Question Time crowd emerge as stars on a night of vicious attacks on leaders
|
Version 0 of 1. The audience were the star. After a campaign lamented for its sterility, vacuum-packing the leading candidates in airless rooms a safe distance from the voting public, the BBC Question Time special forced the men who would be prime minister to face the electorate at last. The studio audience came at them like hounds who’d been kept caged and without food for weeks, snarling and ready to chew flesh. Related: Question time over the BBC debate | Letters They asked the prime minister why on Earth they should believe his promises on immigration considering he had so wildly broken the pledge he had issued five years ago. They asked him where his planned axe on the welfare bill would fall, how he could be proud of a nation where a million used food banks. They asked him why he kept talking like an accountant or an economist, always failing to see “the moral dimension.” To his deputy they were just as unsparing, beginning – as Nick Clegg must have known they would – with the credibility he lost, the reputation he destroyed, when he broke his word on tuition fees, and moving on to ask what plans he was making for life out of work. “Charming,” the Lib Dem leader replied. But it was to Ed Miliband that they bared their sharpest teeth, asking him the toughest questions and proving stingy with their applause. He faced what may have been the first pro-zero-hours remark ever aired in a format like this, from an employer who believed he’d be out of business without that option. He was grilled by another owner of a small business – and that group were strikingly well-represented in the Leeds audience – over the merits of Ed Balls. But the most lethal missile of the night came from the man who asked whether Miliband would admit that the last Labour government had overspent. When the Labour leader said no, a lowing sound could be heard, the noise of an audience uniting in sceptical rejection of the man before them – a reminder that one of Miliband’s greatest errors since 2010 was his failure to debunk the narrative that blames Labour profligacy for the country’s fiscal troubles. It was like a triple-bill version of those events that became such a feature of the 2005 campaign, when Tony Blair insisted on following what he called a “masochism strategy.” The leaders of the three main parties had to play the submissive, smiling politely as the flesh was flayed off them. “You are the boss, we are your servants,” Clegg said, as if borrowing dialogue from Fifty Shades. Indeed, a motif of the evening was “the darkened room” invoked by David Cameron and Miliband as the place where principled manifesto commitments would be bartered away in coalition talks. Clegg won a rare laugh when he said his two rivals’ insistence that they could govern alone was proof that the two of them needed to “lie down in a darkened room”. Related: Miliband: I won't have Labour government if it means SNP deal The night went best for Cameron, a verdict borne out by the Guardian’s instant poll which anointed him the winner by a 44-38 margin over Miliband. Where he had looked nervous and oddly detached in the first TV encounter of the campaign, this time he was all Tiggerish energy, the sweat beading on his upper lip. Each hostile inquiry slipped off that highly polished veneer, leaving behind no gaffes to trouble Conservative spinners. But it did leave room for Labour to maintain their attack: that the Tories have harsh cuts planned, about which they refuse to come clean. Miliband is less practised in the arts of evasion. He ended up ruling out more firmly than ever before the prospect of any kind of deal with the Scottish National party, not just a coalition but even a loose confidence-and-supply arrangement. He would rather not be prime minister than make such a bargain, he said. Perhaps he calculated that this would be the only way to persuade Scottish waverers that the only safe route to a Labour government is via a Labour vote. Perhaps he was trying to reassure those English voters spooked by the prospect of a Labour-SNP alliance. But the result is to have handed Nicola Sturgeon an attack line: Miliband would rather see a Tory return as PM than deal with what seems to be Scotland’s majority party. And if the Commons arithmetic on 8 May forces him to eat his words, there is a now a fat video reel waiting to taunt him. One of its most awkward images will show his stumbling exit from the stage. If he makes it to No 10, that moment will soon be forgotten. But if he doesn’t, it will come to seem like an omen on a night when the public reminded the politicians that, however watchful and untrusting voters might be, they are also intensely, even ruthlessly engaged. |