Did Cameron Win Last Night?
The popular press would have you believe it, but then again they have an agenda. Look deeper and look at what needs to happen next week more thoughtfully and you get a different outcome. From the Economist:
Our latest poll, conducted by Angus Reid Public Opinion, a Canadian pollster, suggests that there is still plenty to play for. It puts the Conservatives in first place among those certain to vote with 33%, followed by the Liberal Democrats on 30%, Labour on 23% and other parties on 14% (see chart, and for full details see here). After pondering the specific swing in marginal seats, the pollster reckons these results would leave the Tories the largest party, with 294 seats, but 32 short of a majority. Labour would have 174 seats, and the Lib Dems 150.
The poll confirms Mr Clegg’s commanding personal lead over his rivals.
And that’s all you need to know. Was Clegg ever likely to get the largest number of seats from his position in this first-past-the-post system? Absolutely not. But if Clegg really gets anywhere near 150 seats he’ll have done far more than he set out to do, and get proportional representation onto the top of the political agenda. I don’t doubt for a moment still that Cameron will press right ahead and form a minority Tory administration, but in rejecting PR (which he’ll do, and there’s no way the Liberal Democrat Party would ever allow Clegg to join in a coalition with him) he’ll ultimately destroy himself and govern with no popular mandate, at just the wrong time in history. The electorate remains incandescent with rage about the expenses scandal, still feels betrayed by a New Labour government which delivered far less than it promised, and hates politics and politicians with a passion. Calling Cameron the winner last night is meaningless, when the sentiment which Clegg tapped into three weeks ago is still very much in play, and still demands satisfaction.
Labour meanwhile are still playing games with the authoritarian state, and wondering why the voters have given up on them. Gosh I wonder why?
Third #leadersdebate Liveblog
Read my liveblog of the third and final leaders debate in this general election campaign.
The Rise of Nick Clegg
The HateMail is in complete panic (and can’t stop lying):
A rattled Nick Clegg today sought to defend himself over his claim that the British people have a ‘more insidious cross to bear’ than Germany over World War II.
The Lib Dem leader attempted to laugh off criticism of his astonishing attack on our national pride – in which he said we suffered ‘delusions of grandeur’ and a ‘misplaced sense of superiority’ over having defeated the horrors of Nazism.
Campaigning ahead of tonight’s crucial second live TV showdown with party leaders, Mr Clegg said: ‘I must be the only politician who has gone from being Churchill to being a Nazi in under a week.’
He also came under fire today over donations made to his personal bank account, to which he responded: ‘I hope people won’t be frightened from trusting their instincts by doing something different this time. We have got a very exciting opportunity for real change in this country and I hope we will take it.’
The Murdoch high command can’t stop it:
we learned this morning that James Murdoch and his enforcer, Rebekah Brooks, nee Wade, burst their way into the offices of the Independent to give executives a hard time.
Gosh, that’s pretty uncool, and may suggest that expensive suits at News International are rattled by Cleggmania, which could leave them out in the cold if the Tories fail to win on 6 May.
What seems to have upset them are ads that the Indy has been running along the lines of “Rupert Murdoch won’t decide this election – you will.” Brooks apparently rang Simon Kelner, the editor-in-chief and now chief executive of the Indy to complain that dog does not eat dog in Fleet Street.
Anyway, the Brooks-Murdoch posse turned up at the Indy’s HQ – now housed in the Mail’s London premises, the old Derry and Toms department store in Kensington High Street, got past security and appeared unannounced and uninvited on the editorial floor.
“They barged in and Kelner had to take them into an office where discussions took place. Rebekah was observed in gesticulating mode,” says my source. The incident was mentioned on Radio 4′s Today programme, where Trevor Kavanagh, a Sun guru, was found to be unbriefed about the whole thing.
The Sun isn’t pulling it off through censorship:
The Sun newspaper failed to publish a YouGov poll showing that voters fear a Liberal Democrat government less than a Conservative or Labour one.
The Liberal Democrats accused the newspaper, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, of suppressing the finding. The paper, which endorsed Labour in the past three elections, declared its support for David Cameron during the Labour Party’s annual conference last October. Like other Tory-supporting papers, it has turned its fire on Nick Clegg over his policies, pro-European statements and expenses claims since he won last week’s first televised leaders’ debate.
YouGov also found that if people thought Mr Clegg’s party had a significant chance of winning the election, it would win 49 per cent of the votes, with the Tories winning 25 per cent and Labour just 19 per cent. One in four people Labour and one in six Tory supporters say they would switch to the Liberal Democrats in these circumstances. The party would be ahead among both men and women, in every age and social group, and in every region. On a uniform swing across Britain, that would give the Liberal Democrats 548 MPs, Labour 41 and the Tories 25.
