lot worse for him over the next eight or nine months before the general election.