A few years ago social housing campaigner Kwajo Tweneboa appeared on daytime TV, he’s been on several current affairs programmes fighting the good fight for council and housing association tenants. Kwajo’s great, we need more people like him. Across the desk was Reform UK’s Ben Habib, looking particularly gormless and for a few minutes he pretended to care. Asking someone from Reform about an essential public service like housing is a bit like asking your local WI members about Death Metal – the two worlds will rarely collide.
Over the past few years opinion polls have been relatively stable but in the last few months a new trend has emerged – the rise of Reform UK. Many people are sceptical of their success, but if there is a genuine groundswell they’re using the same media strategy playbook that UKIP used, which worked for them.
The Sun always shines on TV
There’s two things to note about UKIP’s method, they didn’t depend on print media support (although The Express did back them, briefly), by contrast, they took every opportunity to get on TV. There’s a key date that ushers in the UKIP TV revolution and funnily enough they weren’t involved. October 22, 2009. That’s the date that Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, appeared on BBC’s Question Time. This was the first time in many years that someone from the far right appeared on a mainstream current affairs programme. I remember people in my office who weren’t normally that engaged with politics were really fired up about it (hoping to see Griffin put through the mincer I might add). The BBC had taken a risk in giving Griffin the oxygen of publicity but it gave them a major rating bounce, and populists have had ample slots with all our major broadcasters ever since.
The ubiquity of Nigel Farage on Question Time was so notorious that a meta-analysis was carried out comparing his number of appearances with pro-Europe MEPs (35 – 0 between 2000 and 2016). Not merely did broadcast media give multiple slots to populists like Farage and Johnson to boost their profile it provided a training ground. Prosaic as it is to say so, skilled politicians don’t come fresh out of a box, they spend years honing their craft when it comes to comms. Many opportunities simply don’t exist any more – it could be said that the great age of oratory has been and gone – many politicians in the pre-radio days were lay preachers or trades unionists who gave speeches on a weekly basis for decades. Andy Warhol said if you have an opportunity to be on TV take it, this in particular applies to our political class, you can never appear too many times and if you have a few braincells and an astute comms team you reflect and improve over time.
The contrasting fortunes of Lib Dems in the broadcast media, but you have to be there
All froth and no beer
There are limits to how far TV exposure can take you, and how useful it can be. For a few weeks in 2010 pundits talked of Cleggmania as Nick Clegg seemed to come off particularly well in three-way televised debates (will we ever see the like again?). The problem for the Lib Dems is we only had 45,000 members at the time, not nearly enough to follow up on the doorstep with a ground game that showed people we were really on the march in their seat. As a result we had a little spike in our vote share overall, but actually lost seats, especially in places like the South West where the demographic trend of pensioners voting Conservative more and more hit us hard. The Lib Dems were presented with an opportunity in 2010 but we weren’t geared up to maximise it and winged our way into coalition government.
Many pollsters are dismissive of Reform’s double-digit poll ratings as they are reflective of high-engagement bias that comes from online polling and thus far Reform’s by election performances are well below the peaks of UKIP in 2015. It’s also entirely possible that the TV prominence the party has had in the last year will count for nothing when the general election is actually called. Most people don’t think about politics most of the time and this is especially true of people under the age of 40 that don’t consume newspaper content either in print or online.
Above the fray
What of the Lib Dems – are they missing a trick by not appearing on shows such as Good Morning Britain, This Morning or Vine on 5? Our relative absence on the low brow shows dates right back to the SDP/Liberal alliance days where we talked about an adversarial political culture that amounted to a Punch and Judy show, part of breaking the mould was being above the fray and trying to cultivate something a bit more grown up and civilised. The Alliance got a lot of respect for identifying the low quality, childish nature of political debate as a problem but not quite enough people voted for us – we got within 2 – 3 million votes of disrupting the two party system but our vote was spread so thinly First Past the Post killed us in 1983.
Daytime TV political shows have a mix of the photogenic, provocative and populist on board. Some pundits do share liberal values with us – people like Marina Purkiss, Gemma Forte and Femi Oluwole – but they aren’t Lib Dems and people would have to pro-actively connect the dots between their best arguments and our own platform.
People can criticise Ed Davey for not appearing on these programmes, but quite frankly his relative absence is the product of decades of us being a centre party that struggles to broaden its appeal with no senior figures that really speak the language of the C2, D and E social classes. Someone like Shirley Williams did, but we have to understand that comes from Shirley being the product of the Labour movement first. What would happen if Ed, Daisy or Layla went on these shows more often and rubbed shoulders with Andrew Pierce, Carole Malone and Quentin Letts? At first they’d appear like a fish out of water, sometimes these shows are little more than a shouting match, and we’re not about that. Certainly Richard Madeley’s appalling treatment of Layla Moran a few weeks after the start of the Israel/Gaza conflict shows that mainstream TV sees people from outside the two main parties as novelty acts.
Who do you think was the most effective Liberal performer on broadcast media post the Ashdown/Kennedy era? For me it was Vince Cable, that’s because Vince had done more interviews than you’d had hot dinners, was always unruffled by tough questions, and exuded a sense of calm, presumably based on the knowledge he’d have another go on another broadcast platform next week, so one single solitary interview didn’t matter that much. Practice makes perfect, being an effective communicator on TV is very very difficult but if we have one lesson to learn from our populist opponents it’s how to work TV exposure to the full.
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