Sunak has now confirmed himself a liability to the Tories - Brian Wilson

Rishi Sunak must have been persuaded that the ITV debate, if that is not too strong a word, presented him with a dilemma – whether to emerge as a loser or a liar. He went for the latter and ended up with the worst of both worlds.

To continue the alliterative theme, he then confirmed himself as a liability to every Tory candidate in even the safest of seats with the incomprehensible decision to leave the Normandy commemorations early, in order to deny being a liar in a London television studio.

There are some things a Prime Minister just doesn’t do and that is one of them. The incongruous image of Lord Cameron, a ghost of Tories past, alongside Macron, Biden and Scholz will long define Sunak’s lack of empathy for the role he strove so hard to elbow his way into.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak arrives at Imagination Childcare, in Swindon, Wiltshire, while on the General Election campaign trail on Friday. Photo: Jacob King/PA Wire

It is tempting to think there is a secret agent within Sunak’s inner circle. From the Downing Street drenching, through the Titanic venue to his early departure from Normandy and the revelation that he nearly didn’t go at all, it reads like a script with which Armando Iannucci would struggle to compete.

Nigel Farage, firmly installed on the beachheads of France, could scarcely believe his luck as Sunak handed him the opportunity to play the super-patriot. But that is a mere sideshow compared to the genuine offence caused to decent people of all political persuasions and none by the crassness of Sunak’s priorities.

Of course, his advisers are getting the blame and they obviously deserve their fair share of it. Their experience levels must be exceptionally low if they did not foresee any of these pitfalls. That is the problem, which affects all parties, with allowing people who are not nearly as clever as they think they are into the inner circles of influence.

I think this is largely a recent phenomenon which is also reflected in the make-up of Parliaments. Experience of the real world is no longer a qualification for entry into the political one. The fast track to a political career is by joining the army of “advisers” which now pervades both Whitehall and Holyrood. But what are they qualified to advise on?

I’m pretty sure Labour will have had its own inquest into how Keir Starmer was allowed to go into the ITV encounter without being prepared for the onslaught on tax which Sunak was certain to deliver, as the Tories always do. In fact, the £2000 fiction had been pre-advertised and the perfect rebuttal was available in the form of a letter from the Permanent Secretary at the Treasury. You can’t get much better than that.

Sunak repeatedly claimed that the figure had been authenticated by Treasury civil servants which seemed inherently improbable since they simply don’t do that kind of thing for any political party. The idea the Treasury would conspire in a Tory attack on an opponent who is likely to be its political master in a month’s time is ludicrous – yet that is what Sunak repeatedly claimed.

The Permanent Secretary, James Bowler, had actually written in advance to the Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, disowning any involvement in calculation of the “figure used” in a Tory document – i.e. £2000. “As you will expect”, he wrote, “civil servants were not involved in the production or presentation of the Conservative Party’s document”. That was the damning truth which Sunak rushed back from Normandy to address as his performance unravelled.

Televised election debates are usually rabbles or bore-ins which don’t change anyone’s minds. The best outcomes that most participants can hope for is to do no damage to their cause. Attacking on the basis of a falsehood is high risk, as Rishi Sunak has discovered. If he was persuaded that he had nothing to lose, then that has proved over-optimistic.

The alternative explanation is even worse – that he didn’t need any persuasion and thought he could make the lie stick if he repeated it often enough. Like many others, I couldn’t understand why it took Starmer so long to ridicule it. As it turned out, that scarcely mattered and it is Sunak who ended up on the defensive.

It’s not by chance that by far the most effective performer in the history of televised debates was an actor, Ronald Reagan. If I can be permitted an anecdote, I was in a school hall in Nashua, New Hampshire, as a journalist when he delivered a one-liner which arguably changed the course of history. It was the 1980 battle for the Republican nomination and George Bush was streets ahead.

He was due to go head to head with Reagan who contrived a row about whether other contenders should be allowed to speak rather than merely walk on stage and be seen. Reagan, who had funded the debate, seized the microphone and when the chairman tried to silence him, Reagan delivered his zinger: “Mr Moderator, I paid for this microphone”.

If there’s one thing Americans understand, it is the power of money. The hall went wild. Research showed that Reagan’s ratings soared at that moment. He won New Hampshire and the rest is history. As a subsequent account said: “The debate itself was anticlimactic. Virtually nobody can remember a single thing either man said. The nightly news and all the Sunday network shows were dominated by clips of the ‘I paid for this microphone’ line”.

Keir Starmer is a lawyer rather than a thespian, so it was never going to happen. But what a theatrical moment he could have had by producing that Treasury letter from his pocket and, there and then, made Sunak’s week even more ignominious than it has turned out to be. But one can’t have everything.