Can we all just pause for a second? Before we dim the lights, and the make-up ladies rush on for a last minute touch-up, and the floor manager shouts “30 seconds to air” and the stirring theme music strikes up. Before the TV debates begin, can we all pause for a second and reflect on what we’re doing? I won’t keep you long, but a thought has struck me that I wanted to share.
Now, I wanted a TV debate just like you did. But only once they were agreed did I set to wondering why I had been so keen to have them. And then I realised. The TV debates are necessary because politics in this country has changed for ever. And the changes that made the TV debates necessary make other, bigger, changes necessary too.
Forgive me, but I am going to start with the Tories. It’s with them that I first noticed the phenomenon. It’s in Tory politics that I first spotted the deep contradiction that has been produced by the rise of the strong, all-powerful political leader.
David Cameron won the leadership of his party with the help of a tight group of professionals. The Cameron team simply overpowered the MPs organising the David Davis campaign. They had learnt, over the last decade, the lessons of Tony Blair’s political success — about the importance of a disciplined core that took the party with it, whether it wanted to go there or not.
Yet over the same decade, as these lessons were being absorbed, so were others that stood in complete contradiction to them. As leader, William Hague had concluded that no one would join the Conservative Party if the members didn’t have any power. And he also strongly felt that Labour was weakening Parliament. He thought it had undermined the ability of MPs to scrutinise legislation. So he made the Tory party more democratic. And he set up a commission under the constitutional scholar Lord Norton of Louth and asked it to find ways of strengthening Parliament.
He was dead serious about that commission, was William Hague, and he still is. And his seriousness matters. It is one of the reasons that Mr Cameron’s party now has three strands to its approach all at the same time.
First, the Conservatives are going to be professional and disciplined, with a strong central political leadership, projecting a modern party and delivering on their promises. Second, they are going to restore dignity and strength to Parliament. There will be fewer MPs, but they are going to have more power and independence and more control over the agenda. And third, they are going to decentralise, providing local institutions with greater freedom and local activists with more responsibility.
The problem, of course, is that these all go in different directions. And if you talk to different senior Tories, they each have a different view about which approach is likely to triumph. One calls my interest in powerful MPs “your mad plan to put Jim Devine in charge of the Government”, while another tells me gravely that the tradition of Parliament is the Conservatives’ sacred trust.
Yet it would be unfair to suggest that this contradiction is uniquely Tory. The problem isn’t perhaps so great for Gordon Brown as he isn’t about to restore dignity and strength to anything, let alone three things at the same time. But the rest of us have been every bit as conflicted as the Cameron team.
During the recent expenses disaster, the media oscillated between complaints that MPs were now just pawns, acting under instructions from their leaders, and calling for those leaders to get a grip. The fact that it is impossible simultaneously to get a grip on an MP and to allow him greater independence seemed to pass most of us by. If any journalist thinks that this inconsistency in media advice has escaped Mr Cameron’s amused attention, they are wrong.
And then there’s you. Before you go blaming the media and politicians, you’re just as bad, if you don’t mind me saying so. At least you are, if you are anything like the voters I canvassed during my years as a political practitioner. You want strong, unified, disciplined parties “singing from the same hymn sheet” while peopled entirely by MPs who only ever speak their own mind. You want the Government to get on with it, delivering on its promises without all that yakking, as long as laws are properly debated. And you want strong principled leadership that doesn’t make constant U-turns, but also listens to what everyone is saying and is prepared to change its mind.
We called for those TV debates because we realise that the leadership quality of the candidates is now the most important determinant of our vote. Yet we still want a Parliament with a mind of its own.
No constitutional reform that anyone could devise could make these contradictions disappear. So I have become convinced that instead the constitution should be designed around an explicit understanding of the conflict. We should, in other words, consider a formal separation of powers between the executive and the legislature. The TV debates are just a step on the road. They are the beginning of reform, not the end of it.
The prime minister (not the head of state; I remain a monarchist) should run for office backed by a strong team of professionals, committed to delivering his or her programme. And they should bring in outsiders as ministers able to assist with such delivery. We should stop pretending our elections are not already substantially presidential. The logic of the TV debates should be reflected in the constitution.
And then MPs would run for Parliament separately, as senators run for the Senate. There might be fewer of them and they would have greater independence. They would be elected because they were able to demonstrate their personal qualities not just because they happened to belong to the party with the most popular leader. They would scrutinise legislation more carefully because the executive would not be able to exert the discipline it exerts now.
This separation of powers might make it harder to legislate, which is no bad thing, without necessarily making it harder to govern. And at every level — the chief executive, his advisers and his ministers, and our legislators in Parliament — we should get better candidates who are easier to hold to account for what they do.
Which I think would be a good thing, don’t you?
daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk
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Daniel Finkelstein is a weekly columnist and Chief Leader Writer of The Times. His blog, Comment Central, is a personal round up of the best political opinion on the web. Before joining the paper in 2001, he was adviser to both Prime Minister John Major and Conservative leader William Hague
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