Marina Hyde sums it up for me:
For all his crowds now, however, it is notable that both Corbyn and May failed to meaningfully turn up for the EU referendum campaign last year, and saw the side that they nominally backed lose. To see them offered now as an either/or to the electorate is an unfortunate reminder that the cop-outs have inherited the Earth.
Post the referendum, Britain is a country in which families and friendships have been deeply affected by the divisions the vote exposed, making the current choice between two people perceived to have wimped out of the strife everyone else went through feel somewhat galling.
Sometimes we require our leaders to be rather better, rather bigger, than standing in an otherwise empty hangar and repeating emotionless soundbites to 100 of their own activists. Where was the vision, the leadership, the emotionally stirring warning that every ordinary civilian ought to prepare for a long and new kind of war against a complex enemy?
The challenge is to rise to these times. To have election coverage running in counterpoint to horrendous news of bodies being identified should have reminded us all that there are, ultimately, issues that transcend a prime minister’s preference for being hermetically sealed in a removal firm warehouse and twatting on about her strength. To persist with that smallness of approach in the face of such vast, epoch-defining horrors says rather more about you than you might otherwise have cared to reveal.