“All sound and … meh”
Why are they bothering? How many of “us” are?
I didn’t watch last night’s debate. Spoiler. I won’t be watching Friday’s on the BBC, and I more than likely won’t bother with any of the four¹ that are scheduled to follow it. Instead, I watched a repeat of the doc on Rik Mayall that BBC Four showed, seeing as it will be 10th anniversary of his death this coming Sunday. I am perfectly happy that I made the correct decision.
Prime Ministerial “debates” are a fairly new thing really. And in my mind it’s another thing in an ever-lengthening list for which we can blame the execrable dish-faced piping bag of steaming bullshit David Cameron. Before the 2010 election campaign I’m not sure we bothered with this kind of thing at all but tnow, for some inexplicable reason, they are now seemingly a fixture. You have to wonder why.
Harold Wilson first floated the idea of such debates back in 1964, though his then opponent, Alec Douglas-Home was less than enthusiastic about it. As stiff, and old-school patrician² as Home undoubtedly was, you would have trouble saying his opinion wasn’t prescient. Perhaps Wilson’s enthusiasm for that was as a result of the US Presidential TV debates four years before that were widely seen to have significantly boosted Kennedy’s campaign. Who can say? Wilson seemed to get less keen as the years went on, though. The idea rumbled on over time, but didn’t really return until the 2010 campaign. It wasn’t a shock that some were pushing for it³, given that Cameron had a background in PR, and how generally uncomfortable Brown was in the television environment. Maybe it was the novelty of that event, but this is the only one in my mind that had any memorable impact.
My principal problem with these events is that they aren’t really compatible with the British system of doing politics, which is (at least nominally) government by Cabinet, and is essentially collective⁴. These events make everything much more “Presidential”, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. Yes, parties need leaders, and leaders are figureheads in a number of different ways, but leadership isn’t simply about how to look glib on a TV show.⁵ The skillsets that allow a leader to both be an effective head of government, and present as a timeshare salesman in prime-time don’t have much overlap. You could even make the argument that they are almost entirely disjoint, as even a cursory look at the periods of May, and Johnson might suggest, and that is even putting aside questions about how effective they were in policy terms for any number of other reasons.
It also coincides with Sunak’s decision to run an increasingly presidential campaign, which also seems to be an entirely terrible one for all the reasons we’ve been hearing about ad nauseum for more months than many of us would like to remember. Given his now well-documented faults on many fronts, the choice seems utterly inexplicable, but here we are. For now though, it’s all they have, because it appears that hardly anyone else in the Conservative campaign is even visible without delicate sensing equipment. Perhaps we can put that down to their own personal political survival imperatives, and the fact that so many constituencies are still to have their lists decided definitively.
There is also something deeper at work here I think, and that is more to do with an embedded set of values and expectations within the political (mono)culture itself: debating is ingrained. I may be more than normally cynical about such things, but I increasingly feel here’s perhaps something slightly whiffy about the culture of the ‘Union’⁶ in our political landscape. Perhaps that goes back even further to the training in empty rhetoric, and let’s be honest, logic-chopping sophistry, that the schools that have historically fed the great universities give their pupils.
All of this is just part of a wizard wheeze to the people playing it, and is just a part of what is now almost the cliche of what Noam Chomsky described as manufacturing consent, where a vision of a democratic process that looks open and transparent is presented, but shows itself to be less so, and mouch more narrowly prescribed the more you poke under the surface. The debates are not really about elucidation: they are a now quite stylised exercise in points scoring, like an amateur boxing match. Each hopes to land a miraculous haymaker, but generally speaking it’s not going to happen, and they spend their time shuffling around the ring landing the token blows that satisfy their own teams, and tell them they are “scoring well” with particular demographics. But how lasting or deep an impression any of this leaves on the wider electorate it is difficult to tell, and I’d be surprised if last night got a significant audience share (say 7–10%). Besides, after 14 years of the current government, how many people have not decided which way to vote, or at very least how not to vote? How many of those people will have bothered to spend an hour of their lives watching a short, tetchy man for whom things are not going well shout at a slightly older man for whom things are going a little less badly?
For those of us who do feel some sense of political engagement, and who do care about the issues, this is all very depressing. It’s just another bit of pointless box-ticking theatre. The faux gladiatorial bunfight stops us, the electorate, asking more searching questions of the wider political class, particularly when the chances to do that at constituency level are not there yet, and probably won’t get much better when the campaigns step up as we approach 4 July⁷. It’s just more showbiz for the ugly, and it’s not doing anyone any favours. I have no regrets; Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson smacking each other in the face with frying pans was a much better use of my time.
¹ I know. Why they’re not using this as punishment in schools I‘ve no idea, “Behave or we’ll make you watch six hours of this …”
² Literally old-school. Douglas-Home was an Old Etonian. A man who might previously have been called short-lived in the office of Prime Minister for a little shy of a year, if not for the fact that he lasted around eight Trusses, the now accepted British Standard Unit for political ephemerality. His term was almost geologically long in comparision.
³ This attempt to push Cameron out there, and concentrate on smooth presentation was very much in line with the efforts he made at Conservative Party conferences to speak “unscripted” in his speeches. A thing that he ended up forcing Ed Miliband into aping, with limited success, when he was Labour leader. “But if you can fake sincerity …”
⁴ Ian Dunt’s “How Westminster Works …” has much to say on the issue, and I’ve talked about that already.
⁵ That includes the weekly farce of PMQs now, which has long since ceased being a way to find out anything useful.
⁶ Most notably the Oxford Union, given that both Sunak and Starmer were at Oxford, but this also applies to similar societies (and JCRs) in Cambridge, and Durham, for example, which are at least semi-opaque to those not schooled in them.
⁷ Even then, given the money thrown at social media and the increasingly nefarious targeting and messaging used there, the days of simple constituency engagement are disappearing too. I honestly can’t rememember when I was last doorstepped, or even stopped in the street for this kind of activity. Those days are behind us, I think.
