It has taken 50 years for us to catch up with the Americans, so was it worth it in the end? Back in 1960, a grey-faced Richard Milhous Nixon, toughened up to a tanned and smiling senator from Massachusetts. Nixon, who was actually suffering from a serious leg injury at the time, sweated, looked hesitant and grimaced. The young senator was eloquent, smiling and attractive. Television viewers overwhelmingly declared John F Kennedy
the winner. But strangely, radio listeners went for Nixon. And that’s the thing: you can get a very different image on TV. The radio listeners did not see the sweating, the paleness and the hesitancy of Nixon, nor the sun tan, the youthfulness, the attractiveness of Kennedy. Pundits like to think that the TV debate made all the difference to the vote. More likely it was the fact that Joe Kennedy bought the votes of Mayor Daley and Cook Town that got his son elected as President of the United States.
Various attempts have been made over the years to set up a prime ministerial debate, but all failed until now. So, with 76 carefully negotiated rules in place, the three candidates kicked off the first of a series of three debates – this one held in Manchester’s ITV’s studios.
If anyone was expecting sparks and fireworks, they were to be disappointed. What they got instead was a dull reiteration of party policy. It was all very sterile: stage-managed, no audience participation, no applause, no put downs, no interventions. It just seemed a little too cosy. But then sometimes we in the media get it wrong. Perhaps people do like to hear reasoned argument without the likes of Jeremy Paxman or John Humphrys jumping up and down. Viewing figures of 9.1 million, larger than Coronation Street that night, or the measly 1.6 million who watched the Ask The Chancellors debate, might suggest considerable public interest. What will be interesting is to see if the viewing figures are sustained over the next two debates.
The general view was that Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg came out on top, though whether it will be translated in hard votes is another matter. Whatever, you could barely have slipped a cigarette paper between them. At times, you were hard pushed to remember that they represented different parties as they fell over backwards to agree with each other.
Of course, it’s considerably easier for the Lib Dems who have nothing to defend and haven’t had since David Lloyd George was Prime Minister. All Clegg, who still looks like Vince Cable’s youthful research assistant, had to do was let Gordon Brown and Cameron squabble and then step back and declare: “Look at them bickering, the same old two parties”.
It all left me wondering how some previous Labour leaders might have fared against their Conservative counterparts. Clement Atlee and Winston Churchill would surely have been better on radio than TV and you suspect that Churchill would have won it had it been on television. However, in 1955, Atlee might well have fared better against the ladies’ favourite Anthony Eden. In 1959, Eden’s successor Harold Macmillan would have been toughening it out with Hugh Gaitskell. This would surely have been a duel worth watching, but my money might have been on Gaitskell.
After that, we had Harold Wilson who would have trounced the landed gentry’s candidate Alec Douglas Home or anyone else the Tories might have cared to put up. Wilson was a natural: unashamedly northern, occasionally joking, thoughtfully puffing on his pipe and flashing his wedding ring at the cameras. He would have seen off Edward Heath, that’s for sure.
With his avuncular approach, Jim Callaghan would undoubtedly have beaten Margaret Thatcher, if – and it’s a big if – he was able to avoid getting tetchy. Callaghan had a habit of getting annoyed and showing it. In a famous Granada 500 election debate in 1979, he lost his cool with a young nurse in front of a TV audience of millions and, with it, lost the election. The one person you don’t dismiss is a young nurse.
By the time Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock were Labour leaders Thatcher had learned how to cope with television. She had dropped her voice an octave and perfected a cocked head that made her appear to be listening (although she never actually was). Neither Foot nor Kinnock would have come out on top against her, although Kinnock against John Major might have been a close run race. And then we have Tony Blair. The fact is that he could have beaten everyone hands down.
There are no certainties in politics, but the one thing we can feel pretty safe about is that the election debate is here to stay. No matter how opposed any party leader may be at any forthcoming election, it will be difficult for them to worm their way out of it. In the end, the real winner could be the electorate.
