Anne Perkins: Corbyn’s Teflon coating of authenticity deflects rational critcism

There is, I am told, a new dating show on Channel 4 where the contestants’ nakedness is slowly revealed, allowing judgment to be reached on their datability. The Labour leadership hustings are beginning to feel a bit like that. Slowly dawning horror and that weird kind of embarrassment that comes from watching someone do things they will, definitely, regret later.

Each hustings heaps on the misery. The BBC show this morning, dwelling on internal arguments for almost the whole of the first hour, was a bleak illustration of how angry and nasty people get when they are positively encouraged to be, you know, nasty and angry. It was like a couples counselling session where the partners were instructed to say what they really think and don’t worry about the consequences.

No wonder one young woman said she’d rather tell a Tory conference she was Labour than a Labour conference she was an Owen Smith supporter. Unfortunately, that’s an entry level lesson in politics: arguments with your own side are infinitely more wounding than fights with the enemy.

But pretending there isn’t a row doesn’t help either. Smith is smart enough, surely, to realise that telling one great big porky (there is no rift between the MPs and the membership) makes everyone look a bit sideways at everything else you assert. It didn’t help that he knew who Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber were. Each tiny success made him that bit less appealing than Jeremy Corbyn. Failing to recognise Ant and Dec ought to make Corbyn look a tiny bit less ordinary than he pretends, but instead it becomes just another aspect of his virtue.

This is the impossibility of this dystopian contest. Everything Smith says sounds a bit like the clever kid at the front of the class giving the right answer. Everything Corbyn says, even the grotesque populism of his claim to be unable to say whether he preferred Leon Trotsky or the man who won Labour three elections, brought peace to Northern Ireland, introduced the Human Rights Act and the minimum wage and almost doubled spending on the NHS, Tony Blair – even this gobsmacking piece of juvenilia just slicks another impenetrable layer of authenticity that is a Teflon coating against all rational criticism.

Poor Owen Smith.

David Wearing: Ant, Dec and football – but little policy discussion

Putting it as gently as possible, the BBC did not quite cover itself in glory in its role as a public service broadcaster this morning. Over an hour and 20 minutes of a two-hour programme had elapsed before the discussion turned to substantive issues of policy. First we learned that Owen Smith couldn’t remember the score from the Wales v Belgium match in June, and that Jeremy Corbyn couldn’t recognise a photo of Ant and Dec. Fascinating stuff, no doubt, to a nation experiencing a decade-long squeeze in living standards, and a deeply uncertain economic future.

There was much discussion of the divisions within Labour, but barely any serious exploration of what the political basis for those divisions actually is. The section of the debate devoted to the issue of abuse within the party generated more heat than light. Labour members in the audience were clear that abuse had flown in both directions, but Smith was determined to make the mud stick to Corbyn alone. The opportunity could have been taken to debate the substance of the Shami Chakrabarti report, but instead there was cheap innuendo about the integrity of a woman who has been Britain’s leading civil liberties advocate over the past 13 years. None of this was particularly constructive.

The mere 35 minutes devoted to policy rendered what discussion there was largely superficial. There was one fascinating moment when Smith appeared to advocate talking to Isis, which Corbyn sensibly had ruled out, but the significance of this was missed, and the debate moved on.

By the end BBC viewers could have been forgiven for wondering why the press and leading Labour figures have spent so much of the past week talking about Trotskyism. There were no calls from Corbyn for the violent overthrow of the state, the abolition of private property or the installation of a communist regime. All the middle-aged guy from Wiltshire appeared to be suggesting was that British capitalism should be run a little less like America’s version, and a little more like Sweden’s.

It was the basic reasonableness of his position – in spite of his sometimes maddening failure to give sharper, more focused answers – that saw most of the neutral section of the audience expressing their support for him at the end of the debate.

Ayesha Hazarika: Not navel gaze? We’re going for a full political endoscopy

Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith are having a gruelling August, hauling themselves from gig to gig playing to difficult, hard to please crowds, getting brutal reviews and by this point, even they must be bored of their own material. Today’s debate was hard work for everyone, but especially the viewer.

Most of the two-hour extravaganza was spent talking about infighting with a small amount of policy discussion and then went back to both sides taking lumps out of each other and trading tales of Twitter trolling. This is not the fault of the show, it’s a reflection of where the Labour party is now. We are a party that laughs in the face of the political cliche: “We must not navel gaze and look inwards.” Get lost. We’re going for a full political endoscopy.

Corbyn started off strong and looking as cool as a cucumber. His answer to the question “What do you do in your spare time?” was impressive. He runs, tends his allotment, reads widely, makes stuff (jam I presume) and cycles. If this doesn’t work out he could be a life coach. Smith’s answer was less inspiring as he trotted out his CV and talked about his kids but that’s OK because he knows who Taylor Swift is.

The two men traded some blows on handling abuse within the party and Brexit but there didn’t really feel like there was much of an exploration of the big issues. Smith managed to get under Corbyn’s skin a few times and we saw an interesting new Team Corbyn debating manoeuvre which is basically yelling, “How do YOU know?”

But we didn’t really learn anything new from the debate. We saw that Smith is a good performer who is concerned with how Labour can get back into power. We saw that Corbyn is popular and he won with the undecideds in the audience. That the current party mood feels members are the most important people in politics. And we saw that the big questions like how are we ever going to make things happen are not really important right now.

It’s going to be a long summer.