Rishi Sunak showed what the stakes are

In one week the general election will be upon us. Wednesday’s televised leaders’ debate between Sir Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak was one of the final set-piece moments of the campaign, a chance to focus minds and shift voter perceptions before polling day. It was an opportunity that the Prime Minister seized with both hands.

Mr Sunak will have entered the studio knowing that the stakes were high given the state of the national polls. He can take reassurance that he put in a strong, occasionally bravura, performance. He took the attack to the Labour leader again and again on the holes in his plans for government, on taxes, welfare, migration, gender, and the true costs of his net-zero policy.

In the early moments, Mr Sunak raised a report in this newspaper, in which a Labour shadow minister appears to say that achieving the party’s target of decarbonising the economy could cost billions more than previously claimed. On this, as on so much else, Sir Keir had no real answer.

That became a familiar story in the debate, just as it has been in the campaign more generally.

The agenda for government that Labour will admit to is almost embarrassingly threadbare. The party has decided to tell the public the minimum possible of its plans to avoid endangering its polling lead. But people have noticed: Mr Sunak won applause when he criticised Sir Keir for failing to tell us what he would actually do in power.

Some of the Prime Minister’s most striking language came in a section on migration. Labour has no realistic plan for dealing with migration – illegal or legal – and Mr Sunak skewered Sir Keir for having no alternative deterrent to his own Rwanda scheme. There are dangerous uncertainties about what Labour would do with taxation, too. It has ruled out increasing the burden on “working people”, but that allows for a range of increases on all manner of other areas. It is not credible that Sir Keir and his fellow socialists would agree to cut public spending in real terms in the next parliament. So how would they pay the bills?

This has been one of the more dispiriting features of this campaign. At a time of massive geopolitical uncertainty, economic flux, and social strife, Labour has secured an apparently strong polling lead despite refusing to set out a compelling vision for the country. Sir Keir and his shadow ministers have sought to turn this election into a referendum on the past 14 years of government, but the Conservatives are right to say that it should be about the future, not the past.

The Tories’ manifesto does include promising statements of intent – on issues such as taxation, welfare and defence – that show they are by far the more serious party. It was arguably too timid in some of its promises, and some will wonder why it could not have captured more of the ebullience that Mr Sunak displayed given the threat posed by Nigel Farage’s Reform party. But the only two parties that can realistically form the next government are Labour and the Tories, and it is obvious that an administration led by Sir Keir would be dramatically worse than one led by Mr Sunak.

The situation is clearly not good for the Tories. If the polls are correct, and unless something changes, the party faces anything between a 1997-style rout and an electoral apocalypse, down to just a few dozen seats. Such a result would leave Labour with vast power to change Britain forever, refashioning the constitution, dismantling the last vestiges of Mrs Thatcher’s economic reforms, empowering the diversity industry, and bringing the UK back into the EU’s regulatory orbit.

Sir Keir might try to moderate the worst impulses of his party’s Left. But does the Labour leader really deserve the voters’ trust on that? He still has no real answer as to why he happily served in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and campaigned for him to become prime minister. He is still the man who ran for Labour leader as a politician of the Left. He is still not willing to give consistently straight answers to straightforward questions.

The Tories must hope that this final week of the campaign focuses voters’ minds on what they could soon be facing under Labour. The Prime Minister helped to show what the stakes are. But soon the decision will rest with the British people: is the “change” that Labour is offering really what they are looking for?