Good debate's great

Richard Butt
15/ 2/2008

HOW can you make politicians agree? Well, that’s dead easy. Ask them whether they think they get a tough time when they get interviewed.

Those beastly reporters want to actually know things. They don’t want to just hear well-rehearsed platitudes.

I mean, what is the point in political parties spending thousands of pounds training their politicians to avoid answering tricky questions and spouting propaganda if journalists don’t accept whatever drivel pours out of their mouths?

The issue was raised recently when Lucy Powell, Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Withington, and Ben Jeffries, the Tory choice to fight the next general election in Cheadle, appeared on Channel M’s Breakfast Show.

They were as one when it came to grillings from the likes of Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys.

Politicians, they reckoned, didn’t get the "opportunity" to engage in a "real debate". And all that guff.

Funny then, isn’t it, how many times politicians squawk parrot-like responses to questions that have never actually been asked by an interviewer? There is some truth in the point that there’s not a lot of time on many current affairs and news programmes.

They cover more than politics and – to be frank – the audience isn’t held spellbound by politics very often. So the number of minutes devoted to the subject is restricted. It’s no wonder we try to get politicians to stick to the point.

That’s not to say politics doesn’t matter to our viewers. It does. On Channel M News, we try to humanise issues, give case studies, showing why something in the political world matters.

The news is not a party political broadcast – it’s there to question and inform.

Meanwhile, programmes such as Today in Parliament and The Westminster Hour, which political anoraks like me actually listen to on the wireless, and the Sunday political programmes on TV channels that, er, don’t have an M in their titles.

If you lap up politics, you can choose to watch or listen to those or buy a serious newspaper. It’s a choice some of us make. Others have better things to do.

Jonathan Aitken once said John Humphrys had "poisoned the well of political debate" after he’d interrupted then-Chancellor Kenneth Clarke several times in an interview in the mid-90s. If Mr Clarke was veering away from the question, what should someone like Humphrys do? Lie back and accept it, or challenge it?

Aitken had a good turn of phrase. Not long afterwards he had a row with the Guardian and said: "If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play, so be it. I am ready for the fight."

He later went to prison for perjury. I wonder if the journalists’ questions were harder than those of the lawyers in court?

Richard Butt edits Channel M’s early evening news – every weeknight from 5pm