Six of the Best 283

Missives from Doktorb does not want to see leaders' debates at the next general election: "There’s enough reality television in politics without our leaders turning into contestants on Million Pound Drop. I’m devoted far more than normal people should be towards accountability, democratic renewal and electoral reform, but putting our political leaders into contrived Q&A sessions where Downton Abbey should be is an experiment I don’t fancy repeating."

"Politics Transformed: The High Tech Battle for Your Vote", says Mashable, is an in-depth look at how digital media is affecting elections - from online ad targeting to Internet voting, from political crowdfunding to massive data mining.

Mark Thompson says small rail suppliers should be compensated over the rail contracts fiasco, not just the big boys like Virgin.

"I had been sitting on my fathers knee and the two of us were pulled under the dingy while Lucy had managed to get ashore pretty quickly. Father and I spluttered to the surface and eventually made it ashore where we waited for a couple of hours. A small fishing boat that happened to going back through the gulf picked us up and took us to a landing spot near Barnhill from which we walked home. With no more than a “where have you been?” followed by “we were shipwrecked” the incident was deemed silly. The point now being that it could have been a tragedy; no Orwell, no 1984." On The Orwell Prize website Richard Blair remembers his time with his adoptive father Eric - better known as George Orwell.

A fascinating book review in The Lancet explores the 1918 influenza pandemic.

On his Shropshire Star blog Phil Gillam celebrates Ditherington bus garage in Shrewsbury.

Looking back on the leaders' debates

I have an article on the televised leaders' debates that took place during the recent general election campaign in the current issue of Liberator.

It's not the most exciting thing I have ever written, but I am including it here for the sake of completeness.

X-factor Politics

The three leaders’ debates during the general election campaign probably did not much affect the result of the election, but they may have altered the course of British politics after all.

For a while after the first debate it seemed that the wildest hopes of those Liberal Democrats who had long argued for these debates had been exceeded.

As Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian the following day:

From the start, Clegg asserted himself as the star of the show, anointed as such by a whopping 51 per cent of those surveyed by an instant Sun/YouGov poll.

The first shot had him looking alarmingly young, boyish and eager, but he soon transcended that. More than his rivals, he demonstrated an instant understanding of the format. All his answers were delivered to the camera, since that was where the audience that mattered was to be found.

Such was the assurance of Clegg’s performance, and their own comparative lack of preparation, that both Gordon Brown and David Cameron were reduced to frequent cries of “I agree with Nick”.

In the days that followed that debate, we Liberal Democrats could hardly believe what we were seeing. We did not just rise in the polls: it reached a point where we were disappointed if we saw an opinion poll in which we were not in first place.

On the internet, reflecting the particular success of Clegg’s performance in the first debate with younger voters, the position was just as encouraging. Unauthorised “I agree with Nick” merchandise sprouted everywhere, and a similarly independent Facebook group entitled “We got Rage Against the Machine to #1, we can get the Lib Dems into office!”, which had less than 19,000 members after the launch of the Liberal Democrat manifesto, leapt to a membership of 115,000 in the wake of the first debate and was eventually to have more than 160,000 members.

It could not last. Though most judges and polls suggested that Clegg had shaded a generally lacklustre second debate, his performance inevitably lacked that extraordinary novelty factor the second time around. By now the other two leaders had stopped agreeing with Nick, but they did not really get around to attacking him until the third debate. Though Clegg’s performance in this third debate was in many ways more forceful than in the second, by now David Cameron had come to terms with the format and most polls awarded victory to him.

Such had been the impact of Nick Clegg’s performance in the first debate, however, that most observers still expected a major Liberal Democrat advance on election night. When the broadcasters’ exit poll showing no advance at all appeared, not even the most senior politicians believed what it said. Yet it proved to be correct, suggesting that four weeks of election campaigning – leaders’ debates included – had ultimately had little effect on the way the nation had voted. Nor did the turnout show much sign of the young having been enthused to vote. It was up on the last two elections, but given that the 2010 election was so much more open than those two, not up by half as much as might have been expected.

So was Cleggmania all an illusion? The evidence of the opinion polls taken after the first debate suggest that it was not, though we should be more wary of online evidence – in the new social media in particular, there is a tendency for likeminded people to congregate and convince themselves that they represent a far larger slice of the population than is really the case. This can be valuable for raising activists’ morale, but misleading when it comes to sensing the mood of the wider electorate.

