In a general election, head to head is best: but only when one of the heads belongs to an experienced interviewer. After the uninformative ITV “debate” between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak, Sky and Beth Rigby did far better in Grimsby, rather brutally exposing the strengths and weaknesses of both men. Initial polling confirmed a general impression that the Labour leader easily outperformed the prime minister. I felt the same. But neither man came away unscathed. With the Defence Secretary Grant Shapp's warnings of a Labour “supermajority” earlier in the day and the revelation that one Tory candidate, Andrea Jenkyns, is campaigning with pictures of Nigel Farage, not the PM, on her literature, it really does feel like the end of days ...

Here’s one thing we learned from tonight’s leaders' event in Grimsby: a journalistic grilling followed by questions from the public is more revealing than a head-to-head debate where candidates can hide behind insulting each other. Both Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak had a torrid time – both will currently be nursing bruises and agonising over awkward exchanges they wish had gone better. Keir Starmer had the dubious honour of going first. He turned up with one aim: don’t look weak. Clearly he had learned from last week’s debate against Rishi Sunak - in which the prime minister managed to repeat his claim that Labour would raise taxes by £2,000 per household multiple times almost without challenge. Maybe he was still smarting from ...

“What did you go without as a child? Can you give me an example?” It seemed that ITV’s interviewer, Paul Brand, would not be satisfied until the Prime Minister had taken off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and pointed out the forearm scars he acquired fixing the factory loom as a child labourer. The PM has previously responded that, yes he’s wealthy, but that doesn’t matter: it’s about values and policies. To misquote Portia, the quality of empathy is not strained. It appeared to be a manful stand against the American import of backstory politics, in which public figures scramble around for evidence they have struggled, an expectation that leads to much awkward boasting, as with the inevitable Sunak blunder. ...

The Conservative manifesto, launched yesterday, was fantastical in two senses. First, it depends on incredible calculations. As Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies noted, it combines definite costs (£17bn of tax cuts, £6bn more for defence) with highly uncertain savings (a £12bn reduction in the disability benefit bill). But second, there is no prospect of the Tories forming the next government. This was pure political simulation. For that reason, the most significant campaign event yesterday was Rachel Reeves’ press conference at Savoy Place in central London. The shadow chancellor presented journalists with a dossier alleging that the Conservatives’ plans would add £4,800 to a typical mortgage by raising interest rates. But it was Reeves’ own policies that were rightly the focus ...

In January 2023, the electoral prospects for the Conservative government were not great. Their election supremo, Isaac Levido, informed the cabinet that the result of the next general election was “not a foregone conclusion” but the government needed “focus, discipline and delivery” and that “everything has to go right”. It would be something of an understatement to say that the subsequent 17 months have not been defined by focus, discipline and delivery from the Tories. As for everything going right, the chaotic launch of the election campaign, the half-baked policy announcements, the return of Nigel Farage, the D-Day fiasco and the resignation of the leader of the Scottish Conservatives all suggest that this test has not been met. And that is ...

Things you don’t expect to see on your telly on a Tuesday night? Douglas Ross of the Scottish Conservatives being applauded by a Glasgow audience for criticising the Scottish National Party’s obsession with independence; John Swinney (of the SNP) relying on an increasingly obstreperous Lorna Slater (of the Green Party) to stand up for said independence; and Alex Cole Hamilton, the leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, quietly emerging as the most impressive performer in the latest Scottish leaders’ debate. It would be hard to argue that BBC Scotland’s five-way barney, held amid the 19th-century grandeur of Glasgow University, set pulses racing. There is something secondary about this general election campaign north of the border, when so many of the issues ...

While the US newsroom has been in steady decline for decades, the past year has been particularly rough. In January, 528 journalists were sacked; more than 100 employees were let go from the Los Angeles Times alone. Less than one year after its launch, the Messenger shut down in January “effective immediately”. Vice stopped publishing after a very messy, drawn-out downfall. BuzzFeed closed. The Washington Post lost $77m in one calendar year, which is more than $200,000 a day, capping a period in which half the readership has reportedly fallen away since 2020. Meanwhile, in the UK the news media still sees something virtually unheard of in the US outside of the New York Times and certain television networks: profitability. ...

One must be careful with location metaphors in an election campaign. So far, Rishi Sunak has already given us a botched chat with the punters in a brewery and a press conference on the pier from which the Titanic set sail – to say nothing of his flight from the D-Day beaches last week. Silverstone Formula 1 race track was the setting chosen for the launch of the Conservative Party manifesto today. It was symbolic, the Prime Minister said, of the fact that the UK economy had “turned a corner”. But an equally apt analogy is that the wheels have come off. The vast conference space, where a particularly dire episode of The Apprentice had been shot shortly before Sunak took the reins ...