How newspapers clear the fog of confusing politics

With the 2015 general election looming, the Independent’s chief political columnist, Steve Richards, examines why newsbrands remain so influential.

Who will win the election? No one knows for sure. At the start of the campaigns in 1983, 1987, 1997, 2001 and 2005 every single reader of a newspaper knew who would be Prime Minister at the end of them.

This time we can predict with total confidence only that either David Cameron or Ed Miliband will be in Number Ten. The context in which they will rule is not clear, although most senior figures on both sides hope and expect a minority government rather than a coalition.

There is a simple reason for the extreme fogginess and a more complex one. Unusually the three main UK parties are contaminated by power or recent power, a freakish situation that allows other parties and individuals to thrive. That is the easy bit of the explanation.

Deeper factors include the fragility of the UK as a country and its relationship with Europe, the rise of a global economy in which voters can often feel powerless, and a still daunting economic challenge after the 2008 crash. Newspapers have influenced the course of many elections. They will do so this time. But they are also needed more than ever to make sense of this one.

Newspapers become more important when the political situation is so foggy. They have the space to explain and make sense of the apparent chaos. Take David Cameron’s bizarre declaration in a BBC interview that he hoped to serve a full second term but not a third, with its echoes of Tony Blair’s painfully contorted exit route.

The seemingly inexplicable was best explained by columnists who had the space to place Cameron’s words in the widest context of leaders and their departures.

The more sympathetic saw his intervention as an assertion of power, a leader determined to be in Number Ten for a lot longer than some of his rivals might have assumed. Others interpreted the move as a sign of weakness and assumed that Cameron had not only set the clock ticking on his leadership but had also blown apart his party’s election campaign.

Read the conflicting arguments of newspaper columnists and you will be taken into the mind of Cameron, his potential successors and the strategists who desperately sought to argue that nothing had changed as a result of the interview. The columnists will play a vital role in the coming weeks, the informed guides with the word counts required to add depth.

The word count of a BBC report on the election battle will rarely exceed two hundred words. Some newspaper reports will be as high as two thousand words.

Newspapers are also free to express views and are nowhere near as constrained as the broadcasters are by stifling rules in relation to balance. This means they are unavoidably more influential. Some broadcasters might be more famous but they cannot express what they think.

Recently I asked Andrew Marr, a former brilliant columnist, whether he found the constraints frustrating. “Only about once an hour,” he replied. As Newsworks’ recent Shift conference in London demonstrated, newspaper columnists make the most of their freedoms. In one session panellists from newspapers on the right and left debated animatedly whether Miliband was electable as a potential Prime Minister and whether Cameron was fatally shallow as a national leader in daunting times.

The vibrant political debate as conveyed by newspapers has a powerful impact on broadcasters – sometimes too powerful. If a single newspaper columnist attacks Miliband, he or she is invited on to endless BBC outlets.

When newspapers declare which party they want to win the election the editors will be interviewed on various broadcasting outlets and Twitter will erupt with comment on the verdicts. There will be no equivalent sequence in the opposite direction. Broadcasters will not influence how newspapers report the election to anywhere near the same extent.

There may not be a single spectacular episode in this election such as the Sun’s endorsement of Labour in 1997, repositioning that led the BBC’s news bulletins, but newspapers will reflect and influence the current febrile climate. Most will back the Conservatives but with deep reservations.

The Guardian will almost certainly return to supporting Labour after endorsing the Lib Dems last time. Each move will make waves. Take newspapers out of this campaign and there would be a very big hole. Thankfully there is no such hole.

Steve Richards is chief political columnist, the Independent, presenter BBC’s Week in Westminster and presenter of a live one-man show, Rock N Roll Politics.