Six reasons why Cameron has hugely miscalculated on the TV debates

I sometimes wonder how politicians can manage to make terrible errors whilst thinking they are being oh so clever.

Gordon Brown's high wire manouvering in the Autumn of 2007 springs to mind as a classic example. He thought he had the opposition on the run and was privately and publicly toying (and allowing his acolytes to toy) with the idea of going to the country early. In the end he bottled it and it defined his premiership.

Cameron's short term tactics on the TV debates this time round are another example of this effect. He obviously thinks he's been extremely clever on this. It's pretty obvious that all the other parties who have been invited have played a relatively straight bat. They wanted debates and the broadcasters have tried to accommodate them all. They were invited to meetings to try and sort out the niggles and they attended them. The only party that has played games with the process are the Tories. But they thought that the "he said, she said" would blur things to the point where nobody would understand who had really scuppered this.

I believe Cameron and his team are profoundly wrong for six reasons:

1) He allowed his back-room spinners to brief journalists about what he was really up to, i.e. he never really wanted the debates in the first place. There are just too many people who have been spun this line and have reported it for it to be ignored.

2) Because he is the only one refusing to turn up it almost doesn't matter whose fault it is (although it is quite clearly his fault). Even if he was blameless and had somehow been stitched up it would still be a fatal mistake to appear to be the one trying to stymie democracy in this way.

3) He has underestimated the broadcasters. He never thought they would empty chair him but rightly sick of all the games and spin they have thrown down and decided to go for it. Good for them but it leaves him in a terribly isolated and dangerous position.

4) The previous debates were watched by 22 million people. However disengaged people feel with the political process that is a huge audience so it is obvious that in that respect it improved that engagement. And with such a legacy from the most recent campaign, anyone seen to be wrecking the chances of a similar set of debates this time around will have those 22 million people to answer to.

5) There are simply too many on the record examples of Cameron going on and on about how good a thing TV debates would be prior to the 2010 election. It's abundantly clear that he wanted them then when he was Leader of the Opposition and contrasted with the shenanigans now make it equally clear that he is trying to wriggle out of them for no other reason than partisan advantage.

6) One of Cameron's (and the Conservative Party in general) main weakness is arrogance. They have spent a lot of time and effort trying to clean house in this respect and appear more responsive. But spurning these debates plays right into their opponents' hands allowed them to define Cameron and his party as high handed and not willing to be held to account.

I'm not yet sure if this move could cost Cameron the election but with things so finely balanced I would not be at all surprised.

And frankly if that does happen it will be deservedly so. Maybe future Prime Ministers will think long and hard before playing such transparently obvious and cack-handed games with a process seen as important to our democracy by so many voters.

5 things I learned as an activist for a political party

I left the Lib Dems last year after having been a member and activist for just over 5 years. I learned a lot during that time and I think much of it would apply to other parties too.

Such as


1) It costs money

And I don't just means the party membership fees. There are raffles, fund raising events, dinners etc. all of which seek to raise funds for the local party. My local party did not have many active members so the burden for all of this fell disproportionately on those of us who were active. I know there was one member in particular, a stalwart of the party who donated significant amounts of their own money to help keep things going.

But there's more. I stood as a candidate in a council by-election in 2010 and that cost money too in petrol travelling back and forth all over the ward over several weeks as well as on other unexpected things such as buying special chemical hand warmers to stop my hands from seizing up knocking on so many doors!

I'm not saying it cost a huge amount of money but I have a decent job and my own car. For those without those advantages I imagine it would be even harder.

And what's really irritating about this is that...


2) Lots of people seem to think everyone involved in politics is doing it for the money

In the aforementioned by-election one of the things I heard time and again on the doorstep was that politicians are all on the make. As this was being directed at me as a "representative of politics" I felt duty-bound to rebut this claim. I'm not sure how successful it was because as I was trying to get elected to the borough council there seemed to be a residual suspicion that it was in order to get the money. It certainly was not why I was doing it. For a start I knew I had virtually no chance of winning as this is a safe Tory area. But what it did was make me sympathise very much with those activists, especially for the smaller parties who slog their guts out for years and in some cases decades with very little prospect of winning seats. I did it for a relatively short period and it increased my respect for all activists.


