Tory leadership TV debate abandoned as presenter faints on air

A televised debate between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak was abandoned abruptly on Tuesday when presenter Kate McCann fainted in the studio. Viewers heard a loud crash and saw Ms Truss look shocked and move towards Ms McCann before the TalkTV channel went off air.

“Kate McCann fainted on air tonight and, although she is fine, the medical advice was that we shouldn’t continue with the debate. We apologise to our viewers and listeners,” Talk TV said in a statement.

In the 30 minutes before it was interrupted, the debate saw Mr Sunak and Ms Truss adopt a friendlier tone than in previous encounters, although they disagreed sharply on the economy and tax policy.

The questions were posed by Sun readers, and the first came from a man who said he had received no support from public services after a cancer operation and had to rely on a charity for help. Mr Sunak cited his decision to increase national insurance to pay for clearing the National Health Service (NHS) backlog after Covid as evidence that the service was safe in his hands.

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“It’s funding the new technology that helps physicians focus on what they need to do, which is treating us rather than bureaucracy. From day one, tackling this backlog will be my number one public service priority. I’m confident we can get the wait list down quicker but we’re not going to be able to do any of that if the NHS doesn’t have that security,” he said.

Corporate tax

Ms Truss criticised Mr Sunak’s plan to increase the corporate tax rate next year from 19 to 25 per cent, contrasting it with Ireland’s low rate. She said the former chancellor’s policies risked strangling economic growth and driving Britain into recession.

“Rishi’s policies are making us less competitive. The fact is that if you put up corporation tax too high, you get less money into the exchequer. So all this talk about ‘we’re going to be paying these debts off’, we’re not going to be paying those debts off if we go into recession and the tax take goes down from companies and the tax take goes down from people because they’re out of work. That is the reality,” she said.

“The biggest problem we face is a lack of economic growth. And economic growth is not just a number on a spreadsheet. Economic growth is about jobs and opportunities.”

Mr Sunak said the increase would affect only the biggest companies, adding that he believed most people had enough common sense to know that you do not get something for nothing.

“I think it’s fair to ask the largest companies because my plans only apply to the largest companies. For smaller companies, nothing’s going to change. They’re getting help to employ staff, they’re getting tax cuts on that,” he said.

Polls of Conservative party members show Mr Sunak trailing far behind Ms Truss, and YouGov found that most Conservatives thought she was the winner of Monday night’s debate on BBC One. The two candidates will take part in the first of 12 official hustings of the campaign on Thursday evening in Leeds.