The men in front are more than just the front men

Nobody expects...anything other than an inquisition for our political leaders

IN A few hours’ time, before a studio audience of 200, and a live TV audience of many millions, Nick Clegg, David Cameron and Gordon Brown will be the subjects of the UK’s first ever televised Prime Ministerial debate. Whatever your views about the legitimacy, format, impact and guest list of this innovation there can be no doubt that for the three men involved it will be a very serious test of their communication abilities.

Putting our political leaders on the spot is not a new thing, although it has arguably grown in significance in recent years. Many claim this concentration on “personality politics” trivialises and sidelines the substantive ideological and policy debates. Yet, as anyone who has spent any time canvassing will attest, a lot of ordinary voters go with their gut feelings about the character, decency and general competence of a political representative – even at the expense of more reflective views that representative’s policies or ideology. These are what political scientists call “valence voters”; people who don’t have strong opinions on specific policies and who just want to ensure the job of representing them and governing is in broadly safe hands. They infuriate and baffle political activists, who by definition are fascinated by the detail of manifestos and positioning, but valence voters are mainstream voters, and the attention parties and the media give to personality politics reflects this fact.

Perhaps it is this bemusement that leads the political class to try and undermine the aura of individual leadership. The alternative spectre created by those who work in, cover and follow politics is that of the political “front man”; the leader as mere husk picked for telegenic looks and ability to parrot pre-prepared sound bites, leaving the thinking, manoeuvring and governing to a nebulous, shadowy coterie. Satire has taken this idea further, into stories of actors formally hired to play the part of leader, but our pundits also enjoy hinting at it in their probing of those who surround and have the ear of the leader. Peter Mandelson, despite being in front line politics in his own right for many years, has never quite shaken off the image of the master puppeteer, while the brief prospect of seeing David Cameron’s communications chief Andy Coulson taken down filled more column inches that the resignation of a Cabinet Minister. Some of this scrutiny is bound up in a good old-fashioned healthy mistrust of unaccountable power, but much is a seductive notion that the man behind the man is the one who really matters; the organ grinder and not the monkey.

My experience, especially when advising the then Northern Ireland Secretary Paul Murphy, is quite different. It wasn’t the summit of politics, but neither was it the foothills. The Northern Ireland Secretary was scrutinised more than many Cabinet Ministers, first by a vigourous local press, then by a knowledgeable British and Irish media, and finally by a more deferential but still challenging US and world media. The demands for interviews were intense; on the day the then PSNI Chief Constable Hugh Orde attributed responsibility for the 2004 Northern Bank robbery, Murphy did something like 18 separate TV interviews, from CNN to UTV. We discussed his performance between each one, analysing what had gone wrong and right, and if it would generate a further story (which in this context could only be a bad thing). But no single word of mine was aired. I was not obliged to remain calm and focused while someone tried to verbally trip me up live on air. I didn’t have to think quickly when the next googly came. I just had to be wise before and after the event. Despite such an ancillary role, its not uncommon to hear bag carriers like my former self described as if they are smarter – and sometimes more influential – than their patron.

It is a myth that will be fulsomely challenged by events such as tonight’s (even though some will take from them an even greater dislike for packaged politics). In the debates, countless interviews, public meetings, hustings and even one-to-one voter encounters, Clegg, Cameron and Brown – as well as Ieuan Wyn Jones, Alex Salmond and others – will demonstrate that being the man in front is much more than being the front man. The prepping and training, the finessing of “lines to take” and the voter research that backs it up will count for little if these men cannot think quite on their feet – quite literally in tonight’s case. Like professional footballers, they will have rehearsed the set-piece many times; that killer phrase to be deployed when the right question comes. But, like the short corner, the moment may not come – or may do so unexpectedly. Bungle it and a high price will be paid. The killer line will become instead a gaffe to be pounced upon by the opposition, written up as clunky, or perceived as evidence of insincerity and poor adaptability by the voters. Get it even slightly more wrong and it could be the moment that features in the news packages watched by millions more, or that goes viral on YouTube. When even an attempt to press an advantage though prior preparation can be so swiftly turned against you, can anyone doubt the value of having someone up there who knows what he’s doing?

But this is about more than not dropping a clanger, or delivering the right lines at the right times. Football fans speak ruefully of the moment their team’s “heads go down”; the point where the fight goes out of their 11 men. This reading of body language is blunt and rudimentary compared to the minute scanning to which the three leaders are subjected each time they speak or appear in public. Forget the Sky News Chilcott Inquiry close-up replay of hand gestures – this is the body language reading we all do each day subconsciously in all our human interactions. We’re expert at it, and we specialise in picking up deception, insecurity and hidden feeling – especially among those to whom we are critically predisposed.

This in turn runs deeper. The leaders must not only know what they are saying, calling forth a compendious array of statistic, fact and anecdote, they must also do it with obvious – or at least believable – sincerity and passion. Lines to take are just that: lines around which the candidate must fill in the colour, substance and conviction. The spin boys and policy wonks cannot help once the lights go up. Nor, despite some suggestions to the contrary, do they have the power to take back a misspeak, bad inflection or awkward grimace.

That apparatchiks should exaggerate their own importance is perhaps no surprise. Nor is it shocking to learn that journalists, lobbyists and other political clients play up the importance of those to whom they enjoy regular access. But the rest of us should be smart enough to realise that, with very few exceptions, the people who surround the leader are his mere elves and sprites, there to do his bidding rather than vice versa. The brains, the charisma and guts of the operation are where they should be. If you doubt this ask yourself if you could maintain composure, much less get your message across, under the sort of pressure they will be during event such as tonight’s.