The short history of TV debates and UK general elections

Keir Starmer has said he will take part in TV election debates but won't commit to the idea of weekly head-to-heads suggested by Rishi Sunak.

Starmer told BBC Breakfast that he could debate with the PM "once or a hundred times", but "I know what he is going to say. He will say everything is fine… we hear that every week at PMQs".

Sunak last week challenged Starmer to take part in six TV debates, tackling issues like tax, the cost of living and security. But Labour said Starmer would not agree to "tearing up" the format established in previous elections "just to suit this week's whims of the Tory party".

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The Labour leader also told Sky News that "of course there are going to be TV debates". They are "part and parcel of the election cycle now".

How long have we had TV debates?

Although a staple of US politics since the 1950s, the first TV debates in the UK didn't take place until the 2010 general election. Before then "the UK was considered unusual in developed democracies in not holding televised debates", said UK parliamentary historian Neil Johnston for the House of Commons Library. In 2010 there were three debates, featuring the Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, Conservative leader David Cameron and Nick Clegg from the Liberal Democrats.

Although there were complaints that the debates in 2010 dominated the campaign and overshadowed local campaigning, "there was a perception that they were useful and an expectation that they might become a permanent feature of the election process", said Johnston.

Debates have happened in each election since but no one format has ever been repeated. Dealignment in politics in the UK has seen more voters "willing to consider alternatives to the Conservatives, Labour, and even the Liberal Democrats", said political communication expert Nick Anstead in a blog for the LSE. It was "these dynamics which framed the 7-way debate format chosen in 2015", which featured all the parties standing in Great Britain.

Theresa May was the first prime minister since 2010 to refuse to take part in televised debates, with her home secretary Amber Rudd representing the Conservative Party in 2017. It was a decision that "went over poorly in the focus groups and was part of why [May's] election campaign went badly", said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. May later expressed regret to Sky News over this decision: "I should have done the TV debates. I didn't because I had seen them suck the life blood out of David Cameron's campaign."

In 2019, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn went head-to-head in the first TV debates to feature just the Labour and Conservative leaders. The first clash drew an average audience of 6.7 million – "a third of the British TV audience", said HuffPost.

Do they make a difference?

Research is scarce but surveys of voters have indicated that the leaders' debates "engaged voters that would not normally pay as much attention to the election campaign, in particular younger voters", said Johnston.

However, a recent study by Harvard Business School found that "presidential or prime ministerial TV debates, campaigns' most salient events, do not play any significant role in shaping voters' choice of candidate".

The televised debates are essentially "private events conducted by political parties, who do deals with individual broadcasters", said Sky News's Adam Boulton. This means the TV channels "compete to be first and splashiest" while the parties "work to minimise risk by making the debates as unlikely to change opinions as possible".

Canada, "a comparable Westminster-style parliamentary democracy", said Anstead, "offers one possibility" to fix the system. In the run-up to the 2019 election, the country established an independent debate commission and while it is too late to instigate such a system for this year's general election, "we can at least hope it is the last British election where debate organisation occurs in such a haphazard manner".

What might this year's format be?

The Lib Dems, Greens and SNP "face being cut out of televised leadership debates, as broadcasters plan to focus on two head-to-head contests between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer", said The Guardian's political media editor Jim Waterson.

So far the format for this election hasn't been decided but televised debates "are a moment in this campaign when things could change, and therefore if Starmer could find a way to avoid doing them, he should take it", said Bush in the FT.

But if the Labour leader doesn't want to attract the negative attention received by May, the 2019-style "two head-to-head debates with Rishi Sunak, and a third appearance in front of a Question Time-style audience" would be best. That allows him to avoid a proper debate with those parties to the left of Labour who would attack him "over his policy programme and the Israel-Hamas war in particular", said Bush.