A cheer and a half, then, for Labour’s five leadership candidates, who slugged it out on Newsnight and sought to impress the membership with their skills in front of the camera. It wasn’t, frankly, the most riveting bit of television, but it was a marginal improvement on the three leaders’ debates – where the most exciting event was the fact that Nick Clegg could look directly into the television camera and remember every questioner’s name.
There is little doubt that TV debates are here to stay – the three before the election changed politics for ever. 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.
What the debates did was establish television as the absolutely 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.
So, 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, their existence should be an advertisement for a party that needs to reach BBC and ITV viewers, the everyday millions lost in the years after 2005. Unfortunately the late night Newsnight effort only attracted 700,000 viewers, deterred perhaps by the warm weather, the football and the late evening slot. Better scheduled, and more imaginatively produced, they should be reaching double that.
The problem is that the Newsnight debate stuck too close to the format of the pre-election debates, although the programme was at least shorter. But there was too much of the stilted, behind the podium set up. The audience may not have been silent, but they were very, very well behaved, with a near-silence that is no way for a major party to conduct itself in a contemporary democracy.
Audience members should be from both the party and the public, because this is about the best candidate’s electability. At least those asking questions should be allowed a follow-up – but there should be more interaction with the audience – including the use of vulgar techniques like clapping (it works all right on Question Time). Above all, candidates should be free to move around, armed with little more than a radio microphone to create more opportunities to relate to the audience.
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. Newsnight was a good start, but it is possible to do better.