Lord Ashcroft's assessment of the 2010 general election campaign will doubtless make for interesting and important reading - and hopefully influential reading too. It is absolutely right that the relief of once again having a Conservative prime minister - and the comparatively successful way that the coalition was put together and is working out - must not obscure the fact that the party should have won a healthy overall majority.
I've had stimulating conversations with several sceptical loyalists about what could have been done (much) better, and there is a remarkable degree of agreement. But I differ from their received wisdom on one matter: that of the televised debates.
A compelling case can be made that they distracted from other aspects of the campaign, that there was no moral imperative (and still less a political one) to give Nick Clegg equal billing, that PMQs provides the proper forum for the leaders to show their merits, and that we don't have a presidential system and shouldn't do anything that gives the impression that we do. To which I say: that's so much waffle.
Any wannabe prime minister worth their salt should relish the opportunity to take on their direct rivals in this way. More importantly, the public deserve the chance to see how they fare. Communication and listening skills are a hugely significant factor in the make-up of a good premier. The primary system in America is much maligned, but it does ensure that candidates are tested. As a nation, we too should want our candidates to be tested. As a party, we should rise to the challenge.
David Cameron is a formidable debater. He doesn't need mollycuddling and protecting from the demands of democracy. What he needed was to be better prepared. His team screwed up.
I can only begin to imagine how nerve-wracking an experience it was. Stand-up comedy is not for the faint-hearted, but the fear of letting yourself down must be far less overwhelming than carrying the hopes of a political party, not to say a country, on your shoulders. Perhaps because the stakes were so high, Cameron was heavily over-prepared and it had a sclerotic effect. It was also an enormous error to eschew a combative approach.
It seems clear that his handlers were afraid that his superior speaking ability and privileged background would make him look like a bully if he was too swashbuckling. The result, alas, was that he was neutered. It ironically gave the fallacious impression that he wanted to be prime minister because he thought he deserved to be, rather than because he had a series of polices which he dearly wanted to implement and because he thought he'd be good at the job.
Where was the fire? Like Jed Bartlet in The West Wing, Cameron should have thrown excessive caution to the wind and flat-out crushed Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown.
Clegg's performance has been recorded in folklore as brilliant. It wasn't. He stuck efficiently to a gameplan: presenting himself as the only genuine alternative to Brown. That role was actually David Cameron's, and it was a mistake not to undermine the Liberal Democrats' delusions of grandeur. In the first debate Clegg was always going to have the advantage of being the newest leader and therefore the freshest face. But his schtick could have been shown up as weak during the second debate, by the only man capable of replacing Brown as prime minister.
Brown, meanwhile, was staggeringly unpopular. Why then be so gentle with him? I was appalled at how the Gillian Duffy affair - a genuine scandal that was also a gift - was passed up in the third debate. Conventional wisdom has it that Brown dealt with it in his opening speech and that nothing could therefore could be done. Nonsense - Cameron should have said that it showed Labour's contempt for ordinary people and Brown's personal arrogance. Immigration wasn't the point - the point was that unlike Labour giants of the past (e.g. Bevan, Wilson, Callaghan, Foot and Kinnock) who earned their spurs at vast public meetings, Brown - like Blair before him - was rendered livid at the notion of not being protected from exposure to ordinary members of the public. That is not prime ministerial behaviour, and it was a dreadful clanger not to say so.
It is not prime ministerial behaviour, either, to shy away from televised debates. Next time round, by all means we should tweak the format. (There is no merit, for example, in giving audience members or the moderator so much air time; it's the candidates we want to hear.) But David Cameron - who in fairness always made clear that he was up for these debates - should be given the licence by his handlers to show that beneath the charm and polish there lurks a fierce resolve. There is no shame in that, rather it is vital to the recovery of our nation's fortunes.
It could have worked out worse. We have an outstanding prime minister, and the coalition is making good progress in implementing policy. But we should have won outright. Let us learn the lessons of that campaign, but discard the notion that we have anything to fear from rigorous debate. It's a red herring - and it would not reflect at all well on us.
