Sky News leaders’ interviews: Rishi Sunak looked defeated, while Keir Starmer just kept talking

The studio audience in Grimsby was presented with two evasive politicians, but one has not been in power yet and the other has, which meant that they were treated differently.

Keir Starmer was almost physically dismantled on stage by a deceptively understated Beth Rigby, the Sky News presenter, who started by asking whether he meant it at the previous election when he said Jeremy Corbyn would make “a great prime minister”.

The Labour leader didn’t answer the question. “I was certain that we would lose the 2019 election,” he said.

Rigby would not let the question go, and Starmer stubbornly refused to answer it, adding new half-truths and evasions to each non-answer. Leading the party was “not something I had planned to do when I came into parliament”, he said. I do not know a single MP who didn’t at some stage imagine leading their party.

He claimed that “most” of the 10 pledges on which he was elected leader “are still in place”. It is true that only four of them have definitely gone, but they are the ones that had substance rather than waffle. Starmer could not explain, for example, why he had dropped the increase in income tax for the top 5 per cent of earners, which could pay for ending the two-child limit on benefits – something he said he wanted to do but couldn’t afford to.

Bizarrely, he even claimed that “previous Labour leaders” had “pulled the tax lever and increased spending”: was that a Blairite dig at Gordon Brown, or did he mean Harold Wilson and James Callaghan? By now, Starmer seemed to be just saying anything, which would mean he would have to avoid answering another question.

The dismantling was completed by the studio audience, who asked where the money was going to come from to make Grimsby better. Starmer’s answer was a garbled mixture of potholes and putting “money and resources into Grimsby”, which he had just said he wouldn’t have – not until he had got growth back into the economy by unspecified means, anyway.

The audience seemed deeply sceptical. One young man accused him of having changed and become a political robot. Err, said the robot, not computing the question. But he stumbled towards a better answer than he had managed with Rigby, which was that he had changed his mind. “I’m much clearer in my own mind that the country must come first and the party second,” he said, adding that he came into politics late, which implied he had been naive but had learnt.

The audience’s scepticism turned to outright hostility, though, when Rishi Sunak came on for the second grilling. How he must regret that when Jon Craig, the Sky News journalist, drew lots, it was decided that Starmer would go first. That meant that the audience was warmed up, ready to boo, jeer and shout out.

They had been frustrated by one evasive politician, but he sounded human enough to worry about the effect of the job on his children while seeming as if he couldn’t wait to get into power to sort out the nation’s problems.

Now they were contemptuous of another evasive politician who they held responsible for all their discontents.

Unfortunately for Sunak, by a quirk of scheduling, we were treated to an interview with the pre-D-Day-disaster Sunak for half an hour on ITV before the Sky leaders’ grilling. So we saw a bright, cheerful prime minister, oblivious to the mistake he had just made in returning to London early from the D-Day commemorations, interviewed by Paul Brand.

It was a difficult interview, in which Brand caught Sunak out with his eagerness to please. He said “Oh yes” when asked if he had ever gone without something – and was then able only to say “Sky TV” when pressed for an example. But he did reasonably well on the rest of it.

The Sunak who appeared on stage in Grimsby after a 45-minute interlude of Starmer, however, seemed a different person – more subdued and less happy. He, too, was given a hard time by Rigby, who pointed out that he hadn’t kept his one-year time-limited promises last year, and asked why he called an election before voters could see that flights to Rwanda were working.

He then got into the terrible position of trying to insist that taxes are being cut when total taxes as a share of national income are forecast to go up over the next five years. The audience booed him when he blamed junior doctors for long NHS waiting lists, and someone shouted out “You’ve failed” when he said he was the person to deliver, not Starmer.

It was no surprise that YouGov’s instant opinion poll found that 64 per cent of the TV audience thought Starmer did better, and only 36 per cent said Sunak. Sunak looked like someone trapped by the burdens of office, whereas Starmer at least looked as if he wanted to assume them.