It’s a washout: fighters pull their punches in Question Time’s Makerfield match-off | John Crace

Andy Burnham takes round one of the big byelection bout while Reform’s Rob Kenyon takes aim at himself

S econds out … Round one. In the left corner we have the middleweight King of the North … Andy Burnham. In the far-right corner we have the total lightweight … Rob “The Plumber” Kenyon. On the undercard, we have three nonentities we can barely bring ourselves to mention. Mike “The Tory” Winstanley, Sarah “The Green” Wakefield and Jake “The Lib Dem” Austin. And if you think these three are dopey, you should see some of the other candidates in the Makerfield byelection who we didn’t invite.

Thursday night’s edition of BBC Question Time had come billed as the great showdown between Burnham and Kenyon with three no-hopers hung out as a veneer of impartiality. But no matter how much the presenter, Fiona Bruce, tried to hype up the programme as television gold, the excitement never really got started. The showdown was that the showdown never happened.

Andy had clearly decided on a policy of non-aggression. To not attack Rob personally, no matter the temptation. He wouldn’t attempt to score cheap points by pointing out Kenyon’s shortcomings and contradictions. He had quite reasonably decided it would be much easier to win friends in the audience, in Makerfield and at home, if he let Rob do that for himself. Andy was happy to win on a technical knockout. The technical bit being that Rob knocked himself out.

As for Kenyon, he just looked terrified. A rabbit in the headlights. Completely out of his depth and his comfort zone. His mind seemed to be constantly working overtime, desperately trying to remember the party lines the Reform media team had been prepping him with for the last few days. He was the least relaxed person in the north-west by some distance. Come the end, he would need a lie-down badly. Probably wishing he had never heard the name of Nigel Farage.

There was a deep irony in the first question being on the curse of career politicians. Because Burnham, a career politician to his core, had dressed to make himself look like Joe Bloke. Mr Ordinary. Someone with whom you could have a pint. A chilled-out black T-shirt under a black jacket. Shades of the Milk Tray man. Meanwhile, Kenyon, whose whole shtick up till now has been that he’s just a local man of the people, had squeezed himself into a shirt and tie and was wearing a sharp suit. Looking every inch an ersatz career politician.

Andy got to go first. He wasn’t a career politician. He was a carer politician. If he had a fault it was that he cared too much. About Makerfield. About Manchester. About everything. He wanted to change things, which was why he had left Westminster in 2016. That’s odd. I could have sworn that he had left Westminster because he had lost the Labour leadership election to Jeremy Corbyn and could see that the party would be dead in the water for years to come.

Various audience members, egged on by Fiona, mentioned the elephant in the room. The only reason there was a byelection was because the sitting MP had stood down so that Andy could challenge for the leadership. Time and again, Andy demurred. He didn’t want to get ahead of himself. He was here to serve Makerfield. The response of the classic career politician. Finally, realising he was making himself look a bit of a halfwit, Burnham came clean. He fancied being prime minister. One member of the audience almost wept. She said she couldn’t stand Keir Starmer a moment longer.