Leaders’ TV debates like a bad episode of Britain’s Got Talent

BIG debates between party leaders may create headlines and lots of commentary, but they’re a complete waste of time.

They’re like party political broadcasts, only worse, because nobody expects anything of a party political broadcast. They know it for what it is: one of those paradoxical pointless survivors like those fish that live hundreds of kilometres deep in the ocean and have no eyes because the pressure that far down would make fish eyes pop. Nobody in this country would be upset if party political broadcasts were discontinued, except perhaps the independent production houses that make them. They have neither merit, memorability, purpose nor function.

The big debates are equally useless. They’re the ultimate triumph of hope over experience. Viewers who watch them do so in the hope that one of the participants will put his foot squarely in his mouth or that one participant will deliver a killer blow. The lust for the killer blow never eases, despite the fact that never, in the entire history of international big debates, has there been one. Yet you hear media people reverently quoting Ronald Reagan, whose attempt was the feeble “There you go again”, or the other bloke, who told that moron, Dan Quayle, using a carefully prepared line, that “You are no Jack Kennedy”.

In addition to the possibility of the killer blow or the foot-in-mouth, big debates are supported by a myth which regards them as central to astonishing electoral victories, like when the tanned and relaxed Jack Kennedy trounced the jowly Richard Nixon and went on to a landslide. Except, of course, that Kennedy didn’t trounce Nixon – those who listened on radio thought the latter markedly better informed, particularly on international policy – and JFK did not win by a landslide but by a whisker.

Media, nevertheless love the big debates, because they allow for lots of analysis based on body language and because they can replace journalism with opinion polls. The opinion polls, in the case of the second debate between Cameron, Clegg and Brown, emerged within minutes of its conclusion, all of them based on the wrong question.

The wrong question is “Who won the debate?” In a situation where Labour is cordially loathed by most of the people who bought into it in the first heady days of Tony Blair’s premiership, where the nation’s economy is doing badly, their banking system has hit bad times, and where Blair’s successor has turned out to be a grimly unpopular figure with the charisma of a post box, the answer to the question is always going to be either Clegg or Cameron. Even if Gordon Brown suddenly developed the capacity to levitate on the set, it still wouldn’t make people put him in the winner’s enclosure. The winner was going to be one of the other two, and if you read enough British newspapers the following day, you learned that it was both of the other two, but so close to each other (and so closely trailed by Brown) as to be within the margin of error.

Not that it matters which leader was supposed to have won. Winning a big TV debate has no relevance to an election unless it changes the voting intentions of the electorate. Otherwise, it’s show business, and pretty dire show business at that. The Sky production put Clegg, Cameron and Brown standing in triangulated lumps of what looked like a crashed plane, facing a tiered and tired audience at least one of whom went to sleep while we watched and an enormous and enormously happy presenter clutching the ever-present set of prompt cards. The three contenders addressed questions posed by members of the audience while making the odd civilised side-swipe at each other.

Of the three, Brown – as might have been expected – had the best grasp of the minutiae of Government policy, telling an 80-something woman in the audience that in addition to her pathetic old-age pension, she was entitled to a rake of other financial schemes designed to keep the poor afloat.

But of course, when opinion pollsters ask who won the debate, they don’t define their terms. They don’t ask who had the best knowledge of policy, which, in this episode, would undoubtedly have been Brown. They don’t specify if winning depends on understanding the mechanics of the TV studio, which would have put Clegg out front, although the other two had caught up on him quite a bit since the first debate. Nor do the pollsters ask about opportunities missed in the debate – and if that question were asked, Cameron would lose marks immediately for missing endless chances to stick it to Brown and articulate the feelings of the majority of Britons about the Labour government.

Cameron didn’t lose either debate, but he didn’t win them either, and that was a significantly poor result for a younger man representing a renewed party up against an unpopular, older prime minister. Viewers who liked Cameron before the programme started talked, afterwards, of his “passion”. Passion has replaced patriotism as the last refuge of the scoundrel. Talk loud and fast and some twit will describe you as filled with passion, and this will be seen as a virtue, despite the fact that at this stage, every halfwit making anything from chocolate to pooper scoopers claims to be doing their job with passion.

The crucial mistake, of course, was the Conservatives caving in and allowing Nick Clegg on the platform. If they thought they were going to get brownie points as a result, they were thick as planks. Instead of being able to constantly harass the prime minister, Cameron had to cope with a leader of the Lib Dems pip-squeaking his way to fame through a series of know-all mini lectures. (Have you noticed, by the way, that Nick Clegg has a semi-detached chin, just like Podge and Rodge?)

Because Clegg was not very well known, letting him onto a TV set with the prime minister and the leader of the Conservatives instantly promoted him to an unreal equality, and, fair dues to him, he was more competent, in televisual terms, than the other two, first time around. But talking to a camera ain’t rocket science. Talking memorably to a camera is a challenge to which none of the three rose.

What the opinion polls should have done was ask a different question and lay down some groundwork a few months ago. Let’s say that in January, they selected more than a thousand people of varying ages who intended to vote, and who might have a preference for a particular political party, but were not irrevocably wedded to either Labour, the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats.

This group would then be reached, directly after the debate, and asked “Which party are you now going to vote for?” If their voting intention had changed as a result of what one party leader said, that would be a real measure of how effective he had been.

Otherwise, voters are simply rating the performance of each leader as if they were taking part in a particularly bad edition of Britain’s Got Talent.