Perhaps the best parallel for Cleggmania is one of those great by-election upsets in which the Liberal Democrats – and the Liberal Party and SDP before them – used to specialise in. They often produced a remarkable upsurge in the opinion polls; in the Alliance years they often led to polls suggesting that the two parties might well form the next government. But we never did form the next government, because that effect had long since worn off by the time that the general election came around. The polls always ask “How would you vote if there were a general election tomorrow?” but there rarely is an election tomorrow.

Looking back, it seems we also read too much into the polls asking voters who had won the debates. The assumption seemed to be that if people said Nick Clegg had won the debate then they were bound to vote for him, but of course that was never the case. Think of The X-Factor – a parallel that suggested itself to many commentators at the time. Once people have decided on their favourite act they will vote for him come what may, but they will be quite capable of admitting that he was not at his best this week and that someone else sang better. So it was quite possible that some of those who said that Nick Clegg had won the first two debates were confirmed Labour or Conservative voters who were fair-minded enough to be objective about what they had watched. That never meant they were going to vote Liberal Democrat.

The truth is probably not as clear cut as this, with people’s reactions to the debates being partly based on an objective consideration of what they had watched and partly on pre-existent partly loyalties. It was notable that by the time of the third debate the polls on who had won looked remarkably like the polls about voting intention: David Cameron was in the lead with Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown level pegging a few percentage points behind him. By then people’s voting intentions were firming up and were more likely to colour their view of what they had seen in the debate.

One notable result of Nick Clegg’s commanding performance in the first debate was that he and the Liberal Democrats became central to the later debates and the election campaign as a whole. This was a wonderful contrast with past elections, where we have often been desperate for attention, but the political wisdom that you are on the way to victory if the battle is fought on territory of your own choosing is only half right: you have to win that battle too. And we did not win enough of the important battles.

While not being like “the two old parties” was enough to win the first debate, by the time of the third debate there was much closer scrutiny of specific Liberal Democrat policies and they – or Nick Clegg – did not always stand up to it well. Our insistence on including the question of a replacement for Trident in the defence review, for instance, was made to seem a unilateralist position, when a stronger insistence that with the economy in such a state we should be very sure before we embark on a policy that will cost some £65bn.

Equally, our “earned route to citizenship” was painted as a simple amnesty that would encourage further illegal immigrants. The truth is that there will be illegal immigration as long as there is an enormous disparity in wealth between countries and easy intercontinental travel, but that point was never made and might not have been well received if it had been made. In the campaign more generally, Liberal Democrat shadow ministers had more trouble explaining how the policy of allowing people to settle in some regions and not others would be policed and it is probably as well that point was not raised in the debates.

Ultimately these two failings may not have been so damning: people wedded to nuclear weapons or immigration control are unlikely to vote Liberal Democrat anyway. More serious was the failure to get over the sense that the Liberal Democrats grasped that tax had been something that only the “little people” paid and were determined to do something about it. The policy of lifting people out of taxation was mentioned, but the thinking behind it was never made clear and it may have been less well remembered for that reason.

Despite the disappointing Liberal Democrat performance, Nick Clegg left the campaign in a much better position than he entered it, and that must surely be down to the debates. He is now known by every voter and seen, even by those who will never vote Liberal Democrat, as of equal standing with the leaders of the Conservative and Labour parties. That is a remarkable turnaround and could hardly have been achieved without the concentrated exposure that the debates gave.

It may well be Clegg’s standing after the debates that encouraged David Cameron to make his offer when he failed to win an overall majority. For the Liberal Democrat leader was not just bringing his 52 MPs, he was bringing a sense of freshness and possibility that the government badly needed. So while the debates did not ultimately enthuse the young to take part in the political process or result in many more Liberal Democrat votes, they did change our politics permanently.

Will these debates become a permanent feature of British general elections? Do not bank on it. The 1960 debates between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon have entered political folklore on both sides of the Atlantic. What is less widely remembered is that there was not another Presidential debate until 1976, when the unelected Gerald Ford was almost as little known as his challenger Jimmy Carter.

Since then debates have become the norm in America, but they have never decided the election in the way that this folklore holds that they did in 1960. In fact they have often proved quite remarkably dull, with the Ford-Carter debates providing a particularly good example of this. Worse than that, Ford had obviously been told to try to smile and someone had told Carter not to grin so much; the result was that both spent the whole time with fixed half-smiles on their faces.

