Clegg: Our defeat was fault of broadcasters

AFTER presiding over a catastrophic election defeat, you might think Nick Clegg would take some of the blame for the decline of the Liberal Democrats.

But yesterday the party’s former leader accused broadcasters of handing the election to the Tories by ‘terrifying’ the British public with the prospect of a Labour-SNP coalition.

Mr Clegg said television journalists spent too much time focusing on this ‘specific hypothetical outcome’ – amounting t o ‘ hundreds of millions of pounds’ of scaremongering advertising for David Cameron.

‘It had a determining effect on the outcome. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind about that,’ the former deputy prime minister said. ‘I saw it in seat after seat after seat, this growing alarm about the SNP and Labour and the amplification of the Conservative message and the way it was being echoed in the broadcast media terrified a lot of English voters and pushed them in a Conservative direction.

‘The massive amount of broadcast coverage devoted to the possible hypothetical outcome... was like giving the richest party in British politics, the Conservatives, hundreds of millions of pounds of additional attack advertising funding.’

Speaking at the Royal Television Society conference in Cambridge, he added: ‘That there might be an indecisive outcome [of the election] is one thing. That the whole broadcast industry dwelt on one very specific hypothetical outcome... is completely different. And that’s what drove so much voter behaviour in the last stages of the election.’

Mr Clegg also raised fears that broadcasters’ actions allowed the Conservatives to gain power without proper scrutiny, saying: ‘We now have a government in power which was not subject to any meaningful scrutiny at all about what they might do if they were in power on their own.’

His comments came the day before the start of the Liberal Democrat party conference, where his successor Tim Farron will attempt to rally the party after it suffered its worst defeat – with j ust e i ght of its 57 MPs re-elected.