Ed Miliband passed his first screen test. The next one will be tougher

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/29/cameron-miliband-television-debate

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The Tories kiboshed a direct head-to-head between the two candidates to be prime minister, but they were still taking no chances on Thursday night. By the time Ed Miliband was taking his turn on Battle for Number 10, David Cameron had already left the building. The Tory leader watched his Labour rival’s performance on a TV in his limousine.

Both men confessed to confidants beforehand that they were highly nervous. This might surprise you. Mr Cameron has been prime minister for nearly five years and Tory leader for almost a decade. Mr Miliband has been leader of the opposition since 2010. Are they not seasoned pros? Yes, but both were acutely conscious of the scale of the stakes. Both knew that one bad blooper – a deadly tongue tumble that could then be pitilessly recycled by their opponents for the next six weeks – had the potential to make a decisive difference. To perform badly would be crushing for party morale. And a disaster might even sink their chances altogether.

As it turned out, neither man dropped a fatal clanger. What we got was actually a bit more useful than a gaffe-hunt. For all the limitations of the format, for all that it was a non-debate debate, there was some illumination of their strengths and weaknesses, which in turn reflected the positives and negatives of the parties they lead.

One of David Cameron’s advisers told me in advance that these events are essentially about “message-delivery” and at that even a rather obviously under-rehearsed Tory leader was accomplished. He articulated his core campaign themes cleanly. He was also impressive in managing the tricky gear change from facing the bouncers hurled at him by Jeremy Paxman to fielding the soft balls tossed by the audience.

We also got a vivid illustration of his blind spots, especially in the opening rounds of his interrogation by Paxo, who bruised the Tory leader by homing in on his greatest area of vulnerability. The prime minister sounded ignorant about and detached from the country he rules when he could not even hazard a guess at how many food banks there are in Britain and then feeble when he tried to explain away the growth in their number by saying this was because the government had started to advertise their existence. He sounded out of touch again when he tried to argue that the explosion in zero-hour contracts was the result of people being mad keen to sign them. If you came to the programme suspecting that David Cameron lives a life very remote from many of the people he aspires to govern again, your suspicions were confirmed. He was made to squirm over his failure to meet his target on immigration and again came over as under-prepped when asked about the national finances. Asked how much more his government had borrowed, he first denied that debt had risen, and when corrected, simply couldn’t put a number on how much.

Smooth when talking generalities with the audience, shaky when pressed on detail, fluent in his comfort zones, rattled and ratty when out of them, this was essentially the David Cameron we already know. All in all, I doubt it will have changed many minds, one way or the other.

Ed Miliband, as the relatively lesser known quantity, had both a lot more to lose and a lot more to gain. He would either confirm the general prejudice that he is not up to being prime minister or put in a performance that prompted people to have a rethink about him. His weakest area was defending the record of the last Labour government. This matters, because it is central to Tory strategy to try to make this election a rerun of 2010. After all this time to think about it, and many hours of debate rehearsal, you might expect Ed Miliband to have a collection of well-honed, committed-to-memory phrases expressing pride about Labour’s achievements in power while also conveying humility about its mistakes.

He instead sounded tortured. He visibly flinched when a member of the audience asked him about his brother, a subject, so MPs tell me, that still comes up with regularity on the doorstep. He struggled in the opening rounds of his grapple with Paxo, but rallied very strongly towards the close of the bout. When one of the big questions about you is whether you are tough enough for the job, it is actually an advantage to have a hard hitter as your inquisitor because you can demonstrate a bit of steel by returning the punches. Patronised by Paxo, he patronised the inquisitor. “You are important, Jeremy, but not that important,” his scolding of the interviewer for presuming to know the outcome of the election won a warm laugh from the audience. The Labour leader was much more convincing than his Tory rival at conveying both idealism and a sense that he is on the side of the majority. He was also, I thought, quite clever when asked to talk about Cameron’s best qualities. The Labour leader said he admired the PM for legislating for gay marriage and boosting the budget for foreign aid. That may have been sincere, but it was also rather cunning. If you want to remind Ukip voters why they’ve deserted the Tories, then praising the Tory leader for being pro-gay and pro-foreign aid is a way to go about it.

The rival teams afterwards claimed victory for their man and, for once, both had a case. ICM’s instant poll for the Guardian found Cameron the winner by 54-46. In the YouGov poll for the Times, the Tory just edged it 51-49. So why did Douglas Alexander, Labour’s campaign chairman, emerge from his private screening area to punch the air with delight? Because that was a narrow margin of victory for the Tory leader when compared with Mr Cameron’s usual colossal lead on “the best prime minister” question. The ICM poll found that undecideds preferred the Labour leader to his Tory rival by a margin of two to one. It was a small sample, so it would be foolish to read too much into it, but it was another reason for Labour cheer.

Senior Labour figures will admit – at least privately – that Mr Miliband’s poor personal ratings inhibit his party’s prospects. If they can engineer a positive reappraisal of him, it has the potential to put a firmer floor on the support Labour already has and lift the ceiling on the support it might pick up during the campaign.

That is why they were so desperate for debates to give Mr Miliband the chance to show himself to the public unmediated and uncaricatured by a largely hostile press. Conversely, this was why the Tories had such a vested interest in preventing them from happening.

Members of the Labour leader’s inner circle seem genuinely cheered by their man’s performance. There was a palpably buoyant mood at Labour’s campaign launch on Friday. A lot of politics is a confidence game, so it does matter that Mr Miliband’s performance has been a boost for both his party’s morale and his own.

For many Tories, this confirmed why they were cynical but right to avoid a direct head-to-head. When David Cameron formally launched his campaign in Manchester yesterday, he placed heavy emphasis on how the Tories were helping “ordinary people” to get on, an implicit acknowledgement that he had done badly in this respect on Thursday night. The two men face another TV debate this week, and on this occasion they will be in the same studio at the same time. The stakes will again be high. Tories are hoping that what happened on Thursday night will have shaken any complacency out of the prime minister and he will spend more time on rehearsal. Labour would be reckless to be too buoyed by the first debate. Ed Miliband’s relative success on Thursday means that the punditocracy will set the bar higher for him this week. Labour people are conscious of a warning lesson from the Scottish referendum campaign. Alistair Darling surprised expectations in the first TV debate of that campaign when he worsted Alex Salmond. When they met again for a second encounter, it was the Labour champion who came off badly.

The dynamics of this week’s debate are much more unpredictable because there will be five other leaders crowding on to the stage. You will need a wide-screen television for this one. Nick Clegg will be there wanting to exploit an opportunity to depict both Labour and the Tories as too risky to be allowed to govern on their own and the other parties as too dicey to be relied on to provide stable coalition government.

The Ukip leader, the Green leader and the two Nationalist leaders will all, for their different reasons, have an interest in painting Mr Cameron and Mr Miliband as Tweedleron and Tweedleband. There’s a risk for both men that they will get gang-banged by the insurgent parties as similar representatives of the Westminster establishment. It will be a challenge for both men to look prime ministerial amid such a cacophony of competing voices. The one who can find a way of turning that to his advantage will come out on top.

Will they again be nervous? They should be.