Fast forward to 1992 and the debate between the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton, when Bush was caught sneaking a look at his watch during one of their encounters. This was widely regarded as a gaffe and reinforced the idea that Clinton was much more in touch with the voters and their concerns. Yet when asked about it later, Bush said: “Was I glad when the damned thing was over? Yeah, and maybe that’s why I was looking at my watch — only 10 more minutes of this crap. Maybe if I’d have said that I’d have done better."

It will be hard for David Cameron not to agree to televised debates at the next general election – the media will howl in protest if he tries to get out of holding them – but if he is a long way ahead in the polls, do not be surprised if he tries.

Third debate: The verdict

Another score draw for me. Nothing that has happened in the latter two debates has done much to change the picture established in the first. Nick is in the big league and at the top of if for much of the time.

The most interesting thing I read on Twitter during the debate was that when Cameron repeatedly attacked Nick Clegg over immigration both their ratings went down.

And the Liberal Democrats don't have to convince everybody, just the more liberal 40 per cent of voters. I think Nick put his case well enough to do that.

Now we wait for the polls and the worms to tell us who won and how we should vote.

Later. What strikes me most about David Cameron is the complete disconnect between the generous sentiments he expresses and the hard policies he espouses. Just as his campaign posters having nothing at all to do with the cerebral Big Society ideas of the manifesto.

Is that a sign of confusion in the Tory camp - Steve Hilton vs Andy Coulson? Or is the more liberal stuff just calculation?

And Gordon Brown looked tired and hardly bothered to defend 13 years of Labour government. Are there no achievements he is proud of? It was all about making us turn to him because we fear the future.

The third leaders' debate

Join me on Twitter.

Stage your own leaders' debate

Feeling bereft because this evening's TV debate will be the last one?

Help is at hand in the shape of a range of political finger puppets from Rubbish Magazine. Our picture, naturally, shows Nick Clegg, but other puppets are available.

If you do stage your own debate with these puppets, the following phrases may come in useful:

"I agree with Nick."

"Last week I met a black burglar, who told me that economic migrants got a free car from the NHS."

"That was a disaster. Should never have put me with that woman - whose idea was that? ... She was just a sort of bigoted woman."

"You have aligned yourself with a bunch of nutters, anti-Semites, people who deny climate change exists, homophobes."

Metro opinion poll encouraging for Liberal Democrats

An opinion poll conducted for and reported in this morning's Metro made good reading for the Liberal Democrats:

The Lib Dems are on 33 per cent, the Tories are on 21 per cent and Labour lag behind on 18 per cent.

Only ten per cent of readers intend to vote for a minority party while 17 per cent remain undecided.

When undecided voters are removed the Lib Dems are on 40 per cent, Conservatives are on 26 per cent and Labour are on 22 per cent.

Of course, we always like opinion polls that show our party in the lead, but this one is particularly encouraging for the Liberal Democrats.

Because this poll was taken among "fully employed 18 to 44-year-olds, who read Metro at least three times a week and live or work in a city".

This suggests we are winning popularity among just the sort of people who should be supporting us: young, educated, urban. Those with an historical turn of mind could see it as the re-emergence of Orpington Man.

If we are to continue to make progress as a party, we are going to have to strengthen this appeal to the liberally minded. That is why I was pleased Nick Clegg (against some people's expectations) did not make great use of our promise of an in-or-out referendum on the European Union - and not only because I have always been against the idea.

We should be seeking to win and consolidate the support of people who do approve of our EU membership, not seeking to placate those who will always be against the idea. And I say that as someone who is not the most enthusiastic Europeans in Lib Dem ranks.

Third debate drinking game

Worrying the Sheep has the perfect way to enjoy tomorrow evening's third televised debate:

If Nick Clegg looks frustrated and petulant, take a drink.
...if he makes a sensible suggestion which is roundly sneered at, take a drink.
...if he suddenly lapses into a heavy Dutch accent and starts mumbling random Russian words ("isvestya, vodka, pravda, sputnik") take half the bottle.

Most polls score second debate for Nick Clegg too

Last night I was getting great reception on Sky News. This evening it was so poor that I had to turn the sound down and listen to the radio.

My impression from this rather odd way of experiencing it was that the second leaders' debate was a score draw.

Brown and Cameron had clearly learned from last week, so Nick Clegg did not enjoy the clear victory of last week. But his performance was good and became increasingly assured as the evening went on. He was at his best when putting the Liberal case on issues like Europe and immigration, and countered the "we must have strong government" line very well.

