What has Rishi Sunak been eating? The Prime Minister seemed so downbeat when I was with him in Edinburgh for the unveiling of the Scottish Conservative manifesto.
He rattled through his speech in a hotel room and then took questions from six of the travelling press pack. Five of the questions (mine was one) were about the betting scandal engulfing the Conservative party. He seemed a bit broken by it all.
Fast forward 48 hours and he had transformed his mood in the final head to head debate with Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer. And he carried that energy into a pub in Nottingham this morning, where I interviewed him for GB News.
“I’m up for the fight. I want people to join me in that fight. We should not surrender our country to this. We can do better,” he told me, warning viewers against “sleepwalking” into a Labour landslide when most of the country votes, a week today.
The Prime Minister seemed so downbeat when I was with him in Edinburgh for the unveiling of the Scottish Conservative manifesto
PA
Sunak let slip some of the internal research at CCHQ, claiming that there are only 150,000 voters who can change the course of this election if they vote for the Conservatives, rather than another party.
Sunak said that some “150,000 voters in key places will make the difference. Those are the people that will be watching, right? If you’re watching this show right now, you can make the difference”.
And he brushed off the claim by viewer Robert Blackstock (who voted for Brexit in 2016 and for Boris Johnson in 2019) that he was “a mediocre Prime Minister”.
Sunak might have got his mojo back but he pulled his punches when I offered him the chance to take personal swipes at Starmer or Reform UK leader Nigel Farage.
It was clear though that he bridled at the claim by Farage that the PM did not understand his country when he left the D-Day commemorations early. “I am deeply proud to be British,” he said: “I love this country. And no one should ever question that.”
Sunak had some warm words too for GB News pointing out that he enjoyed coming on the channel so he could talk “to talk directly to your viewers because I respect them and I want to make sure that they know I’m addressing their concerns”.
The same could not be said for “the Labour-run Welsh Parliament” which has banned the channel from its internal TV screens for assembly members, he said.
Sunak has clearly found a second wind, days ahead of the vast majority of Britons casting their votes in the general election on Thursday next week (one in five tend to vote by post).
“Mark my words, your pension, your home, your council tax, your car, you name it, Labour are going to tax it. It’s in their DNA,” Sunak told me today. Labour would certainly contest much of that.
But his repeated questioning in the BBC’s head-to-head debate – “what would you do” of Starmer on areas like cuts in the welfare budget and how to deal with burgeoning asylum cases were effective.
The question for Sunak and his team is whether anyone is listening because – if the polls are anything to go by – Britons have so far greeted Sunak’s entreaties to voters to give his party a fifth term in office with a gigantic shrug.
