The drama, the tension, the gameplaying and deception, the headlines written long beforehand. The Telegraph will say that Boris triumphed over a faltering Corbyn. The Guardian will say Boris was shifty and failed to answer questions. The Mail and the Mirror – well, you can guess. The stories were written before the match and just had a few blanks to fill in.
You would think it should have been a knock-out blow: the intelligent, bubbly Boris against a daft conspiracy theorist with terrorists for friends. It must be harder on the telly to make an impact than in a logical, one-to-one conversation where you have to make sense and not just rhetoric.
There we have today’s politics though: sound-bite against sound-bite, and just trying not to sound too insane or anti-Semitic. Can we perhaps hope for some winning surprises in later debates? Round one with no knock-out.
Still, it was there, it was live, it was raw, it was … a pity that I was out leafletting all evening and missed it.
See also
- Honest, Georgian elections
- Fallen riders – Auntie’s list
- Accidental spies, useful idiots
- 101 Uses for a Dumped MP
- Westminster in the exit endgame
Books
- Woke: A Guide to Social Justice by Titania McGrath
- The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity by Douglas Murray
- Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay (1841)
- 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, by Jordan B Peterson
- All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class by Tim Shipman
- Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union by Harold D. Clarke, Matthew Goodwin and Paul Whiteley
- Brexit: How the Nobodies Beat the Somebodies by Sebastian J. Handley
- By David Cameron:
- For the Record
- Cameron on Cameron
- For the Record by David Cameron
- By Boris Johnson:
