General election: Which politicians have been the winners and losers on TV?
Some have shone on-screen but others have had to be taken into hiding, writes Sean O'Grady
The general election of 2019 will be remembered for many things, but probably not the quality of its discourse and the integrity of those taking part in it. Politicians have always enjoyed a fairly poor reputation among the public. As the old joke goes: “Don’t tell my mother I’m a politician – she thinks I play piano in a brothel.” Nothing, as someone once said, has changed.
Few of those begging for our votes have emerged from this contest with their reputations enhanced: but there are exceptions… here are some of the media winners and losers. We’ve omitted Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, on the grounds that they’ve had their share of coverage, for good or ill.
Winners
John McDonnell 5/5
The self-confessed Marxist shadow chancellor, a man once too extreme to hold down a job on Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council, has proved to be a calm, confident and even reassuring media performer. Despite his “Demon Headmaster” looks, he wants to be nice to billionaires, such as businessman John Caudwell with whom he enjoyed a convivial chat and cup of tea on the BBC Today programme. Mr McDonnell is a rare fully costed, environmentally sustainable, for-the-many-not-the-few frontbench success, mainly because he is smarter than the average Corbynite. Indeed he has received the ultimate accolade of an approving tweet from Alastair Campbell demanding Labour makes more use of him (and Keir Starmer). Nothing dodgy about that.
Rishi Sunak 3/5
The chief secretary to the Treasury has occupied a peculiar place in this election. Second only to Michael Gove, he has been trotted out for any number of media slots. Part of this may be to highlight this rising Tory star. The most junior member of the cabinet may also be sent by Conservative headquarters for the broadcasters as a gesture of the bottomless contempt in which it holds those organisations, and especially Channel 4.
Likened to a children’s TV presenter, the youthful Mr Sunak has not yet mastered the art of moving beyond the soundbite, but is slightly better at disguising his naked fear at going behind “the line to take” than his colleague Matt “20,000 police” Hancock. Early Sunak performances on the cost of the Tories’ plans were especially challenging for him. Even so, Mr Sunak will have done his career prospects no harm.
Angela Rayner 5/5
The shadow education secretary has an unparalleled capacity for scorn. Over the past few weeks, she has burnished her name as a passionate, combative warrior for social justice. Indeed, Ms Rayner was responsible for the only classic “zinger” moment in the various debates. In the last Channel 4 Debate, Jo Swinson had just finished a slightly rambling anecdote about children at her son’s school being offered free bagels to fight hunger when Ms Rayner snapped at her: “They don’t want a bagel, they want a job.” Ms Swinson resembled a stunned goldfish. Many of the debates have in fact been a warm-up for a run for the Labour leadership or deputy leadership, and Ms Rayner has probably shaded it from the likes of Rebecca Long-Bailey and Laura Pidcock.
Nicola Sturgeon 4/5
An otherwise flawless campaign for Ms Sturgeon was flawed by her appearance with fellow Scot Andrew Neil, who inflicted the usual damage. Still, she should win respect for just turning up (in contrast infamously to the prime minister). However, her push for a second independence referendum has collided with some determined unionist opposition as well as Mr Neil; tactical anti-SNP voting is liable to restrict her likely gains.
Adam Price 5/5
The leader of Plaid Cymru has been the “Nick Clegg” of this election – the nice 2010 version, that is. His easy manner, personable way with the public in the audience and calm, measured approach has won many fans. But, of course, no one outside of Wales will be able to vote for him.
Michael Gove 3/5
The Tories’ top performer, at least insofar as he turns up for more big interviews than any of his colleagues. He is not afraid of a scrap with a journalist (he was one, after all) or his political opponents, and indeed obviously relishes it. He even turned up to the Channel 4 climate debate without being invited. However, trying to patronise Stormzy on Talk Radio was a major error of judgement and taste.
Losers
Jacob Rees-Mogg 1/5
His unforgivably brutal and stupid remarks on LBC radio (about the people in the Grenfell tower disaster being, in essence, too stupid to get out when told by the authorities to “stay put”) represented the worst possible start to the Conservatives’ campaign.
Mr Rees-Mogg was sent down to Somerset for the duration, and is in hiding. The rumours are that, after a suitable gap, he will find himself returned to the backbenches in a new Johnson administration. The former chair of the European Research Group has served his use and, as Jennifer Arcuri put it in a slightly different context, will be “cast aside like some gremlin”.
Jo Swinson 2/5
For some reason the public haven’t taken to her, and her ratings have plummeted Corbyn-wards over the course of the campaign. Her almost Dr Strangelove willingness, expressed in an interview with ITV, to press the nuclear button was just one of a number of borderline manic episodes. She took ITV to court for their refusal to let her into the first Corbyn-Johnson head-to-head, but they might have been doing her a favour.
Nigel Farage 1/5
Once ubiquitous on our screens, the usually chirpy leader of the Brexit Party has cut a slightly more pensive, disconsolate figure since he was pressured into standing down about half of his parliamentary candidates. The broadcasters seem correspondingly less interested in him now that his party’s poll ratings (even adjusted for their reduced candidates) are firmly in mid-single figures, and he seems to have reciprocated. Whatever his new Reform Party amounts to, this will not have been the perfect springboard for its launch. His performance against Andrew Marr was about his best.
Keir Starmer 2/5
Some frontbenchers, such as Diane Abbott, Priti Patel or Jacob Rees-Mogg, are given a low profile by their party managers as an exercise in simple damage limitation. Some, perversely, are kept under wraps because they are too good, too fluent and too persuasive at sending slightly the wrong messages. Mr Starmer’s commitment to remaining in the EU might have turned out to be an asset in this campaign but, like Emily Thornberry, he was rarely permitted to take part, as shadow Brexit secretary, in “the Brexit election”. A doctored Tory video of him was the most exposure he got.
Dominic Raab 2/5
Too much baggage, too hardline, too much like the spawn of Ridley Scott’s Alien, Raab is clever and articulate, but one of those politicians who is, as they say in Westminster, not a “retail offer”. Barry Gardiner managed to put him down as being “for the 1 per cent” rather than a One Nation Conservative, and Mr Raab has been wise to spend time trying to hang on to newly marginal Esher. That throbbing vein on his forehead, likened to the lead on a hotel room mini kettle, hasn’t helped soften his image.
Sian Berry/Jonathan Bartley 2/5
Most people think Caroline Lucas leads the Greens, but in fact they have a joint leadership team, as a job share. Sian Berry and Jonathan Bartley have come up against a wall of indifference from much of the public and most of the media about the climate emergency, despite almost everyone agreeing it is indeed an emergency. Not entirely their own fault, but the duo haven’t capitalised on the recent demonstrations and their promising support in the European elections in the summer.
Competent and sincere, and always ready to fall back on the line that joining the Greens is not for a careerist, maybe sharing their limited limelight between two leaders rather than concentrating on one of them has not been the most effective media strategy. To be Green shouldn’t mean to lose, should it?
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