It’s not the impact of TV debates but the absence of press conferences we should worry about

Weekly TV leaders’ debates in the 2010 general election prompted complaints from some quarters about how they sucked the life out of the rest of the election campaign. It became all about the run-up to the next TV debate, the debate itself and then the post-mortem, after which point it was then time to do the run-up to the next one.

Was political campaigning being dominated by politicians communicating directly to voters really such a problem? It’s almost as if some people’s judge of what counts as a good campaign is how much power rests with newspapers with their pre-selected editorial lines coincidentally lining up with their owners’ personal views and coverage that tells you more about their political leanings than the actual events…

Unsympathetic as I am to some of the complaints about 2010, the move to fortnightly slots in 2015 is not without its advantages.

The gentler debate pace also highlights another, far more problematic, structural change in the way our elections operate: the death of the cycle of daily press conferences.

These have been dying off for a few elections, and now are dead rather than seriously ailing. That’s a huge shame because the format of each party holding a press conference at the start of the day allowed journalists to pursue one issue in depth with a party if they wished.

It was far harder to beat off six journalists all asking about the same topic than one interviewer asking the same question six times – especially when the interviewer only gets one bite in the campaign but the journalist pack gets a bite every morning.

Moreover, the ability to run with an issue from one press conference and raise it at the others often provided a set of drama and battle within each day as politicians were boxed into all addressing the same issue – hence giving the day a clearer structure, forcing all sides of an issue to be played out, and even giving a sense of a daily winner and hence progress in the election campaign other than staring at polls.

Now, without press conferences, it is far easier for parties to dodge the hard questions and there’s no similar battle over an issue each day.

It all makes events rather flat – and scrutiny rather less.