Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer fight for a poundshop presidency

Neither Rishi Sunak nor Sir Keir Starmer is a natural politician. That may be a strange thing to say about a man who was the youngest prime minister since 1812 and an opponent who is on track for a historically large majority. But in a less feral era of British politics, Sir Keir would have capped off a successful legal career with a few years as attorney-general and Mr Sunak would still be a mid-ranking cabinet minister rather than the boss. Extreme events put both in a high place, like a fishing boat marooned halfway up a hill after a tsunami.

All their flaws and frailties were on display during their first televised head-to-head debate on June 4th. Neither shone. Mr Sunak has two registers: simpering and hectoring. When members of the public laid out their hardship stories, Mr Sunak responded with the learned empathy of a man worth £651m ($830m). When the debate moved to technical matters, he responded with the pernickety fluency of an over-promoted junior minister. Sir Keir, meanwhile, is remarkably wooden for a former barrister, clumsily dragging every other question back to his tenure running the Crown Prosecution Service. The viewer was left pleasantly surprised that anyone was jailed during his stint there.

If each struggles with this format, why did both agree to participate in it? One answer is that debates are now a mainstay of British politics, which has taken a presidential turn. Party leaders dominate election coverage at the expense of colleagues who would also be running the country under Britain’s system of cabinet government. Combining the profile of a president with the powers of a prime minister is a bad mix. A pair of flawed politicians, such as Mr Sunak and Sir Keir, make the absurdities of this accidental system apparent.

Britain’s politics became presidential after a succession of leaders who, if not always loved, were bigger than their parties. David Cameron, a former Tory prime minister, looked the part (tall, posh, reassuringly meaty) and polled above his party. Sir Tony Blair had the highest leadership ratings of any recent prime minister. Margaret Thatcher bestrode Conservativism for a decade; even Sir John Major, her comparatively meek successor, was initially a boost to his party’s ratings, not a drag. Boris Johnson, another former Tory prime minister, was an electoral boon for the Conservatives before he became an almighty burden.

Increasingly, however, British politics is an unpopularity contest. Both Mr Sunak and Sir Keir are less popular than their parties. Mr Sunak was once liked, though mainly for giving away hundreds of billions of pounds during the pandemic. Now his ratings rival predecessors’ all-time lows. Mr Sunak is front and centre of the Tory campaign regardless. Likewise, Sir Keir’s face is plastered all over Labour’s materials even though he is set for Downing Street in spite of his own ratings, rather than because of them. Being less disliked than Mr Sunak is the bar and Sir Keir easily clears it.

In a presidential system everyone must have an “ism”, a vision for the country handed down by a mighty leader to his party. This becomes ludicrous when applied to Sir Keir and Mr Sunak, who avoid ideological chin-stroking. Lord help those forced to explain Sunakism, given that the prime minister’s political legacy amounts to unilaterally scrapping a high-speed rail link and stymying his own proposal to ban smoking for people born after 2009. Sir Keir also has a hollow agenda that is merrily filled in for him by hangers-on and pundits. Nature abhors a vacuum and so do political journalists. Far better to write about some imagined political philosophy than the actual origin stories of policies, which range from “a trade union asked for it” to “the prime minister’s spouse was keen”.

Political authority must be infused in a single figure in a presidential system, no matter how much this may bend reality. During the honeymoon period that is likely to follow a Labour victory on July 4th, President Starmer will be reverse-engineered into a political great rather than what he actually is: the lucky leader of the opposition at a time when inflation hit 11%, the gilt market imploded and the Conservative Party ran through three prime ministers in two months. People have underrated Sir Keir until now; a gigantic majority will lead to the mother of all over-corrections. Perhaps the people cry for Sir Keir. More likely, they simply want a change and his party is the other horse in a two-horse race.

Hail to the First Lord of the Treasury

Presidential expectations without presidential powers lead only to disappointment. Even the most presidential prime ministers struggle to enforce their will. In 2011 Lord Cameron was startled to discover that his health secretary planned to up-end the nhs without Downing Street quite realising. Sir Tony, supposedly the most presidential of prime ministers, would tentatively ask Gordon Brown, the chancellor, for a sneak peek of the budget a few days before—and be refused. Putting leaders front and centre overshadows the people who are often actually running the show.

A presidential contest involving politicians as awkward as Mr Sunak and Sir Keir is merely absurd. But turning British politics as a whole into a presidential affair is risky. Party politics provides one of the few checks against extremism in the British system. It is tricky to break the duopoly of Labour and the Conservatives. By contrast, a gonzo-presidential system in which a charismatic leader and a few hundred flunkeys count as a credible party makes British politics easier to infiltrate. Nigel Farage, who is back as leader of Reform uk, an insurgent right-wing party, is only the first to make a sustained attempt at this. But if the election is fatal for the Tories, better-equipped political entrepreneurs may enter the fray. It may require more talented politicians than Sir Keir and Mr Sunak to see them off. ■