Will television crown Clegg king of the election debates?
Raymond Snoddy on the power of television in the forthcoming general election and the attitude of the main parties towards the media.
The winner of the Prime Ministerial debates is going to be Nick Clegg – relatively speaking.
Until now the House of Commons has swallowed up the boyish-looking Clegg and left him looking totally anonymous beside the battered and gritty Vince Cable.
Tomorrow night Clegg will share centre stage on terms of true equality with his political betters Brown and Cameron and he could be the one to impress.
He is bright, personable and has already shown in one-on-one interviews this week that he has a light and effortless command of detail.
It was very noticeable that despite much huffing, puffing and trademark sneering, Paxman failed to land a single scoring blow on Clegg in his interview.
Because of the electoral system there are obvious limits to what can be achieved by any Lib-Dem leader, however well he does in the televised debates.
But with large sections of the electorate undecided and apparently reluctant to give Labour a fourth term, or hand the economy over to David Cameron and his old Etonian chum George Osborne, good TV performances could make a difference for Clegg.
Television could give voters the encouragement – and the permission – to indulge in an unprecedented outbreak of tactical voting which might help to keep the big beasts at bay.
If anything like it happens, the not so anonymous Clegg could act as a power broker to keep a minority Labour government in power. It’s probably the best that Brown can hope for and it will all be down to the power of television.
Meanwhile as the leaders limber up for the first of the three-way debates tomorrow evening under the chairmanship of Alastair Stewart on ITV, more is starting to emerge from the manifestos and interviews on the attitude of the main parties to the media itself.
First there was the debacle of the “wash-up”, the unseemly horse-trading that dispatches months of legislative work in the hours before the calling of the general election and the dissolution of Parliament.
It was almost as if Lord Carter and the Digital Economy Bill had never existed.
With the exception of highly contentious measures on internet piracy and peer-to-peer file-sharing there was not a lot left.
No measures on replacement regional television news services, and no 50p tax a month on phone lines to pay for broadband Britain.
Both were casualties of political deadlines, although both will be reinstated if Labour returns to power, according to the manifesto.
Since the wash-up there has been a bit more media fun.
In the Radio Times, Gordon Brown took a revenge swipe at Rupert Murdoch and the Tory-supporting Sun with an attack on paywalls for online newspaper content.
“People have got used to getting content without having to pay,” trilled Brown helpfully.
There will be far more serious paybacks than that coming Murdoch’s way should Brown somehow manage to hold onto power by his fingertips.
As predicted, the Conservatives have started to take a tough line on making the BBC more publicly accountable on its £3.5 billion licence fee income.
The Corporation has until now managed to keep the National Audit Office at bay – welcome in an invitation only basis – on the grounds of maintaining its independence from government.
Earlier this month the all-party Public Accounts Committee denounced such limitations as “anomalous and untenable”.
The chairman Edward Leigh did, however, take a step too far when he criticised the BBC’s “use of editorial necessity” as a rationale for some spending decisions.
This, Leigh whinged, put the BBC beyond value for money considerations.
Yes Jonathan Ross’s £18 million contract certainly should be judged on value grounds but try doing a cost-benefit analysis on covering the Haiti earthquake.
Now there it is in the Conservative manifesto. The NAO will have full access to the BBC’s accounts.
If that’s the worst a prospective Conservative Government does to the BBC then perhaps the Corporation will privately feel it has got off light.
In the atmosphere of greater public accountability generated by the MP’s expenses scandal – a story enthusiastically covered by the BBC – it will be difficult, if not impossible to bar the door to the gents from the National Audit Office.
The Committee was particularly put out by the fact that the BBC Trust would only make information available on condition it was not published.
“The Trust seems to think it is acceptable to negotiate the terms on which it will do business with Parliament. This is unacceptable and a discourtesy to Parliament,” the Committee noted tartly.
There is at least one bit of unambiguous good news for the media so far. Greedy libel lawyers are at least going to get a good seeing-to.
Times are going to get harder for the likes of Carter Ruck, special injunctions and the conditional fee agreements which have cost newspapers dear.
Both Labour and the Conservatives have pledged to take measures to protect freedom of speech, reduce the cost of libel cases and discourage libel tourism.
You can be sure that Nick Clegg would agree with that.