No ifs, no buts. This, in the small, stifling area of the universe where journalists and politicians mingle, was a bonfire of the certainties, a pyre of punditry. No one – except John Curtice and his exit pollsters – emerges with reputation intact. No prophet of a columnist saw this coming. No editor believed it possible. Everyone settled for the supposed stasis of a parliament hung, drawn and divided into multi-party segments. So the one great lesson for May 2020 and elections beyond is inescapable.
We’re used to the pollsters telling us what’s happening (as opposed to finding out for ourselves). We somehow believed the politicians have an inside track – until we saw their mouths gape incredulously on Friday morning. Data journalism is only as good as the data it deploys. Shoe leather and inquiring minds still count.
But there are other campaign things that matter to take away from the wreckage of hopes and careers, other media lessons to help make coverage of May 2020 better.
For the broadcasters
The two most influential and appreciated TV election outings had one element in common. ITV’s seven-plinthed debate was tightly run and intelligently organised. It didn’t allow talking over or shouting back between combatants. The BBC’s three solo Question Times from Leeds had exactly the same virtue.
Has the performance on the right – and (to be fair) on the left – been sensible this time round? Hell, not entirely
Making it clear? Nothing is clear amid almighty din. And the Leeds questions themselves – posed precisely by ordinary members of the public – tended to leave the commentariat trailing. The Paxman interviews, the Humphrys, Marr, Snow and Davis interviews? All of them arrived meticulously prepared, taking the evidence of the polls and building. But too many of them seemed not so much interviews as arguments. For instance, the John Humphrys argument with Dave/Ed/Nick in which (shades of 1984) the great interrogator offers a loaded hypothesis about future developments and demands a yes or a no that no politician in his right mind would think it remotely sensible to provide. Nick Clegg wouldn’t lay out his favoured partner for coalition – which was just as well as it happened, because the whole scenario was meaningless.
You can get overcomplicated, overbearing. And, on 2015 form, you can also be too clever by half. There will be more debates in 2020. They’ve happened now for two elections in a row. No windy Downing Street incumbent will be able to dodge them next time – and next time will need organising early, via the Election Commission, rather than staggering into some bedraggled studio late in the day after another negotiation between broadcasting’s awkward squad and the shrinking violets of No 10. But those individual Question Times deserve a traditional slot as well. Democracy means giving the public an authentic, unmediated voice. It can be done, because Yorkshire just did it. Perhaps, somewhere in there, you could already hear the voice of the people who actually went to the polls. Let’s do it again.
Meanwhile, that boring, hermetically sealed campaign the TV teams spent so much time complaining about? The infantile video Polyfilla of people who aspire to run the country playing ball with infants or lecturing small crowds of extras on industrial estates? They – the politicians – only do it for you, the TV producers: weeks of photo ops without point or human content except a few eyeball minutes on the television news each night. But it isn’t news. It’s the precise opposite. It’s political spam. Why not give it up for a few days next time and see whether anyone applauds? No non-news might be very good news.
So would be a full-throated onslaught on the automatic tedium of fairness and balance as inflicted by law and policed by Ofcom. Of course, at least in theory, we like our public service broadcasting to be fair: which means independent and honest when reporters travel out of their offices to a rally. But independent honesty doesn’t mean the kind of mathematically balanced coverage, measured in seconds and minutes, that academics – this year at Loughborough University – rate as statistically fair.
It entails the ability for the journalist on the spot, speaking to camera, producing his witnesses, to posit that candidate A or B is winning, and say why. He or she could do that if this were an Israeli or Nigerian election. Fairness and balance doesn’t mean no verdict, no enlightenment overseas. But in UK elections, by law, we turn constituency reporting into pretty pictures without a point, vox pop interviews without a bite. Tedium self-inflicted.
