Looking forward to the election? Just don’t expect a straight answer

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/mar/22/election-dont-expect-straight-answers

Version 0 of 1.

Ask a stupid question and you’ll usually get a stupid answer. Ask a boring one and the tedium spreads. Thus, with only 44 days of Q&A to go, the big question affects both ends of the TV table. Will you, Mr Whoever, definitively rule out a coalition/loose arrangement/something-or-other with the SNP/DUP/Lib Dems/Ukip/Greens? Will you lay out your own detailed spending plans for years two and three? How many lemons make a raspberry?

It’s a mug’s game that sends viewers off to make a brew. But it may also be the name of the election game now that one seven-ring circus appears to be the only debate left in town. Enter Paxo, Dimbleby et al on interrogation duty. Has the kettle boiled yet?

And the difficulty – dutifully watching the Andrews, Marr and Neil, last week – was finding a moment when the repetition of impossible questions and squirming non-replies stopped. You can make any politician look lousy if you ask a question he or she daren’t or can’t answer. The snag is that it makes the whole of electoral politics look lousy, too: a cynical ritual.

Better bunker down this time: give no hostages to fortune, no detailed pledges that can be minced by events

I was working through the press and broadcasting election reaction of almost five years ago recently (in the course of writing a media chapter for Anthony Seldon’s walloping new study of The Coalition Effect). Remember those first few fraught days after 6 May 2010: an economy in dismaying trouble, a result without a winner. Only brute arithmetic ruled OK. So Cameron and Clegg, together in the garden of No 10, seemed a great relief, hugely popular in the polls and most leader columns. The Lib Dems had done the right thing: they’d compromised on policy and put the national interest first.

That was, alas, what Grant Shapps might now call an “over-firm” view. By October, when Lord Browne’s report on university funding actually reminded students and political correspondents what the Liberals had promised on tuition fees, the cuts and the gloom were bad medicine. “In most governments with a highly contentious programme, there is a hate figure,” wrote Andrew Rawnsley. “Before the election, many of us expected that position to be filled by George Osborne, who seemed a natural for the role. It is instead the Lib Dem leader, the erstwhile ‘Nice Nick’, who has become the lightning rod for discontent.”

Was this fair or sensible? More pertinently, had anyone raised it during the give-and-take of coalition-building? Yet the crude charge lingers to this day. “The Liberal Democrats made a courageous move from a protest party to a coalition partner, but the voters haven’t liked it,” according to Martin Baxter, founder of Electoral Calculus, in the Telegraph last week. Lib Dem support, he recorded, was down to 8% now, its lowest since 1970.

The point, of course, is that the Lib Dems had no supporters among press and broadcasters once a coalition with Labour became obviously impractical. They were there to be hammered when things went wrong. And what, sentiently, could Clegg say about his tuition fee promise? Only that it was a mistake, a pledge forgotten in the melee – and a scar to be picked open thereafter in every broadcasting studio.

In short, better bunker down this time: give no hostages to fortune, no detailed pledges on deficit reduction or immigration “targets” that can be minced by events. Who can wonder – as Tim Montgomerie in the Times observes – that the Tories are fighting “a simplistic, repetitive, dull, muscular, negative campaign”? Who can avoid fearing matching interviews all round?

There are many questions you’d love to hear asked now. Why don’t OBR growth projections show an EU referendum wobble? Who’ll be responsible for “our NHS” in Manchester once the city runs its own health budget there? How does continuing Trident help Nato in Ukraine? Anything lateral, unexpected. But this game of coalition thrones before any vote is cast looks dismaying stuff. Thank you mother: three lumps please.

■ Police can’t talk to journalists without permission from on high. Nor, it emerged last week, can army officers or civil servants. Normal channels of communication are well and truly clogged. And if someone you know is arrested, and off work as a result, that can’t be reported either. Unless (see the latest Keith Vaz committee report) the crime is so serious that publicising it might bring more victims to light – which, in turn, means that arrest and conviction begin to amount to the much same thing in the public mind. Reported arrest means you’re guilty, unless you’re not. From colonels to permanent secretaries to chief inspectors, the depressing, oppressive dirge is just the same. News is there to be controlled. At least the free-thinking jury in the trial of four Sun journalists could put two fingers up to that.