The good news is that most polls of viewers and voters and scoring tonight's debate as a second victory for Nick Clegg.

Gordon Brown looked less tired than last week and managed to sound less robotic. David Cameron was less subdued, but I suspect there are large numbers of people out there who simply do not like him. I am one of them.

David Cameron and Nick Clegg

I shan't be blogging or tweeting during the leaders' debate tonight, though I shall be back online later.

While you waiting for the debate, here is an observation form the well-informed Nottinghamshire political blogger Lobbydog:

It’s funny how people always said Clegg was too much like Cameron, and now it might be the other way round.

Nick Clegg really is what David Cameron pretends to be

A colleague at work made an intelligent remark today. He said something like: "David Cameron's problem is that Nick Clegg really is what the Tory leader has been pretending to be."

I was impressed - even when he admitted that that he was reading it off Facebook.

Because this seems exactly right to me. When he became Conservative leader David Cameron grasped intellectually what he had to be: modern, socially liberal, egalitarian, environmentally concerned.

He grasped it intellectually, but nothing in his background or his political career before 2005 gives one any sense that this is what David Cameron is really like. As I remarked the other day, David Cameron is under strain because he is acting the whole time.
By contrast, "modern, socially liberal, egalitarian, environmentally concerned" is a good description of what Nick Clegg is really like.

I suspected when Nick Clegg became leader that many had voted for him or furthered his candidacy because they thought he was like David Cameron.

He is far better than that. He not like Cameron: he is like what Cameron works hard to pretend to be.

It is no wonder, as one commentator observed after last week's debate, that you could see Nick leaching the charisma out of Cameron as they stood beside each other.

The first debate: Flashman, Tom Brown and Sigismund the Mad Maths Master

The leaders' debates must be a particular strain for David Cameron because he is acting the whole time. Those who encountered him before he entered Parliament do not recognise the caring, frowning with concern character they now see on their screens.

In truth, he would much rather be tossing a fag in a blanket or having the gardeners boy thrashed. And a little bit of the real Cameron can be seen in the arrogant way he pulled Nick Clegg back as he went to the audience at the end of the first debate - see the video.

If Cameron is Flashman, that must mean that Nick Clegg is Tom Brown - the symbol of all that is best in upright British youth.

So who is Gordon Brown?

In the first debate he looked tired and careworn. I can recognise that Brown is a decent man, but with his love of statistics he is a classic Labourite and not my sort of person.

To find a parallel for him we must leave Dr Arnold's Rugby and travel to St Custards.

Gordon Brown is Sigismund the Mad Maths Master.

Nick Clegg wins the first leaders' debate

Halfway through tonight's debate I tweeted that whatever else has happened tonight, Nick Clegg has shown he is in the same league as Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

But it was better than that. Nick Clegg was the clear winner of the debate. He was the most responsive to the audience and got in far more policy than David Cameron, who just did just did not have enough to say to fill 90 minutes.

Meanwhile Gordon Brown came over like a well-meaning speak your weight machine.

My chief memory of the night will be Brown's sheer incomprehension when asked a question about the need for more liberal education.

The other thing I should, say given that I was a debate sceptic, is that it was more entertaining than I expected. The presence of three leaders made it more fluid and spontaneous than the American Presidential debates.

A little more noise from the audience might have helped - Ask the Chancellors hardly ended in a riot - but no doubt the broadcasters will take it slowly.

If Labour and the Conservatives agree to more debates after this experience, that is.

A preview of the first leaders' debate on TV

When it was announced that there would be televised leaders' debates during this election campaign, I did not share the general euphoria in the blogosphere.

My doubts about how Nick Clegg would fare have been largely assuaged by his assured performance so far, and whoever negotiated the arrangements on behalf of the Liberal Democrats deserves several medals. But I am still not convinced that the debates will make great viewing.

Everyone knows the story about how Nixon's poor performance in the first televised debate lost him the election to JFK, but they have not played the key role in American Presidential elections that some imagine.

Following Nixon's experience no televised debates took place in 1964, 1968 or 1972. Since then we have had Gerald Ford's faux pas about Eastern Europe not being under Soviet domination, flashes of effective humour from Ronald Regan and Bill Clinton's moments of folksy charm.

But for the most part the debates have not decisive. Those in the most recent election were positively dull.

