Well, despite myself, I failed to follow Boris's lead and watched the Channel 4 News Conservative leadership debate tonight.
It involved Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt, Sajid Javid, Dominic Raab and Rory Stewart but (famously) didn't involve Boris Johnson, who declined Channel 4's invitation.
The quip already doing the rounds on my social media feed this evening is that tonight's joint winners were the absent Boris and the even more absent Nigel Farage.
And I can see why. Except for Rory Stewart they were all awful. And, even including Rory, Boris's empty podium put in by far the best performance.
The Channel 4 audience put BBC Question Time audiences to shame, bias-wise. This was a pro-Rory audience from the start. Rory couldn't say anything without them loudly clapping him.
This isn't me just saying that. I was deliberately listening out for enthusiastic audience applause and Rory got the lion's share of it by a very large margin. That's simply a fact.
So who selected this audience? Rory's friends and family? Jon Snow? John Simpson? Or a reputable polling company? Whoever it was didn't do a good job, impartiality-wise.
Poor biased Krishnan Guru-Murthy had a pre-prepared point about none of the candidates mentioning climate change. He deployed it after both Michael Gove and Jeremy Hunt had already mentioned it. They protested that they'd already mentioned it. He moved on. Good grief, Krishnan and Channel 4 - listen and adapt!
Boris was wise to skip this farrago.
Presumably no difficult questions for Rory Stewart such as:
ReplyDelete1. What other drugs have you tried apart from opium?
2. Why were you attracted to join the Labour Party?
3. What human rights abuses took place in your area when you were a deputy Governor in Iraq?
4. Why are you pretending that the Withdrawal Agreement is a trade deal when it isn't? It's an agreement to hand over £40 billion in return for agreeing to talk about trade.
5. You were a Remainer before. You are supported by Ken Clarke now. Are you a secret Remainer, in the way that Ken Clarke is an open Remainer?
6. Were you and are you now a member of MI6?
7. Why have you changed your mind about the legitimacy of the Iraq war?
8. How would he describe his time as an advisor to Hillary Clinton?
9. How successful was he in eliminating violence and extreme drug abuse, as Prisons Minister - which he promised he would do?
10. What is his reaction to the poll analysis (Electoral Calculus/ComRes) which showed that if elected, he would reduce Conservative representation to a rump of 51 Members, less than Nick Clegg got with the Lib Dems?