When Nick Clegg looked straight into the ITV camera, British politics changed forever. An hour and a half later, at the end of the first leaders’ debate, the Liberal Democrats became a plausible governing party. Even though his party’s poll ratings slipped back, Clegg’s assumption of high office was a natural progression from what happened that night in April. A short journey, in short, from television to government.
Television is now the critical medium. Newspaper sales are declining typically by between four and eight per cent a year, and voters collectively ignored virtually every newspaper endorsement back in May. Meanwhile, despite the hype, social media is only used by a minority. There were 36,500 people Tweeting during the first debate, for example. Compare that to the nine million who watched Nick Clegg’s sudden elevation – a point not lost on some of ITV’s advertisers who have told the broadcaster that the bout of Cleggmania reminded them that the only media that can change a brand image overnight is television.
Labour needs television to reinvent itself now and it is critical that television debates are at the heart of the five-way leadership battle. They are not in the interest of any one candidate over the other, but rather in the interest of the party as a whole. While any leadership debate may not be mass peaktime viewing, simply holding them would be an advertisement for a party that needs to reach BBC and ITV viewers, the everyday millions lost in the years after 2005. And there is no reason why a debate can’t reach at least couple of million viewers, a little over double Newsnight’s core audience.
Yet it would be a mistake to repeat the format of pre-election debates. There is no need to overload the viewers – three debates were one too many. At 90 minutes, unheard of for a current affairs show, the programmes were half an hour too long. And, in any event, as this year’s experience showed, it is the first debate that generates the excitement, while a second could serve as a final test. While that may not keep all the broadcasters happy, it would allow Labour to see which of the channels will offer the best slot for all five on air.
Meanwhile, a stilted, behind the podium format set-up, with – worst of all – a silent audience, is no way for a major party to conduct itself in a contemporary democracy. Audience members should be both from both the party and the public, because this is about the best candidate’s electability. Those asking questions should be allowed a follow-up; clapping should be permitted – and, above all, candidates should be free to move around, armed with little more than a radio microphone and a sense of where the cameras are.
We judge politicians by how they interact. Whatever our initial cynicism, voters and viewers want to believe they have a relationship with those on power and on screen. When Bill Clinton sank the elder George Bush back in 1992, it was his answer to a question from a woman that proved decisive. She asked him how the national debt had affected each of their lives, Bush mumbled something about interest rates. But it was Clinton who left the podium and began his answer by saying: ‘Tell me how it affected you again…’ It is the kind of empathy that was lost during the Brown years, but has not been fully captured by David Cameron who is as prone to making up stories about a ‘black man’ who joined the navy at 10, as he is at claiming to share voters’ concern about immigration.
Labour now has the chance to show it can do things differently. How the party and its leadership candidates conduct themselves on television is a good, symbolic way to start.