When I worked in 10 Downing Street for David Cameron I had a quote from Tony Blair’s memoirs on the wall next to my desk - and used to include it in as many presentations as I could get away with because it captures a defining fact about politics and elections.
“The single hardest thing for a practising politician to understand,” Blair wrote, “is that most people, most of the time, don’t give politics a first thought all day long.” The reason why this matters so much, he concluded, is that it leads politicians to “focus on the small picture, not the big picture”.
The drawn-out saga of the 2015 election TV debates is a classic example of a small-picture issue. Those in the Westminster bubble have obsessed over the debates. Will they happen? If so, how many? What will the format be? Which leaders should be included? Whose fault will it be if they don’t take place?
The truth is that, apart from the tiny (and profoundly unrepresentative) cross-section of the electorate who are partisan activists and political true-believers, nobody cares. Voters crave clarity and certainty, about what the political parties really believe and will do if they are in government - solid ground on which to base a confident decision about which party will do the best (or least bad) job of handling the most important issues and the unexpected events that so often end up defining governments.
The inherent artificiality and rigidity of TV debates makes them simply a spectacle, not, as the broadcasters try to persuade themselves, an exercise in accountability. There are few examples, from anywhere, ever, of anything happening in an election debate that ended up making any difference to the result. That’s because they are not, in any meaningful sense of the word, debates at all. They are a trading exercise in the delivery of pre-tested soundbites and “pivots”. In other words, they are the continuation of peacetime politics.
Broadcasters speak of election debates in solemn tones as if they are somehow different from all the interactions between politicians during the previous five years. They are not, of course. The only difference is that the party leaders themselves, rather than their senior political colleagues, are on show.
But we already have staged faceoffs between the party leaders every week at PMQs, which occasionally generate heat but never light, and voters learned long ago not to take them remotely seriously. I hope that we won’t just have to imagine how the Gogglebox families will be reacting to seven party leaders trading lines and interrupting each other.
In 2010, curiosity more than expectation drew a huge audience to the historic first debate (though far more voters didn’t watch than did), the main revelation of which was that Nick Clegg, whom most voters had never heard of before, turned out to be a skilful communicator with a refreshing style. There was no substantive enlightenment on any policy issue and, as the novelty wore off, the 10% jump in support that the Lib Dems got from the first debate steadily eked away.
On election day they ended up doing no better than in the polls before the TV debates - and got five fewer MPs than at the previous election. In the Scottish referendum campaign last year, Alistair Darling, the leader of the no campaign, was judged unanimously to have won the first TV debate, after which the polls showed a huge swing from no to yes. Alex Salmond was deemed to have won the second TV debate even more convincingly, but Scotland then went and voted no.
The lesson from the much longer and more varied history of TV debates in the US is the same. So, there is no reason ever to have thought that having TV debates, or not, would make any difference to how people vote at this general election. If the broadcasters had been allowed to do what they wanted, the entire campaign would have been dominated by debates, as it was in 2010: days of repetitious buildup followed by days of post-match analysis, running straight into buildup to the next debate, then around again.
David Cameron’s point that the TV debates sucked the life out of the 2010 campaign is not only correct but also important. Preparation for the debates meant that the party leaders had virtually no time, until the final few days, to go around the country engaging with voters on the issues that mattered to them. The media gorged 24 hours a day on stories about process, which fascinate journalists (and party tribalists) but bore normal voters. Debates don’t, in fact, illuminate the election, they trivialise it.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Andrew Cooper is a Conservative peer, Lord Cooper of Windrush, a director of the polling company Populus, a former strategy director at No 10 Downing Street and an adviser to the Tory party.
