The problem for two opponents in three-sided TV debates

One of the things that struck me about the first TV debate between party leaders was how very different it was from election debates between US presidential candidates - and, indeed, almost any other 'debate' I've ever come across.

A three-sided debate in which there are two front-runners

The most obvious - and consequential - difference from the American TV debates is that the British version has three, rather than two, contestants. Add to that the fact that only two of the three are deemed to have any realistic chance of becoming prime minister, and you have very unusual set of dynamics indeed.

Compared with most conventional approaches to 'debating' - including other adversarial exchanges like those in courts of law - the presence of a third party makes these 'debates' about as different from a straight duel between two opponents as you can get.

In effect, there are two debates going on at the same time: one between the leaders of the two biggest parties trying to score points against each other, and another in which the leader of the third party tries to score points against the other two.

The challenge for Brown and Cameron

Brown and Cameron both acknowledged that Clegg did rather well in the first debate, and have announced that they'll counteract by turning their attacks on Liberal Democrat policies.

This might seem a rational and obvious enough response, but I suspect they'd do better by spending rather more time on analysing the dynamics of the unusual situation in which they find themselves and devising a workable strategy for dealing with it - because I suspect that one of the main reasons for Nick Clegg's unexpected success in the first debate came from the fact that neither of the main parties had realised beforehand how a three-sided 'debate' would actually work in practice.

So Brown and Cameron concentrated too exclusively on attacking each other, without much regard for the presence of a third party who, for once, had the same speaking and turn-taking rights as themselves.

To make matters worse, Clegg was able to exploit their two-sided assault on each other and, when he did, scored high points in the Ipsos MORI 'worm' analysis of audience reactions, which was summed up by Ben Page as follows:

Clegg's position as the 'third party' allowed him to align himself with the voting public and express their frustration at the other two parties "the more the two of them attack each other, the more they sound the same."

Equality in turn-taking, speaking time and furnishings

As for why Brown and Cameron misunderstood and/or underestimated what would be involved in a three-cornered debate on equal terms, it probably came from their weekly jousting at Prime Minster's Question Time in the House of Commons - where they have three built-in advantages that formally position the Liberal Democrat leader as a side-show to the main event:

1. The LibDem leader only ever gets to speak third, after the other two leaders have already had a go.
2. House of Commons procedures allow the Conservative leader to ask the prime minister three times as many questions as the LibDem leader.
3. The Labour and Conservative leaders both have dispatch boxes to lean on, rest their papers on, bang their fists on and generally look like VIPs - compared with the Liberal Democrat leader, who has no dispatch box to lean on and nowhere to put his papers other than in his hands in front of him.

But in the TV debates, there is equality on all three fronts: how the turn-taking is organised, how long each leader may speak and where each one gets to stand (i.e. at identical lecterns).

During the protracted negotiations that eventually led to agreement on the 76 rules of engagement, I suspected that they might be creating a beast that wouldn't work in the quite the way they all expected (e.g. HERE) - and recommended that televising the debates between the politicians and broadcasters about the rules would have made for some very interesting viewing (HERE).

After the first debate, I should think that the Labour and Conservative negotiators are kicking themselves for what they agreed as much as the Liberal Democrats are patting themselves on their backs.

For the next debates?

If I were advising the parties on how to deal with the next debate, I'd be telling the Brown and Cameron camps to give at least as much thought to the dynamics of dealing with a three-cornered debate as to working out attacks on LibDem policies.

Meanwhile, I'd be advising the Clegg camp to carry on with more of the same and urging him to make the most of the rare equality afforded to the LibDems by the rules.

As I said in my post on Vince Cable's victory in the 'Chancellors' Debate', attacking the other parties along the lines of 'a plague on both your houses' has been an recurring Liberal line of attack for more than thirty years. In the aftermath of the MPs' expenses scandals and widespread disaffection for politics and politicians, it's a line that seems to be playing better then ever - and whose moment may finally have come.

What's wrong with a 'hung parliament' if that's what the electorate votes for?

After his party has lost three consecutive general elections and spent thirteen years in opposition, Conservative leader David Cameron has started to issue dire warnings about the horrors that await us if we're stupid enough to vote for a 'hung parliament'.

I'm as flabbergasted by this as I was by Labour friends who continued to denounce proportional representation during their eighteen years in opposition between 1979 and 1997.

