TV Blog: Election Debates special

We've now had all three live Prime Ministerial Debates: one on ITV, one on Sky News and one on the BBC, designed to help us examine the candidates from the main three parties. While such debates have long been a fixture in the US, the leaders in this country have never been able to agree to host one before – the incumbents either having too much to lose or being too popular to topple. There are good arguments as to why the UK should avoid leadership debates; unlike the American system, we don't directly choose our leader but a party, the boss of which becomes PM. Also there are serious questions over whether the race to Number 10 will become an X-Factor-like popularity contest with the person who is best on camera proving most popular regardless of policy.  

But how did they pan out? First off there is no way Sky “News” should have been allowed to host a debate, given the fact the channel's owner, Rupert Murdoch, openly backs David Cameron. The channel's billboards for the event contained massive, heroic close-ups of Oily Dave's face without even including Gordon Brown or Nick Clegg and, despite constantly floundering like a political beached whale, Sky's goon-like reporters always spun their coverage to favour him.  

As a new format for British TV, all three were a little tentative and creaky. But in allowing the leaders to field questions free from journalistic spin (yes, we do it too), it resulted in more direct answers and clearer differentiations on policy than has been seen on TV for a generation. This has to be a good thing. Certainly the format favoured Nick Clegg, whose profile was transformed overnight from political also-ran to potential PM material due to his calm and measured responses. Gordon Brown is not good on camera and tends to alienate when he attempts smooth PR (as this week showed more than any other), yet when arguing the facts and figures his command is more assured. He was never going to come out the best but performed far better than many predicted and held his own. It was Cameron who really lost out over the course of the three, despite the right wing press' best efforts to paint this otherwise. A year ago he was all but assured of office but here he was outshone in the PR department by Clegg and out argued by Brown. That his party has suffered the most significant drop in the polls as a result of these debates must be a serious blow to the Conservatives, who assumed their man would walk it. 

The election debates have heralded the arrival of proper three party politics in Britain, the result of which is that serious electoral reforms are all but certain if the Lib-Dems go into coalition with either Labour or the Tories. Such change is, in my opinion, long overdue; for both this and the fact they’ve opened up proper political discourse across the whole nation, I think they have been a good thing. My only gripe with the format is that, in a post-devolution environment, it is inherently undemocratic towards the nationalist parties of Wales and Scotland where (like them or not) they are a major force. To have them on the platform with the UK leaders would be meaningless for the majority of voters, but to exclude them is to automatically demote them to fourth place with no debate. There is no easy solution to this problem and it is one worth seeking to resolve next time these debates come around. Because given the response to this year's debates, they are here to stay.