Televised leaders’ debates are under threat

“It is time now for the cameras to leave the room!” With those words, Sir Graham Brady summed up the entitled, incestuous and arrogant way that the Conservative Party is selecting their leader as well as Britain’s next Prime Minister.

Brady was speaking, grudgingly, after having allowed the media in to report the results of a round of voting by Tory MPs, delivered live by the “officers” of the ’22, standing in a row with chests puffed out like the prefects on stage for school assembly in days gone by.

Following that brief ceremony, the reporting media were kicked out, ironically, to clear the room for “hustings”, one of many private sessions for Tory MPs to hear from the would-be prime ministers and to question them without the embarrassment of the public being able to find out what is really on the minds of the ruling party.

If the Tories were choosing the secretary of a private club such stuffiness might be reasonable. A party in opposition is usually desperate for all the publicity it can get. But when two relatively small selectorates – 358 MPs, and an unquantified number of perhaps 200,000 party members – are also choosing the next head of the nation’s government it is the duty of TV news organisations to get as much information as possible out to the electorate at large.

Alas, competing news organisations are setting about the task in a way likely to minimize public interest while playing into the hands of partisan political manipulators. This depressing trend is evident on both sides of the Atlantic. The noble idea of open, free political debate on television has not become established here and is under attack, like so many other national standards, in the United States.

In the current Conservative leadership cycle, the broadcasters have rushed forward with competing plans for TV debates between the candidates – resulting in three debates clustering over five days. Channel 4’s Britain’s next PM was last night (Friday) and ITV’s The Conservative Leadership Debate is on Sunday.  Sky News was the first to announce a debate for Monday, only to be undercut by rival channels. Significantly, Sky has now rescheduled for Tuesday evening.

The BBC has yet to show its hand but is bound to push forward its tawdry Question Time format at some stage. Hanging back now looks shrewd. A candidates’ debate will be most pertinent between the final two during August once MPs have done their work, and the party members are casting their postal or online votes.

C4 and ITV will have the same cast list.  Krishnan Guru-Murthy for C4 and, presumably, Julie Etchingham (she hasn’t been officially nominated yet) will confront the same five wannabes currently on the ballot at Westminster: Sunak, Mordaunt, Truss, Badenoch and Tugendhat.

Until they are all in the studio No Shows are the producers’ nightmare. C4’s imaginative decision in 2019 to substitute a melting ice sculpture for the boycotting Boris Johnson is widely believed to have fuelled his scorched earth decision to sell off the troublesome network.

But this time both networks have been guaranteed a full turn-out. That is because multi-headed events, known as “clusterf***s in the trade, are just the kind of meaningless shows that front runners like. When airtime is shared out so thinly there isn’t much room for potentially transformative pratfalls and knockout blows. The big fight is to hog the microphone for your few allotted minutes.

After the three concentrated Cameron-Clegg-Brown debates in 2010, the Conservatives were all for dilution. In subsequent general elections, the Tories kept insisting that the smaller parties – with no chance of furnishing a Prime Minister – must be included.

The “Public Service Broadcasters”, BBC and ITV, duly complied, thus doing the voting public a disservice by destroying the 2010 leadership debate model. Also-rans are always keen to intrude. Indeed, this cycle’s tail-ender Tom Tugendhat may only have stayed in the race for his two telly spots this weekend.  

Naturally, there has been no coordination between Sir Graham and his cronies and the broadcasters over the timetable. Sky has cannily moved its debate later so that it will be the most worthwhile. By Tuesday evening the third and fourth round of MP voting will have taken place, winnowing down the number of candidates to three, or possibly the final two if someone else drops out. Kay Burley and her online panel will have the time to explore the real choice of the next prime minister.

Sir Lynton Crosby tells me that he thinks debates are less important than broadcasters believe. Maybe so. Just in case candidates in his ambit have tended to take pains to make sure that meaningful debates take place as seldom as possible.

Whether or not he has the Wizard of Oz’s support, the establishment candidate Rishi Sunak is following the Crosby playbook. He’ll turn up for the two five-headers but, I understand, he has yet to commit to taking part in Sky’s more testing scenario.

I am a champion of proper TV debates and they are under threat from a combination of deceitful politicians and self-serving TV executives.

Being part of the Sky team which brought about properly moderated leadership debates before the 2010 General election remains the proudest achievement of my career. This is not because debates provide entertainment but because it is proven that, done properly, they inform and educate the electorate about the democratic choices before them.

Debates have thrown up some dramatic moments: “I agree with Nick” “I’m paying for this microphone” “I knew Jack Kennedy… Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy” “Because you’d be in jail” but only in one debate in ten.

Not everyone watches debates as they happen but the rise of digital media has made recorded clips ever more important. The pitches from the broadcasters all stress the role of replays on social media and YouTube.

I doubt that debates change the outcomes of an election often – what they tend to do is re-enforce the impressions voters are forming of the candidates’ personalities while putting them on the record regarding the actions and policies they will implement.

To perform a democratic purpose they require formality, agreed rules, and unselfish collaboration between rival broadcasters and political parties. That is why the Commission of Presidential Debates has been so effective in the US.

Since it was formed in the 1970s debates between the nominees have happened routinely but that is now under threat. This year the Republican National Committee voted unanimously to resign from the commission. There was only one presidential debate in 2020 because Trump pulled out of a Covid-aware remote debate.

Democrat and Republican debates during the primaries are the nearest equivalent to the leadership contest here, although the season is much longer, at least fifteen months rather than eight weeks. Parties and broadcasters have now imposed some discipline after the excess of 2008 when both parties’ nominations were open and there were more than twenty debates for each side.

In the open election, the number of debates was down to twelve for democrats and sixteen for the Republicans. In spite of 29 registered hopefuls in 2020, the Democrats kept it down to just eleven encounters in 2020. The polarisation of American media has made the screening of debates and choice of participants more an adjunct of selected campaigns rather than a chance to scrutinize them all fairly.

After bringing about the Leaders’ Debates in 2010, Sky News immediately collaborated with the other broadcasters to bring about the prime ministerial debates on an open access basis. That remains the only UK general election during which proper debates occurred.

Since then Sky has repeatedly proposed the establishment of an independent debate commission in this country to co-ordinate proper political debates. BBC and ITV are not interested, presumably because they consider protecting their brand of political coverage to be more important. That results in the present mess, devalues the debate format and lets down the public.

It only serves the likes of Sir Graham Brady and the Conservative leadership who want to rule without being held to account.