The Sun’s electrifying leadership debate showed there’s still nothing to choose between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss

LIGHT OF SUN

IT was cruelly cut short last night but The Sun’s electrifying leadership showdown still managed to generate, at last, more light than heat.

An audience of our readers didn’t get bogged down with daft issues about Rishi Sunak’s suits or Liz Truss’s earrings. Their questions were exactly what Britain wanted answered:

Why is the NHS broken? How can we continue to afford buying meat? What about our energy bills this winter?

Do you have the strength to continue to stand up to Putin?

And TalkTV’s Kate McCann moderated it brilliantly, insisting each candidate stuck to the point.

Rishi’s answers focussed mainly on the long-term. If we cannot get inflation down, he said, prices will get even worse next year. He’s right.

And borrowing more to cut taxes DOES just hand the bill to our grandkids to pay in years to come.

We’re just not sure it was the short-term reassurance our readers needed.

Liz reckoned there was enough money to lower tax now and scrap the planned rise in corporation tax which threatens to hammer investment in Britain.

Their remedies for the NHS, still reeling from Covid and with its backlogs vast, were different.

Rishi wants changes to its structure. Liz wants to liberate frontline staff from clipboard-wielding managers. Both are right.

We were more disheartened by their response on fracking. Both enthusiastically backed it, IF local communities approved.

But shale gas could provide us with crucial cheap energy for years. It cannot be up to locals to have a veto.

There’s still nothing to choose between these two candidates.

But with each debate they both look more like serious contenders for PM.

BAD NOT MAD

IT is understandable to want to believe Putin is a madman.

The Sun has called him that. Because the alternative is worse: That he is every bit as calculating and evil as Hitler and just as racist and genocidal.

Ukraine’s President Zelensky is convinced of the latter. He tells our Piers Morgan that the Kremlin tyrant is sane and knows his troops murder, torture and rape . . .  even children. Putin considers it a legitimate way to wage war.

And it’s harder to dispute that assessment when Putin’s own manifesto cited Russian history and in the starkest terms denied Ukraine’s right to exist.

It should shame every major Western leader of the last two decades that year after year at global summits they overlooked the monster in their midst.

And that some betrayed their citizens by shackling their economies to his oil and gas even after the invasion of ­Crimea and the chemical weapons attack in Salisbury.

Perhaps it’s THEIR sanity we should question.