Even the tactics Craig Murray alleges YouGov has employed to smear Clegg aren’t working. And it’s all a reminder of a change which I think is playing a major part in determining the outcome of this election, namely that these papers used to determine people’s opinions, and no longer do. Political commentators aren’t getting listened to, party political broadcasts and press conferences are getting ignored; the whole process of opinion formation has completely changed. Long-term departure from print media has certainly played a part in this, but for all the talk of an election determined by the Internet, Twitter and Facebook and other social media don’t yet have that sort of power. They are however keeping the narrative of Clegg’s sudden rise (and its desirability) visible and a story in itself.
Also whilst the usual pundits are saying Clegg’s ‘upstart’ narrative is accidental, in truth it seems to have arisen from a confluence of factors which have been bubbling up in political life for some time now, the principal one being that the public now detests politics and politicians alike. They may not know how they want to express it, but Clegg has shrewdly made a strong attempt to do so for them in the first two debates. Could he have done that without the continuing, massive popularity of his shadow chancellor Vince Cable? Probably not – Cable has been legitimising the Liberal Democrats for some time. But conventional wisdom has also long suggested that the British public was eurosceptic, waswedded to nuclear power and nuclear weapons and madly in love with American power; Clegg in the last fortnight has challenged that entire paradigm and has astonishingly been increasingly admired for it. I suspect if he directly attacked the Iraq War (and Afghanistan) in the manner of Charles Kennedy he’d rise even more.
With Cameron giving the impression he wants power because he believes he’s due it, and New Labour now only being a power winning-and-retaining machine, Clegg is far from an ‘upstart’ – he has become the ‘insurgent’, representing tool to move past public’s loathing for the Way Things Were. The first debate allowed him to rise over the top of the biased, distorting right wing press and communicate directly and spin-free with the electorate. Maybe the electorate has been waiting for the chance to finish the hated New Labour (and its Tory copycat) off, and has seen him as a unique historical opportunity to do so. Cameron’s director of communications Andy Coulson may have already realised this too late – the flip-flopping between dog-whistle politics and the failing ‘Big Society’ message suggests he does, but Mandelson has also been caught flat footed. Johann Hari says:
Rattled, the right-wing press now demands Cameron start publicly thumping the table and articulating the agenda he whispers to them behind closed doors, and can be uncovered in his policy documents: big cuts in public spending, big tax cuts for the rich. But Cameron sees the polling and the focus groups, and he knows the public loathe his real agenda. That’s why his performances in this campaign are so stilted. Once Cameron is forced to address us directly, without being bigged-up by the Murdochracy he has promised to feed and fatten, he withers under the weight of his own deception.
For a moment, the media demonisation of the liberal-left was switched off in favour of equal time and open access – and it revolutionised our politics. If this happened day in, day out, how would our national conversation change?
The conversation has begun to change, and Murdoch, Dacre & Desmond are being kept out of it. Let’s keep it that way.
Cameron is a PR ‘Spiv’
Simon Heffer sure believes so:
I do not yet despair of the Tories being the largest party on May 7. Whether they would be able to form a government is quite another matter. Whether they deserve to be able to form one is another still. Perhaps the meltdown at Tory HQ that we are told is under way, with talk beginning about who or what might come next, is an indication that a moral defeat has already taken place. We hear little about the “big idea” of the “big society”, which despite the efforts of propagandists died almost the second it left the womb. The public knows it is inadequate: the big idea it wants is about securing prosperity again, and the Tories are nowhere near a credible plan for that.
I wrote about Mr Cameron in November 2005, before he became leader, warning of the dangers of his dislike of policy, his obsession with style, his flexibility of principle, his absence of belief. “He is a PR spiv,” the piece concluded. “It is not enough.” Should he enter No 10 with a clear mandate, he will be justified in saying that the public thought there was more to him, and his image-driven project, than met the eye. However, his weaknesses have been cruelly exposed not by the rise of Nick Clegg, but by his failure to fight it adequately. For you cannot win a war without weapons, and Mr Cameron chose to disarm years ago.
It’s an analysis which makes sense of what happened in the first leaders debate last week. Clegg provided the style and the substance, leaving Cameron looking as hollow as he actually is. With Cameron having failed even to unite the right wing in Britain, and the opinion polls showing the left lining up very quickly behind Clegg, it’s no wonder the Tories’ campaign has started to panic. Cameron has relied almost entirely on rebranding the party as ‘no-longer-nasty’, but now we’re in the run-up to the election he’s finding a) they really are nasty and won’t be denied and b) he needs policies which actually have traction with the large swathe of the country utterly disillusioned with New Labour. He doesn’t have them, and it’ll be interesting to see whether the next two debates can continue to demonstrate that.
