Ducking TV debates is not a sign of great leadership

Editorial: If her party meant as much to her as she claims it does, Liz Truss would have stood down by now

In Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, it suggests a certain lack of confidence (PA)

The decision by Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss to withdraw at the last moment from the Sky News debate was taken for understandable reasons.

For Mr Sunak, the frontrunner, there was little to gain from exposing himself to further risk. As for Ms Truss, such is her inadequacy as a “retail politician”, she shouldn’t have been allowed out in the first place. It seems too late for the more capable Kemi Badenoch to overtake her and land a spot in the final pair that go on to the activists stage, but another embarrassing, nervous, economically illiterate display by the foreign secretary could easily have been enough to panic Tory MPs into propelling Ms Badenoch into real contention.

Ms Truss, with her bizarre Margaret Thatcher cosplay and her inability to stray far from a cautious script, gave the impression that she didn’t really want the job, and would be an electoral disaster if she ever did get it – and that she was struggling not to admit as much to herself.

She seems to embody all the worst qualities of her immediate predecessors, combining Boris Johnson’s gift for obfuscation, the uneasy demeanour of Theresa May, and David Cameron’s common touch. But she’s still soldiering on, presumably because she’s come too far to turn back.

If her party meant as much to her as she claims it does, Ms Truss would have stood down by now and requested that her mixed bag of followers clamber onto the Badenoch bandwagon. Instead, she has deprived the right of her party from deploying its best asset, for the sake of coming second and making sure she stays in the cabinet.

In other words, it looks very much like a cosy Sunak-Truss stitch-up, designed to deprive the insurgents – Ms Badenoch, Penny Mordaunt and Tom Tugendhat – of the oxygen of publicity. From the outside, it looks very much as though the foreign secretary and former chancellor are running scared.

As it is, both of the top contenders seem to have concluded, correctly, that the main beneficiaries of the debates were Labour and the other opposition parties, who were gifted a huge arsenal of ammunition to use against the Tories for years to come. Given that one of these two candidates will probably end up having to form a government, it is Mr Sunak or Ms Truss who will have to pick up the pieces. As Ms Mordaunt said, it has not been an edifying sight.

Nonetheless, it was an important democratic exercise, and made for surprisingly good viewing – if, sometimes for all the wrong reasons, at rewatch, so far as Conservative HQ is concerned.

Among the TV debates, propaganda columns and media interviews, the not-so-famous five have said little about many of the issues that concern voters. The Rwanda plan to deport refugees has scarcely been tested. Neither has the privatisation of Channel 4, or the question of defunding the BBC. If the public want to know whether any of the candidates would impose another Covid lockdown, they are none the wiser.

We don’t know how they propose to win a free trade deal with the US, how they’d fight a trade war with the EU, how they’d keep Sinn Fein (as well as the DUP) inside the power-sharing executive and keep the peace in Northern Ireland, or how they’d help win the war in Ukraine. These conversations have hardly begun.

The main, inconvenient conclusion to be drawn about Ms Truss and Mr Sunak running for cover is that the Conservative Party is so bitterly divided that it can’t discuss policy and the future of the nation without the proceedings descending into personal strife and the repetition of all-too-familiar slogans.

All the candidates declared that they wanted a clean fight, yet even that was a pledge waiting to be broken. They all ended up brawling in the gutter about their ministerial records, or lack of them, and swapping snarky insults. There have been some hurtful moments.

When Ms Badenoch inadvertently dissed Mr Tugendhat’s military service in Afghanistan and Iraq, she doubled down on her sneer that he’d never been “on the front line”, as she had as, say, minister of state for children. When Mr Sunak cruelly teased Ms Truss about her dark past as a Lib Dem and a Remainer, she effectively told him he was just an overgrown, spoilt public-school-boy swot.

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In the Tory newspapers, Ms Mordaunt seems to have been transformed from a proud Royal Navy reservist and Brexiteer into a kind of woke Europhile, and her opponents have basically accused her of lying. For all the talk about building teams and a government of all the talents, they don’t seem to like each other that much – or, more to the point, respect each other. Is this lot the best the Tories have to offer?

There was much more for them to discuss, as there is much more for the Conservatives – and the nation – to learn about this slightly odd grouping.

As a kind of primary, there is much to be said for seeing how they perform under pressure and on TV. Soon, one of them will have to go head to head with Sir Keir Starmer, a revitalised Labour Party, and the reborn Liberal Democrats. They can’t run away from PMQs, or, probably, a general election televised debate featuring real voters and awkward questions.

The decision of Mr Sunak and Ms Truss suggests a certain lack of confidence. It recalls, unfortunately, Mr Johnson’s tendency to avoid tough interviewers and scrutiny in general. Ducking debates in which one has previously committed to taking part is not the stuff of leadership.