David Cameron’s plan for the leaders’ debate was to get it out of the way before anyone had noticed the election campaign had begun, and then ensure that it passed off without sparking interest. On the strength of Thursday night, he has pulled it off. No ringing refrain emerged from a staccato seven-way conversation. The first four polls pointed to four different “winners”, and averaging across all five of the eventual surveys suggested that neither Mr Cameron, nor Ed Miliband, Nigel Farage or Nicola Sturgeon had broken ahead of their rivals in any meaningful way.
But the lessons of this forgettable evening must be remembered. Atrophied voluntary parties are not in a condition to turn the masses out to chilly church hall meetings, but here was a chance for politics to reach into the living rooms of people that it doesn’t usually trouble. It was an opportunity blown. The prime minister’s pathetic refusal to go podium-to-podium with his principal rival is the most important reason for that. So the first thing that’s needed, as the Guardian has already argued, is a US-style debates commission to avoid opportunistic, wrecking games being played with the cast list.
Such a commission would also need to grapple with the format, a question that has not been satisfactorily answered by either of the two pre-election broadcasts thus far this year. The back-to-back Jeremy Paxman interrogations of Messrs Miliband and Cameron on Channel 4 and Sky had its moments, but it vested too much authority in one man. A different format would have allowed for a panel of journalists and/or experts, to choose which questions to pursue. Besides, while Mr Paxman is an able journalist, he is not an electoral participant. There is no substitute for the country’s would-be leaders tackling each other directly. The ITV debate was the moment for that, but the leaders were so abundant, and their time was so short, that each was more concerned with staring at the camera to say their pre-prepared bit. Even the wilder claims of Nigel Farage were sometimes left unchallenged.
The final question of format concerns the place of the territorial parties, not standing candidates across the UK. While the polls disagreed on who had “won” the debate, with most voters siding with their party’s chief, when the question was who had “performed well”, Ms Sturgeon was, by a distance, out ahead of the pack. In Scotland, her performance is likely to have been judged even more winning, a reflection, in part, of her sure political touch. In part, however, it also surely reflects her freedom to stand, unencumbered, as a champion of Scotland, while her rivals were obliged to weigh, painstakingly, how words would play in different parts of the realm.
It has to be asked whether this is fair, and whether it would be more appropriate for her to debate with Scottish Labour’s Jim Murphy. The underlying question here, however, goes deeper than the TV debates – it is really the viability of pan-UK parties amid a discourse where the salient question is whether you are on your own country’s side – or instead on that of the hated Westminster.
