Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer fight for a poundshop presidency

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.