Prime Minister, David Cameron, has both maintained and marginally moved his position on televised leaders’ dates in the run up to the General Election on 7th May 2015.
Mr Cameron has made it known that he has agreed to a formal offer from the television channels for the single multi-party leaders’ debate to which he had already agreed – but has gone along with a modest shift in date from before the 30th March when the official campaign begins, to 2nd April, in its opening days.
This is hardly a tectonic shift but SNP leader and Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon has received the ‘news’ with a political response which simply misses the point.
She says: ‘While it is welcome that David Cameron has accepted his position was indefensible and agreed to debate during the campaign period – abandoning his arrogant ‘final offer’ – he should sign up to the full programme of debates that is on the table.
‘I will debate David Cameron any time, anywhere, and on any number of occasions – but a Tory Prime Minister simply cannot be allowed to dictate terms to everyone else.’
First of all, Mr Cameron’s decision is for himself alone. He is not proscribing debates and would have no right to try. There ks nothing to stop any leaders who wish to do so from ‘debating’ each other to eternity, if the media will put up the cameras and the audiences will summon the will to watch.
Then imagine what the response from the separatists’ leader would have been had the Prime Minister told her to sign up for anything just because it had been put on the table by others?
The media are in no position of authority. They are ratings chasers who chance their arms for their own advantage when they are let away with it. They have grown far too used to the latitude given them by media tarts and have forgotten that they are service providers like any other and not dictators.
The Prime Minister has the same right as every other leader to take part in all, one or no debates. He has agreed to one. We can all hope that this puts a limit to what has become a tedious circus.
In saying: ‘I will debate David Cameron any time, anywhere, and on any number of occasions’, Ms Sturgeon has also adopted her former boss’s monocentric habit of personalising confrontation for the elevation of his own status.
Ms Sturgeon will not be ‘debating Mr Cameron’. She will be one of a handful of seven or eight leaders, in a yawnfest where they will all have their equal fifteen minutes of fame.
Contemplating quite how they will all be contained and quite how they will each question each other is a matter of mischievous private pleasure on dark days.
And why would anyone care? It’s a charade of pretend import.
Mr Salmond may not, of course, actually be Ms Sturgeon’s former boss as much as the centre of an alternative court, if Gordon returns him to what can only be five years of an unlicensed, unfettered and barnstorming one-man-show at Westminster.
Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP will not have their sorrows to seek. Mr Salmond will be one gigantic hostage to fortune, every day for a long five years. And Gordon will love it because they won’t see the problem.
