Cameron may have chickened out, but the broadcasters cocked up the TV debates

So David Cameron won’t debate anyone unless the broadcasters agree to his exact specifications, Ed Miliband won’t debate Clegg in Cameron’s place and has instead offered Harriet Harman, and the broadcasters are threatening to empty chair anyone who refuses to turn up to any of their debates. It’s fair to say that the TV debates are firstly very unlikely to happen and secondly in the most unimpressive mess.

Though the Prime Minister is ducking out of them for the selfish reasons outlined here, the blame must ultimately lie with the broadcasters for making it possible for him to do so. They have managed to mess up at every stage of the process. For starters, the Prime Minister was saying in December 2012 that he was in favour of the debates taking place outside the short campaign, so it’s not as if they haven’t had warning that Cameron might use this as a sticking point. Then they managed to publish proposals that, while useful for the Greens in terms of membership and sympathy from unlikely quarters, were easy to object to because they had invited Ukip but not the Greens. These proposals suggested that the broadcasters were really struggling to come up with a definition of a party that should be involved.

Then the two 7-way debates and the head-to-head invited criticism from a vast range of parties, from the Lib Dems to the DUP.

Now they are threatening to go ahead with the debates without Cameron, and Nick Clegg is threatening to stand in for the Prime Minister in the head-to-head. But this morning Lucy Powell objected to that idea from the Deputy Prime Minister, saying:

’It is a ridiculous question. He can have a debate with Harriet Harman, who is our Deputy Leader, about being Deputy Prime Minister. We have got options on the table that have long been negotiated.’

After this election, there will likely be serious discussion of how the 2020 debates can actually happen, possibly with an independent body taking over the organising of them. It certainly doesn’t seem wise to trust the broadcasters with them again.