Isabel Hardman

How is it possible that a seven-way debate between the main parties in this election was more civilised than the two-way stand-off between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak earlier this week? Tonight's BBC debate was bizarrely better viewing. Sure, the party representatives interrupted one another, attacked each other, and flung about fake figures. But it was easier to follow. Mordaunt did not defend or praise Rishi Sunak It was also fascinating to see who attacked who. Penny Mordaunt largely pretended Nigel Farage didn't exist, but interrupted Angela Rayner frequently.

Is Alex Salmond feasting on the misery of an SNP that, having hit its high watermark, is now having to work hard to hold onto its Westminster seats? Not at all, according to the Alba leader, who told Andrew Neil on Times Radio today that he was in fact trying to help the cause of his former party by going after pro-independence voters who would otherwise have stayed at home. In so doing, of course, he was not-so-subtly suggesting that the SNP aren’t giving voters a reason to turn out at all.  There’s 20 per cent of people who are either going to stay at home or going to vote for a unionist party.

There is a truism in British politics that things would be much more civil if there were more women in the room. Tonight’s all-male Scottish leaders’ debate undermined that: the exchanges were far less vehement and aggressive than they had been when Nicola Sturgeon was SNP leader and when she was facing other female leaders. The real reason for this had nothing to do with the gender of the leaders standing in the STV studio, or indeed much to do with a new era of kinder, more civil politics and everything to do with the fact the wind has gone out of the SNP’s sails. John Swinney reminded the audience that he hadn’t expected to be in this position just five weeks ago, but that he wanted to ‘protect Scotland in these tough times’.

The problem with spending an election campaign saying as little new as possible is that it does leave a big gap that can easily be filled with rows over process and mistakes. Labour has a safety-first approach to its campaign, wanting to reassure voters that it has changed rather than being too exciting, but this makes the row over Diane Abbott all the more pronounced because there is little else to talk about. Yesterday, the party wanted to talk about its pledges on the NHS, but none of them were particularly new or striking. Instead, its frontbenchers were all asked repeatedly about the way the party has handled Abbott’s case. It was very clear few of them were happy about it.

Keir Starmer has been considerably less discombobulated by the election announcement than the party that made it, but he still has some catching up to do. The Labour leader knows that he has to answer the question of ‘why Labour’ to voters who have already largely accepted that there is a strong reason to change from the Tories. To that end, his speech this morning was an attempt to explain to the public what Labour now stands for. Slightly improbably, Starmer started by telling the audience that they really should visit Oxted. The reason for this was that Starmer sees Oxted as being the way he can explain his politics and what he stands for. He was starting with his biography (again).

Michael Gove has just announced he is standing down at the election. He spent the past few days agonising privately over the decision, and published a letter on Twitter paying tribute to the Conservative party’s legacy in government – mostly his legacy, in fact. He names education reform, funding for modernising prisons and rehabilitation, progressive environmental policies, levelling up, housing reform, Brexit and building safety. It is notable that he says he was ‘pleased to be able to introduce the most wide-ranging reforms to leasehold, social housing, and supported housing in a generation’. That is true, but the leasehold reforms did not go as far as Gove had wanted, and his attempts to reform the private rented sector were also frustrated by colleagues.