For the newspaper editors
Hallelujah! cried the Mail on Friday morning. Hail to the precious commodity we call press freedom? Of course. That freedom inevitably means the right to run lead headlines like the Telegraph’s “Nightmare on Downing Street” or the Sun’s “Save Our Bacon” – from the “pig’s ear Ed made of eating a helpless sarnie”. It includes the “right” of the Mail to be named Britain’s “most influential” newspaper on a poll that also put Labour two points ahead. But the question here isn’t about rights, more common sense.
It’s important on many levels that your readers see something to trust in you, so that your scoops count and your leaders may be read with respect. So there’s always a line to be drawn: not to stop you going over it, merely to indicate what’s advisable and what’s merely hysterical.
Has your performance on the right – and (to be fair) on the left – been sensible this time around? Hell, not entirely. There have been good pieces of analysis to cut out and keep (Kettle, Freedland, Rentoul, Collins, Aaronovitch and more). There have been excellent leader articles (in the FT, Indy, Guardian and Times) putting an eloquent point of view. There were unpredictable endorsements – the Indy and FT – that made an impact because they were unpredictable. But there has also been too much malign abuse and dodgy dealing. I sadly agreed with writer Ed Caesar’s tweeted summation of front-page coverage as the campaign closed – “mostly dire, partisan, shouty rubbish”.
And to what purpose? To bolster the reputation of Ipso, the new regulator and its clause number one: “The press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information…” Nightmare on Fleet Street.
The good/bad thing is how little difference all the shouty rubbish seemed to make. The pollsters aren’t using it as an excuse. And the interesting thing was how little account the press took of digital reach (counting, for instance, the Tory press at 5.2m copies against 1.6m on the other side, as though online’s millions didn’t exist). This wasn’t some transformative election on the net. The might of Vice made a stereotypical late effort (“How Five Years of Coalition Have Totally Fucked the Young”). The bravura of BuzzFeed remained undiminished. (“17 Hot Men who Really Want You to Vote in the Election”.)
… in fact, for all media futures
It isn’t just our electoral system that can’t cope in a complex multi-party world. It’s the media’s way of covering it. Consider the Sturgeon phenomenon, the rise and rise of the SNP. That catches a unique mood. Did Ed Miliband understand that mood when Johann Lamont, walking out as Labour leader north of the border, accused him of trying to run Scotland “like a branch office of London”? Can a devolved press and, particularly, a devolved BBC, treat what happens in Holyrood as British news needing consistent British coverage, or does devolved somehow mean “foreign”?
Crucially, now, how SNP fortunes rise or fall as the fortunes of a new Tory government rise or fall will be vital. The 2016 Holyrood elections will be the springboard for 2020 too. Either the embrace of hated London will trap the SNP in its coils and drain the confidence from Scottish voters – or it will be onwards to a new referendum that could change the nature of Britain once and for all. How many correspondents on the ground in Scotland will that need? How great a break from the current state of things where Glasgow looks after its own broadcasting affairs, the Scottish Sun goes its own sweet way, and most upmarket UK papers manage with two or three reporters north of Watford, let alone Berwick-upon-Tweed? Basic message: Scotland isn’t just up there. It’s down here as well.
For valiant service
■ A Golden Toupee to Andrew Neil, asking incisive questions and pothering stupendous statistics for day after day. Nice to see young talent coming through at the BBC. Andrew won’t even be quite 70 in May 2020.
■ A Golden Horlicks mug for David Dimbleby, who’ll be 81. Thursday night was his last stand, surely: and he stood up straight and sure.
■ A Golden Rinse for Julie Etchingham (45), the cool hand and cool head at ITV’s seven-ring circus.
■ A Golden Welcome Back to Nick Robinson (51), croaking bravely back into action, wit undiminished.
■ And numerous silver medals to the writing press, including first-class travel scholarships for Marina Hyde and John Crace at the Guardian, Ann Treneman (once foreign editor of the Observer) at the Times – and a bronze Poison Pen for Quentin Letts at the Mail to mark his amazing, indefatigable service to bile production at the hustings, in the theatre, or indeed anywhere where bile flows free. Watch it, Dave: Quentin, the hindrance without let, is waiting for you now. Hallelujah!