If Keir Starmer watched Rishi Sunak’s interview, he should be worried

The prime minister is a formidable communicator. It was less than four years ago that he first came to the nation’s attention, when Boris Johnson sent him, the most junior member of the cabinet, as his representative for the TV leader debates in the last general election.

I said at the time that he “sounded like a satnav reading out a Tory press release”, and that Rebecca Long-Bailey, sent by Jeremy Corbyn to represent the leader of the opposition, sounded “more prime ministerial”.

He sounds different now, and today’s 35-minute interview with Paul Goodman, editor of Conservative Home, the Tory activists’ website, offered a preview of the next election campaign. If Keir Starmer was watching, he should have been alarmed – his opponent came across as confident, polite, focused and articulate.

It is not that Starmer isn’t any of those things – he outscored Boris Johnson on all of them except the first – but that Sunak is better than him. Some Labour supporters might be tempted to dismiss Goodman as a soft interviewer. This would be a mistake. It is true that he personally supported Sunak for the leadership, but his website represents a party membership most of whom voted against Sunak, and many of whom regard him as a snake who betrayed their hero, Johnson.

Goodman asked Sunak why party members should trust him. “We are starting to see the fruits of what a united party can do,” the prime minister replied, which was an elegant ducking of a potentially dangerous question. He managed to turn the early part of the interview towards his determination to deliver his five new year promises. He said, “we’ve got to look forward” and in several answers said, “we’re making progress”, which is obviously going to be the central election message.

He avoided giving a promise that he would actually “stop the boats”, which is what it said on the Downing Street lectern when he announced the policy. He said that the objective is “not easy” and would not be achieved “overnight”, in effect conceding Goodman’s point that the boats would not actually be “stopped” before the election.

His political calculation must be that if he can reduce the numbers crossing the Channel – itself difficult enough, as this week’s figures confirm – then all he has to do is be more credible than Labour. His answers on small boats were weak: “the toughest legislation on this issue that any government has ever brought forward”, as if “toughness” were a measure of effectiveness; and “cooperation with other countries like France or Albania”, which has never made much difference before. But if he can get the numbers down, then it would look as if he was taking back control.

Goodman then asked about the wider immigration question: that even the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast of anaemic growth depends on net immigration of 245,000 a year. Sunak tried two tactics. First, he implied that no one cared about high legal immigration as long as he stopped the boats: “The thing that everyone talks to me about is not that; what they talk to me about is what we’re doing to stop the boats.”

Then, when Goodman pressed him, he suggested that economic growth was not necessarily dependent on immigration because the changes in the Budget would support people “to move off welfare and into work”. That is the work of a decade of consistent, focused reform, but it got him through an awkward corner of the interview.

He was more comfortable with the random questions submitted by Conservative Home readers. Judith from Oxford asked him why he put up with the intrusion into his private life when he could have “a successful lower public profile career elsewhere”. He said that it was a question “I ask myself on a regular basis”, but he gave a standard answer about what a “rare privilege” it is to do a job where “you can make a positive difference to people”. Not a trace of the tetchiness that he sometimes showed when asked about his family’s finances.

The last reader’s question, from Bill of Staveley, was whether he agreed that “other advanced European nations have healthcare systems that deliver superior results to the NHS – and if so, would you have the courage to have a conversation with the British people about why this is”. It turned out that Sunak’s answer to this was essentially “No”, because the British people wouldn’t vote for him otherwise: “The NHS is the country’s number one public service priority.”

The prime minister then turned that question, too, back to his five priorities – another one, cutting the waiting list, which has been confounded by new figures just published.

But if Sunak does start to “make progress” on inflation, growth, the waiting list and small boats, this interview suggests that he will be a much tougher opponent for Keir Starmer in the election campaign than the opinion polls currently predict.