The Tories need not worry. Their next bright young thing, Rishi Sunak, is just as shameless as the rest of them

The best thing you can say about the leaderless BBC leaders’ debate is that, hopefully, no one was watching

Plaid Cymru has ruled out nuking anyone. The world sleeps a little easier.

That, to the best of my knowledge, is the only thing that passes as a news line at the end of an hour and a half of BBC primetime Friday night television throughout almost all of which I managed to stay awake.

One of the many thousands of unfortunate side effects of having three general elections in four years is that it transfers upon what was once a precious event the status of a tired TV format.

The Complete Non-Event Debate is now as wearily familiar to the British public as the sight of a dozen idiots in tie bars and high heels being chased round some foreign marketplace by Karren Brady.

Boris Johnson didn’t bother with it, obviously. Tory prime ministers don’t bother with the debates, because Sir Lynton Crosby tells them not to.

Sir Lynton Crosby, knighted in 2015 in recognition for his pioneering work on the total shame transplant, knows how to win elections, and that’s to just be as transparently cynical as it is humanly possible to be.

It works, of course. Just ask David Cameron. Just make sure you don’t ask hm anything else.

Jeremy Corbyn didn’t bother with it either, which is a bit of a shame. For roughly the past two years, absolutely anybody on Team Corbyn, when asked about the latest disastrous polling around their saviour, has said with metronomic consistency that: “That’ll all change when there’s an election. When purdah starts, and the broadcasting rules change, and the British public get a good look at Jeremy Corbyn, that’ll all change, just like it did last time.”

And it was true last time. It did. But last time Jeremy Corbyn took part in this event. He arrived in Cambridge like Jesus riding a donkey into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Members of his team will still tell you that that was the turning point.

This time round, even Jeremy Corbyn would have to concede that it is hard for the British public to get a good look at Jeremy Corbyn if Jeremy Corbyn is not there. Could it be dimly possible that Jeremy Corbyn has kind of given up?

In their places were Rebecca Long-Bailey and the Tories’ newest bright young thing, Rishi Sunak.

It is truly depressing to consider how Sunak won, if that is the right word, the right to be there. During the Tory leadership campaign, when Boris Johnson was placed under house arrest (and still managed to have the police called to said house), Sunak was just one of a large band of ambitious young things, sent on to the airwaves as proxies for their coward-in-chief.

It is nice to think that Sunak knew, when he was sitting in a BBC radio studio, being asked by Emma Barnett why it was that Boris Johnson won’t tell us how many children he has, that he was actually auditioning for the role he found himself in on Friday night.

And that role, specifically, was bearing every outward resemblance to a functioning human, yet still saying such transparently absurd things as: “It is because we care so deeply about the NHS that we must get Brexit done.”

Shall we just pause and think about that? There is precious little else to discuss after all. Try and imagine, just four years ago, an actual vaguely sane person trying to claim that you can only sort out the NHS by leaving the European Union.

The worry, of course, is that we’ve been swimming in this river of filth for so long now that we’re almost used to it. That someone can come out with something like this and we all just shrug our shoulders and think, yep, NHS is in a right mess; need to leave the EU.

Rishi Sunak is a fairly young, fairly ambitious person. One of his first jobs out of university was to work for Goldman Sachs. There is not a soul at Goldman Sachs who will tell you that Brexit is anything other than a completely terrible idea. It will make the country poorer, that’s a fact. And when the country is poorer, the NHS is poorer. That is also a fact.

And yet, here is poor Rishi, trying to make a name for himself, trying to be the Next Big Thing, standing there and earnestly telling you that we’ve got to leave the EU to sort out the NHS.

A full-on 42 carat embarrassment. A ritualistic televised humiliation. A bad joke. Still, Sunak will be fine in the end. He’s shown he’s got what it takes to succeed, and that’s a brazen willingness to say and do absolutely anything the Big Boys tell him to, no matter how transparently absurd.

And the joke, in the end, is on us.