So my three questions to both the bigger parties are the same:

1. How does your party (not to mention the poor old country) benefit from your preference for letting the other lot do whatever they like for 13 or 18 years when you could, with a more rational voting system, be in a position to moderate and/or restrain the excesses that inevitably flow from absolute power?
2. Is your party quite happy to be powerless for a decade or two in exchange for being in power for another decade or two?
3. Could one or other of you please explain how anyone in the country actually benefits from this bizarre form of turn-taking?

Did the TV debaters tell too many stories?

As I suspected, I found the first TV debate as stilted, boring and uninspiring as I'd feared it would be.

Nor, however historic it may have been, did the continuous wall-to-wall media hype before and afterwards persuade me that the transfer of political coverage from traditional election rallies into television studios will ever generate much excitement or enthusiasm for politics among the wider public.

But, from an observer's point of view, there was rather more meat there than I'd anticipated.

So this is what I hope will be (time permitting) the first in a series of posts about the debate(s) - unless, of course, any of them distract me by taking to the stump and making proper speeches at proper rallies.

The power of stories?

I've never come across any presentation skills researcher, writer or trainer who doesn't recommend stories as an effective way for speakers to get their points across.

So, perhaps not surprisingly, all three leaders came armed with collections of anecdotes that could be trotted out at suitable points in the proceedings.

But the question is whether I'm alone in thinking that they overdid it.

After the first one or two, I found myself groaning and thinking "Oh no - not another attempt to show how in touch you are with ordinary people around the country."

In case you didn't notice them, here's a selection by way of a reminder. I'd be curious to know whether anyone else thought there were too many. Or was the bronze medal awarded to Brown by the instant pollsters partly a result of the fact that he had fewer stories up his sleeve than the other two?

Clegg:

"I was in a hospital, a paediatric hospital in Cardiff a few months ago, treating very sick premature young babies. I was being shown around and there were a large number of babies needing to be treated. There was a ward standing completely empty, though it had the latest equipment. I said to the ward sister "What's going on? Why are there no babies being treated?" She said "New rules mean we can't employ any doctors from outside the European Union with the skills needed". That's an example of where the rules are stopping good immigration which actually helps our public services to work properly."

"I met a young man in London the other day. His flat had been burgled five times, and one of them, would you believe it, Jacqueline, was when he was away at his father's funeral. He said to me "Why can't this stop?"

"I was in a factory in my own city where I'm an MP in Sheffield just a few weeks ago. There was a great British company there, a manufacturing company, that produces great metal braces with these huge rollers, which apparently are sold to the American army. They attach them onto their vehicles, and when the rollers move over mines, the mines blow up, but of course, they destroy the rollers and not the soldiers. The American army says that those rollers, diesigned, manufactured by a great British business in Sheffield, have saved 140 lives. Why is it they're not being used by the British army?"

Cameron:

"I went to Crosby the other day and I was talking to a woman there who had been burgled by someone who had just left prison. He stole everything in her house. As he left, he set fire to the sofa and her son died from the fumes. That burglar, that murderer, could be out of prison in just four-and-a-half years. The system doesn't work, but that sort of sentence is, I think, just completely unacceptable in terms of what the public expect for proper punishment."

"I went to a Hull police station the other day. They had five different police cars, and they were just about to buy a £73,000 Lexus. There's money that could be saved to get the police on the frontline."

"I have a man in my constituency called Clive Stone who had kidney cancer who came to see me with seven others. Tragically, two of them have died because they couldn't get the drug Sutent that they wanted, that was on the market, that people knew was a good drug. That's a scandal in our country today."

"My mother was a magistrate in Newbury for 30 years. She sat on the bench, and she did use those short prison sentences that you're talking about. I've got to tell you, when someone smashes up the bus stop, when someone repeatedly breaks the law, when someone's found fighting on a Friday or Saturday night, as a magistrate, you've got to have that power for a short prison sentence when you've tried the other."

Brown:

"When I was young, my father ran a youth club with my brother for young people, and the more people who do voluntary service and give their time in the community to getting young people off the streets doing purposeful activity, the better, whether it's sports, dancing or music or other activities that get people off the streets."

"I had a lady write to me who said that she would not be alive today if we hadn't introduced screening and we hadn't given the chance to see a specialist in two weeks."