Sunday’s tv debate was great entertainment — but did it really tell us anything? | thearticle

How useful are TV debates in deciding something as important as the next Prime Minister? It’s an American affectation that politics is only “accessible” under the merciless scrutiny of a

studio audience, a bumptious presenter and the need to compress a lifetime’s experience into a soundbite. In Britain we took centuries to evolve our own, far more unforgiving form of

Darwinian selection. We call it the House of Commons. In Sunday evening’s Channel 4 Tory leadership debate, however, Parliament was a mere footnote. Michael Gove reminded us of his sterling

record at the despatch box, where he claimed to have taken Jeremy Corbyn apart, but nobody else thought that mattered. Rory Stewart informed us that Parliament was not a building (which some

of us knew already) in order to suggest that if Dominic Raab were to shut them out on the street, MPs would meet in Methodist Central Hall (which, for those not up on the local geography,

is an outsize chapel in Edwardian baroque near the Palace of Westminster). He made Honourable Members sound like down-and-outs, in need of a soup kitchen. Raab replied that such a

prorogation, or suspension, of Parliament was not actually illegal, but the people’s Rory (Eton and Balliol) insisted that it would be “disturbing” and the other three agreed that a No Deal

Brexit could not be done against the will of Parliament. Stewart has certainly established himself as the latest in the tradition of great English eccentrics (although he likes to say that

he’s really Scottish). He got one of the few laughs with an anecdote which ingeniously implied that he is a dab hand at household chores. His wife had apparently forced him to accept the

reality that he could not fit three bags of rubbish in their bin. The bin, it turned out, was a metaphor for Brexit, putting all those who claimed it could be done and dusted by the end of

October firmly in their place. “You’ve got to believe in the bin,” he parodied, chortling at his own wit, as the other candidates stared in bewilderment. Stewart had, by implication,

insulted the 17.4 million who had voted Leave by suggesting that Brexit belonged in the dustbin of history, but he must have delighted Remainers. Sajid Javid alone had been schooled at a

comprehensive (Raab was a grammar school boy, the rest privately educated) and the only one not to go to Oxford, yet he seemed the least boastful about his credentials. His rise has been

remarkable, from bus driver’s son who was jeered at as a “Paki”, via Wall Street and Westminster, to become the first Briton from an ethnic minority to hold one of the great offices of

state. Javid’s modesty will have done him no harm in the eyes of viewers. In the bear-pit of Westminster, however, the self-confidence conferred by an expensive education counts for more

than hard graft. Jeremy Hunt (Charterhouse and Magdalen) exuded a Zen-like calm, perhaps courtesy of his Chinese wife. He and Michael Gove, running second and third respectively, were

perhaps wondering whether it had been wise to scrap with the other three “vanity” candidates rather than waiting, like Boris Johnson, for the next debate. It is assumed that tomorrow’s

ballot of Tory MPs, requiring a minimum of 33 votes, will eliminate everyone except Johnson, Hunt and Gove. Both the latter two performed well, but neither was outstanding. When cocaine came

up, Hunt graciously defended Gove, pointing out that delivering Brexit was too big a deal to be influenced by what they had got up to in their youth. In the US, of course, politics very

often seems to turn on what someone got up to at school — think of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court hearings — but in Britain we prefer to focus on what kind of school it was and how you got

there. They seem to us prurient, we seem to them snobbish. Gove, an adopted son and scholarship boy, presented himself as “the captain of a team of great and diverse talents, like Dom and

Rory and Sajid and Jeremy”. This was by contrast with Nigel Farage, whom he accused of being on an “ego trip”. “Nigel Farage is not the face of Brexit,” Gove declared, claiming that he had

led the Leave campaign. Boris might have had something to say about that, had he had been there — but he wasn’t, so he couldn’t. Actually, it was Dominic Cummings who masterminded the Leave

campaign, but he was once — perhaps still is — Gove’s right-hand man. What did this trial by television tell us that we didn’t know before? Not a great deal. But all the candidates know that

they will have to work together in a few weeks. Given the absence of the biggest beast, this was bound to be an exercise in shadow-boxing and punches were certainly pulled. They are great

entertainment and enable Channel 4 and the BBC to claim they are fulfilling their role as a public service. But do they serve the public? It is doubtful that many votes will have been swung

by Sunday’s spectacle. Will Tuesday’s debate be any different? There is no substitute for grilling by a tough and well-informed interviewer such as Jeremy Paxman or Andrew Neil.