3) It's like being a part of a large extended family

Going to party conference (and I think I ended up going to about 7 of them in total in my 5 years) was a very nice experience. There are lots of friendly faces and you know that if you strike up a conversation with someone in a fringe meeting or around the venue you are likely (although not guaranteed!) to share some core political values. As time went on and I got to know more and more people in the party there would come a point when simply wandering around for 5 minutes I would bump into people I knew and often go for a drink or a bite to eat in a completely impromptu way.

Having spent the first 34 years of my life as not a member of any party this was a new and welcome experience. It is the thing I am probably going to miss the most now I am no longer a member.


4) It's pretty damn hard to get on the approved candidate's list for parliament

So having been obsessed with politics since I was about 16 years old and having fairly quickly established myself as a successful political blogger (winning the Best New Lib Dem Blog of the Year in September 2009) I perhaps somewhat arrogantly thought I had what it took to get on the approved list and have a tilt at being a candidate for parliament somewhere (unwinnable) in 2010.

So I applied to go for the half day assessment at Cowley Street and dutifully toddled along expecting that my many years of watching BBC Question Time and reading political opinion pieces would stand me in very good stead.

I could not really have been more wrong.

To be fair to myself I was pretty good at the media task but given I was being asked to respond to the previous week's pre-budget statement by Alistair Darling and I had actually been on Sky News two days before doing exactly that it would have been pretty surprising if I had not been good at it. Of course media skills are an important part of what a candidate needs to be able to do but frankly much more important, certainly in getting elected are the other tasks that I was set such as an "in tray exercise" where you have to decide how to respond to a number of different scenarios as a candidate or a group exercise where I had to role-play within a team (involving some of the other candidates) as if I was on a council committee. Not to mention the "policy and values in action" exam where I had to interpret party policy through the prism of my experience and explain how I would put it into action.

I was pretty bad at these tasks but particularly in the in-tray exercise. I had a very long debriefing with the chap who oversaw the whole process after I failed to get onto the approved list and it was clear that most of my answers were simply plain wrong. In my (partial) defence I had never been in a council meeting or had to deal with any of the scenarios as a candidate so I simply applied my world experience from running my own company etc. It's pretty clear there are a specific set of skills that have to be learned.

And on a final personal note it was also clear to me that...


5) It is very unlikely I would ever have achieved elected office in any capacity

For a couple of reasons.

Firstly I am interested in national politics. When I stood in the by-election I did enjoy talking to people when I was canvassing but only really when it strayed into national issues which as a council candidate I probably should have been steering away from to talk about speed-bumps and dog mess. Which frankly do not really float my boat. And in order to make any headway in getting to a position where I could have had a shot at anything at a national level I'd have had to spend years doing the local stuff, trying to get elected and learning the ropes of everything I had got so wrong during the candidate vetting session.

Secondly I simply do not have the patience to spend thousands of hours of my time doing all of that work over years and years. I have a huge amount of respect for the people who can and do do this but I am now certain I am not one of them. I have a wife, a job, business interests, friends and family (spread all over the country) and various hobbies. There is just not space personally for me to do all of the things that would have been necessary to make headway in the world of elected politics.



As I said in my piece when I left the Lib Dems I am still passionately interested in politics but I have other priorities in my life at the moment and am happy outside of a party. That may change in the future and I may join the fray again some day but it is very likely to be a smaller party or campaigning group and my focus would be on the issues that matter most to me.

I learned a lot in my 5 and bit years as a Lib Dem and for anyone interested in politics I would definitely advise them to join a party and see how you get on. You may well find it suits you better than I ultimately did.