My chief memory of these debates is the one in 1976 between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Ford had clearly been told to smile, while Carter had been told not to smile too much. The result was that both spent the evening with fixed half-grins on their faces.

So what are the prospects for tomorrow?

Gordon Brown's strength is his knowledge of policy and master of detail. The American experience suggests that this will not play well against David Cameron's charm.

But things are different in Britain, where economic views tends to have a greater role in how people vote. Added to that, Cameron lacks Regan's warmth and may even put up some people's backs with that little hint of Flashman that is never far from the surface of his personality.

As for Nick Clegg... He will find the format a lot easier than he finds prime minister's questions in the Commons and I hope that will lead him to drop his Mr Angry persona and allow a little more light and shade into his performance.

Yes, Brown and Cameron are both Labservatives, but it would do Nick no harm to agree with one or other of them from time to time.

So good luck to Nick: I think he will be fine. But I will take some convincing that these debates are the key to re-engaging the public with politics, as some argued when they were announced.

My sympathies are rather with view of the elder George Bush. In one of his debates with Bill Clinton he was caught glancing at his watch, and this was thought to be a bad thing.

But as Bush later said:

“The media made a huge thing of that. You look at your watch and they say, ‘He shouldn’t be running for president: he’s bored and he’s out of it and we need change.’

“Was I glad when the damned thing was over? Yeah, and maybe that’s why I was looking at my watch — only 10 more minutes of this crap. Maybe if I’d have said that then I’d have done better."

Tonight, Matthew, I am going to be Gordon Brown

David MacLean, the political correspondent of the Leicester Mercury, writes a blog and has picked up a nice snippet about the leaders' rehearsals for the forthcoming debates:

The Liberal Democrats are using David Laws as Cameron and Chris Huhne as Brown.

David Dimbleby was a member of the Bullingdon Club

In the early days of this blog I wrote of David Dimbleby:

He is a public school boy of no great imagination or ability, projected on to the national stage by television fame and family connections.

A profile of Dimbleby published in the Observer last October suggests this was more true than I realised.

Written by James Robinson, it says of Dimbleby:

He attended private schools in Surrey, including Charterhouse, and studied at Oxford, graduating with a third-class degree. He joined the notorious Bullingdon Club, many years before David Cameron's membership brought the elite drinking fraternity to the attention of the wider public.

You can't get much more public school than the Bullingdon. And "no great imagination or ability"? Emerging from the best education his father's money could buy with a third suggests that Dimbleby is indeed not the brightest light in the studio.

I wouldn't mind, but Dimbleby shows no signs of going away. The BBC recently announced that he would be their interviewer in the leaders' debates at the general election.

At least he and David Cameron will have something to talk about.

TV debates: Let's not be beastly to the Nationalists

Writing about the prospect of debates between the party leaders back in September, I said:

The arrangements under which the party gets close to equal treatment with the two main parties during election campaigns were hard won. If Sky TV is allowed to tear them up (if there is more than one debate, will Nick Clegg be invited to all of them?) we are unlikely to gain from it.

As far as the media are concerned, the story is Labour vs Tory, Brown vs Cameron. The Lib Dems and Nick Clegg are a distraction to this and if they can sideline us they will.

We seem to have avoided this danger (well done to the Lib Dem negotiators for getting us equal treatment), but I do not feel we should gloat about it too much. So I have limited enthusiasm for my fellow Lib Dem bloggers' triumphalist reaction to the Nationalists' complaints that they have been excluded from the debates.

Liberal Revolution talks of PC/SNP and other whingers. And Stuart Bonar, who is the Liberal Democrat parliamentary spokesman for Plymouth Moor View - which turns out to be a constituency and not a guest house, as I first thought - asks What exactly do the Scot Nats or Plaid Cymru have to say to Plymouth?

Ultimately, I think the decision to exclude the Nationalists from the debates broadcast across Britain is the right one. But in victory magnanimity, there but for the Grace of God and don't count your chickens before they are hatched.

Party leaders to debate on television: Bad for the Lib Dems?

Back in September I posted some reasons why I was less than enthusiastic about the prospect of televised debates between the party leaders at the next general election.

News has come today that those debates are indeed to take place: I see no reason to change what I wrote then, though "We should not assume that televised debates will be good for the Liberal Democrats" would be a more accurate, but less arresting, headline.

Considering the question in less partisan terms than I did in September, it strikes me that these debates will accelerate the trend towards a more presidential system here in Britain. For that reason, I do not welcome the development.