Something remarkable is going on – and the BBC is intent on ignoring it
Democracy can’t deal with increasingly complex issues if discussion is ever more shallow
NIGEL FARAGE has said he has a “duty” to stand again as an MP, and that he would cut a “deal with the devil” in order to deliver Brexit.
The Brexit Party leader yesterday confirmed he would run for parliament for an eighth time at the next general election, claiming that he cannot stand by and allow the referendum result to be “railroaded aside”.
With his new party soaring in both national and European election polls, Mr Farage added that he would be prepared to prop up a Conservative prime minister in the event of a hung parliament, on the condition that they agree to a clean Brexit.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph today, the arch-brexiteer also accuses the BBC of “bias” in the wake of his heated interview on The Andrew Marr Show, alleging that the broadcaster has failed to reflect his party’s success.
Despite “outperforming every other party” in recent polling, Mr Farage claims that “until last week” no major BBC programme had invited any representative from the Brexit Party to appear. “Something remarkable is going on,” he adds. “But the BBC has seemed intent on ignoring it.”
Two bombshell polls published this weekend put Mr Farage’s party on 34 per cent and 27 per cent for the May 23 European elections, eclipsing both Labour and the Conservatives.
A separate survey by Comres found that in a general election now, with Theresa May leading the Tories, the Brexit Party would win 49 seats.
Asked yesterday whether he would be leading the party’s election campaign, Mr Farage told LBC: “I’m going to have to [stand], of course. It’s a duty.
“We cannot ever allow again a great democratic exercise like this to be railroaded aside by career politicians of the Labour and Tory parties.”
On the prospect of a coalition with
‘We cannot allow a great democratic exercise to be railroaded aside by career politicians of the Labour and Tory parties’
the Conservatives, Mr Farage said: “If we can save £39 billion, come out of the customs union, come out of the single market, come out of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice and be a genuinely independent, self-governing democracy that can choose its own future, I’d do a deal with the devil to get that.”
He spoke during a visit to Pontefract, West Yorkshire, part of Labour MP Yvette Cooper’s constituency, where 70 per cent voted to leave the EU.
At a rally in the town earlier, he said Labour’s Brexit stance made it “vulnerable in the most extraordinary way” in its Leave-voting northern heartlands.
“The passion seems even stronger in Labour Leave areas than in Conservative Leave areas,” he continued. “This is a 70 per cent Leave constituency; these five towns voted Leave by a massive margin. You’ve got a member of Parliament who, at the general election a year later, promised to honour the result, and has spent the last two years, effectively, trying to stop Brexit from happening. “We focus on the Conservatives being in real trouble over the EU issue. In the north of England, Labour are in very big trouble, too.”
The death of Brian Walden is a moment to remember a man who was an eloquent parliamentarian, a brilliant broadcaster and always a fascinating person to meet. But his passing is also a time to lament the art of the lengthy, searching, forensic and ultimately revealing television interview, which disappeared as his career came to an end.
Instead, we have an avalanche of tweets, an unending flow of “breaking news”, more channels than we can keep track of, and interviews of between three and eight minutes that move breathlessly from one slogan or soundbite to another. We can hear the same person give the same answer dozens of times but rarely find out what they say when cornered. We find out in seconds when something happens but don’t learn why. We have more news but less understanding; more noise but less clarity; more assertions but less explanation; more fleeting impressions of leaders but less chance to see them as they really are.
Yes, there are some excellent podcasts trying to fill this gap, but it
should shame our leading broadcasters that the long-form television interview has been allowed to die out. They have assumed that those 50-minute interviews that in the past were so instructive would now be impossibly long for voters in a hurry; that as governing a nation becomes more difficult and complicated it has to be presented as being simpler instead; that people who are more stressed and concerned about the world than at any time in decades are content to hear a quick confrontation and then get back to their smartphones.
Perhaps that is all too true of large numbers of people. But if only a few million in a country of our size had the appetite to tune in to a real political discussion, rather than just watch a group of highly opinionated people shout at each other on BBC Question Time, the quality and depth of debate would be greatly enhanced. I believe there are indeed a few million people who want to do that. Not everybody has regressed to having an attention span shorter than that of a very small insect. In any country facing a crisis of leadership, huge uncertainty over its general direction, a plethora of untested new ideas – not to mention the threat of global diplomatic or ecological crisis – people do actually want to find out just who is going to get them out of this.
It might sound like nostalgia to hanker for the days when Sir Robin Day and Brian Walden would interrogate Margaret Thatcher for nearly an hour. Yet these famous confrontations performed a vital public service that is missing today. They allowed us all to see what this woman, who said she would transform the country, was really about. By the 40th minute of such an interview, the voter could decide how intelligent she was, what she really felt deep inside and what her character was like, for good or ill.
Even 20 years ago, when I was Tory leader, I did many half-hour sessions with interviewers like John Humphrys and Jonathan Dimbleby. Today, 10 minutes is regarded as a long interview. Each morning, a blearyeyed politician “does the morning round”, which means getting through up to a dozen short interviews while saying the same thing in all of them and avoiding being caught out. The skills required for this, and for the interviewers trying to catch them, are considerable – but they are different from the skill of truly illuminating the issues and choices facing the country and the character of those who lay claim to leading it.
Wouldn’t the public interest be massively well served by some new Brian Walden examining today’s leaders? Shouldn’t Jeremy Corbyn, who avoids all interviews that might be challenging, have to explain in detail what he thinks of Marxism, or how he would handle being in charge of nuclear weapons? Or shouldn’t Theresa May, not the most forthcoming of Prime Ministers, even I have to admit, have the chance to take people through why she doesn’t go for a no-deal Brexit? Shouldn’t we be listening to John Mcdonnell, supposedly a potential Chancellor, on what he thinks of modern monetary theory – the latest delusion that you can invent as much money as you desire. Or shouldn’t we be able to examine how well thought out my fellow columnist Boris Johnson’s plan for exiting the EU is, before he runs for the top job?
On Sunday, Nigel Farage was questioned by Andrew Marr on several subjects – gun control, the NHS, admiring Vladimir Putin. These are wholly legitimate questions for a politician, particularly since he apparently has strong views on them. I have had far tougher interviews than that without going outside afterwards and whining about it as he did. But if such interviews were longer, all such issues could have been covered while giving him plenty of time to make his pitch for the European elections. There could have been a more searching examination of all matters, instead of a slanging match about the motives of the BBC.
I realise that it is not easy for broadcasting chiefs to go against the trend of the past few decades. Yet at some point we have to sit up and notice that democracy can’t deal with issues of ever greater complexity if discussion of them is ever more shallow. If we are going to have more direct democracy, through regular referendums, then voters will need to hear more debate to make an informed decision. Alternatively, if we are going to trust elected representatives to make momentous decisions, we have to develop an accurate judgment about what they are like as people. There is no other walk of life where we think a few minutes is enough for that.
Social media, fragmented into thousands of little echo chambers, shows no sign of providing the depth or quality necessary for such debates. It’s time for one or two broadcasters to reverse the sad demise of the real interview. It is worth trying to raise the quality of scrutiny and argument with leaders whose judgments affect all our lives. And you never know, by revealing that most of them do actually think and care deeply about the country, it might generate more hope and faith in leadership among a public who currently assume that they don’t.