Keir Starmer tonight told Rishi Sunak he “might not be quite so out of touch” if he actually listened to voters.
The Labour leader delivered the brutal swipe as the PM resorted to shouting over him in the final election TV debate.
During the 75-minute showdown on BBC One, a desperate Mr Sunak repeatedly interrupted his rival as they clashed on tax, immigration and sleaze. But Mr Starmer earned a round of applause as he told him: “If you listened to people in the audience across the country more often, you might not be quite so out of touch.”
Viewers at home accused Mr Sunak of acting like a child by constantly interrupting.
A snap YouGov poll of 1,716 debate viewers suggested it was a tie with exactly 50% saying Mr Sunak performed best and 50% saying Mr Starmer.
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A fired-up Mr Starmer warned that voters had simply had enough after 14 years of Tory failure. After an audience member called Sue Barclay spoke about how people are “dismayed by the lack of integrity and honesty” in Westminster today, the Labour leader said if elected as PM he would “reset politics so that it returns to public service”.
“This is a question of leadership because this isn’t just what’s happened this week and last week with the Gambling Commission,” he replied. “We saw Partygate earlier in this Parliament. The Prime Minister himself was convicted and fined for breaking the rules, which he brought in and imposed on everybody else. And of course we have seen what happened with the Covid contracts. This takes leadership.”
Mr Starmer compared how he had suspended a Labour candidate under investigation by the Gambling Commission “within minutes”, whereas Mr Sunak had waited almost two weeks to take action against one of his. “The Prime Minister delayed and delayed and delayed until eventually he was bullied into taking action,” the Labour leader added.
On tax, Mr Starmer warned that Mr Sunak had “not learnt the lesson” of Liz Truss by making unfunded pledges on how he will bring down the record burden. “Lots of promises, promises, promises, promises, but where’s the money coming from?” he asked.
“We’ve got a cost of living crisis bearing down on people across this country, really struggling because the economy is broken. This is the chance at this election to turn the page and start to rebuild our country with a stable economy.”
When Mr Sunak suggested people on the state pension would pay less tax under the Tories, Mr Starmer said: “Pensioners are not going to be better off with a Prime Minister making promises that he can’t keep because they’re not funded. That’s exactly what Liz Truss got wrong. There’s one thing that we cannot repeat at this election. Please do not go back to Liz Truss with this Prime Minister because the same damage will follow.”
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Mr Sunak said he wanted to change the eligibility system for people on benefits when asked about driving down the welfare bill. But Mr Starmer hit back: “The Prime Minister says he’s going to do all these things, they have been in power for 14 years.
“Why has he only just thought of this with a week to go before the General Election? Honestly, if there’s that much wrong with the system, who’s the guy in charge of the system for the last 14 years? Why’s it so bad?”
Mr Starmer accused the PM of pedalling “complete and utter nonsense” after he suggested that he would “surrender” the country’s borders and migrants would “need a bigger boat”.
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In a wince-inducing moment, a man called Robert Blackstock told Mr Sunak “you made a fair job of being Chancellor, but you are a pretty mediocre Prime Minister”, while accusing Mr Starmer of having his strings pulled by senior members of the Labour Party. “Are you two really the best we’ve got to be the next Prime Minister of our great country?” he added.
The Labour leader said: “I’m not surprised after 14 years of this that people feel this way because the country is in such a state. They’ve had loads of promises made in the last election about what will happen which haven’t been delivered on, that does beat the hope out of people… So, this is an opportunity to restore that hope. I don’t think we can do that by making sort of grand promises of things that can’t be delivered.”
In a swipe at Mr Sunak, he added: “Part of the problem we have with this Prime Minister is that his lived world is millions of miles away from the lived worlds of individuals across the country, businesses and families they are trying to support. That is a problem.”
The Labour leader accused the Tories of fuelling divisions as he was asked about gender issues. He said: “The role of the leader of the country is to bring [us] together so that the country itself is less divided. One of the issues for me with sadness is the fact that over the last 14 years, there’s been this tendency on almost every issue to try to find the points of difference and division.”
The noise of protesters outside the debate venue at Nottingham Trent University could be heard at points during the programme.
The Prime Minister desperately needed a miracle to turn around his disastrous election campaign.
Mishal Husain hosted the debate after Sophie Raworth was forced to pull out of presenting because of an injury she picked up during the London Marathon.