The First Election Debate
This is pretty funny, but of course the first debate has so far proven to be a game-changer for the Liberal Democrats. Nick Clegg seems to have tapped into a deep resentment towards the last parliament – the worst in living memory – and towards politics in general, and as a result is riding at the top of some opinion polls. Time will tell what the effect of that will be, but I find it enormously exciting – if the Lib Dems hold the balance of power in 2 1/2 weeks then the rollback of the government’s authoritarian project, electoral reform and constitutional change get thrown to the top of the political agenda. Clegg may yet provide the most important jolt to British politics in generations, and my fingers remain tightly crossed. Interestingly Labour have now started codedly to woo Clegg:
Lord Mandelson, who heads Labour’s campaign, criticised some Liberal Democrat policies but made clear that a coalition government would not be a disaster. It is the first time a senior Labour figure has spoken about a Lib-Lab coalition, in which Liberal Democrats would sit in a Brown Cabinet. In a memo to Labour members, Lord Mandelson said: “I am not against coalition government in principle and for Britain, anything would be better than a Cameron-Osborne government.”
The Secretary of State for Business said a two-party government would not be so stable without a “big unifying challenge”. He named that as constitutional change, urging Liberal Democrat supporters in 100 or so Labour-Tory marginal seats to vote Labour to secure reform of the voting system for Westminster. He predicted, however, that the voters would turn away from their current “flirtation” with Mr Clegg.
I think some will turn away from Clegg, as people reach for what they know when they reach the ballot box. But I’ve been saying for a long time now that the two main parties have completely underestimated the electorate’s hatred for politics as usual, and to offer only that at this general election could yet prove fatal for either of them.
Was the Debate Style Over Substance?
My question is whether that even matters, if the big breakthrough needed for constitutional change, parliamentary reform and a rollback of the authoritarian project is achieved. Peter McHugh, former director of programmes at GMTV disagrees:
It was Question Time without the fire and brimstone.
ITV News at Ten told us that Nick Clegg won on the night and Twitter agreed. But will he win on May 6? I don’t think so. But bring on the hung parliament.
And as for the show, News at Ten also managed to tell us that the debate was exciting and that we learnt lots from the 90 minutes. News at Ten told us that in three minutes, but left out the 87 minutes of irrelevance around it.
One thing for me is certain – somebody has got to look at the rules, because this programme was as sterile as the set on Holby City.
You couldn’t say for certain the audience were in the same studio. It was 40 minutes before David got in a mention about his wife’s pregnancy, but it was 9.17pm before he finally showed emotion and Gordon displayed the rictus grin.
Was it style over substance then?
Yes.
Hmm. That certainly was the risk – the presidentialisation of British politics isn’t actually desirable after all. I haven’t yet watched it, but most of the accounts I heard suggested that Clegg walked it. With that being true, this result is an absolute bombshell:
johnrentoul ComRes/ITV: CON 36 (-3), LDEM 35 (+14), LAB 24 (-3) But note polling among 4,000 people who watched the debate with view to being asked opn
The rider underneath is extremely important but this result has still already acted as a nuclear explosion underneath a campaign which hadn’t fired even the parties’ bases up. It’s true that the first debate didn’t lead to any broader a look at each parties’ policies, that much of the change of opinion appears to be based on non-political, cosmetic issues. But what if this result were even partially replicated across the board? The two ‘big’ parties would finally start having to look at what was driving ‘their’ voters to the Lib Dems, and said constitutional change, parliamentary reform and rollback of the authoritarian project might actually become critical election issues. Particularly so when:
jamesgraham Even with an 11% lead, @LibDems would still have 40 fewer MPs than @UKLabour – #iagreewithnickclegg – desperately need fair votes.
That is so far the most important conclusion to be drawn either from today’s first polling result or last night’s snap polls. First-past-the-post might finally be proven to the majority not to reflect their views fairly. Even if were the only outcome from the first debate, it would have to go down as an unqualified success. Perhaps the argument of style over substance is too simplistic after all.
The Leaders Debate and the Digital Economy Act
Astonishingly the long arm of the #DEAct has affected the digital aftermath of the #leadersdebate last night on ITV1:
ITV has tonight blocked anyone from uploading footage from the Leaders debates to YouTube because it may violate their own copyright.
Instead, viewers are forced to watch clips from ITV’s own archive on YouTube. Even short short clips of several seconds have been taken off.
I’d be interested in someone putting a flattering clip from last night up of Gordon Brown, and then see if material which would be beneficial to the Prime Minister (and to democracy in general) is still banned on ‘copyright’ grounds. The irony would be overwhelming – truly hoist to his own petard.
I didn’t watch it last night, but of course the entire debate is available above. What were your thoughts on the evening’s proceedings? Appalled by the presidentialisation of British politics? Thrilled at Clegg’s performance, which may yet transform the entire contest?
