Lord Ashdown said David Cameron will try to “mess up” the proposed party leader TV debates by including the Green party, with the former Lib Dem leader rejecting a head-to-head between the prime minister and Ed Miliband as unfair to Nick Clegg.
Ashdown, the Lib Dem campaign manager, said Cameron would do all he could to avoid going head-to-head with Ukip leader Nigel Farage, included in the debates for the first time in plans published by broadcasters on Monday.
“I know exactly what Cameron will do, he’ll say we will do it but the Greens have got to be in it. He’ll try to make a mess – I’m not saying the Greens are a mess – but too many participants will make it a mess,” Ashdown told the Radio Festival in Salford on Wednesday.
“Cameron doesn’t want to face up to Farage because he thinks it will confer votes and authority on Farage – I think he’s wrong by the way – he will not want to do this, he will want to find any excuse not to do it.”
However, Ashdown took issue with one of the three proposed debates, which would be anchored by Jeremy Paxman and broadcast by Channel 4 and Sky News, in which Cameron and Miliband would face off without Clegg.
“My view is the Lib Dems need to be in, you can’t let Cameron and Miliband have a free hit on the Lib Dems without Nick Clegg there,” said Ashdown. “This is about the record of the government and you can’t not have one of the parties represented. It is a free hit for the other two.”
He praised the broadcasters for coming up with the plan, which has prompted the Green party to consider legal action over their exclusion, saying he was “delighted they had stepped in. The alternative was us politicians would try to sort it out and we would make it a mess”.
Ashdown said the debates, which took place for the first time in 2010, “had to happen. If it happens for a second time it becomes a permanent part of British democracy”.
Ashdown, who appeared at the festival to talk about LBC’s Call Clegg programme with its host, Nick Ferrari, said the real Clegg was the opposite of the public’s perception of the deputy prime minister, blaming the right wing press for “dumping 23 buckets of shit over him every month”.
Earlier, Ashdown had said Lib Dem advisers had told Clegg not to do the weekly phone-in show. “There were those who said ‘I’m not sure, this is putting you really at risk,’” said Ashdown. But he said Clegg thought it was “absolutely the right thing to do”.
Ashdown joked Clegg “should be prime minister but the bastards won’t vote for him”.
Ferrari revealed that all efforts to get Ed Miliband on an LBC phone-in show had failed. “We have got Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Nick Clegg, I have done everything possible. I don’t know,” he said.
Ashdown said: “They must be frightened not of you but of the revealing moment [with a caller]. The truth is the public don’t trust us.”
