Reality TV politics

"My thoughts exactly" was my mental reaction to a point made by one of the younger press analysts on Sky News. I factor in the youth variable because there are those who contend that 20-somethings - weaned on celebrity lust - are increasingly obsessed by form at the expense of substance. The critic was commenting on Samantha Cameron's (the British Conservative party leader's wife) first television interview.

The newspaper reviewer's point was that he would rather not know the personal details which Mr Cameron's wife was blabbering about, such as: "He is not very good at clearing up as he goes along. He is not very good at picking up his clothes. He's a terrible channel flicker. I have to be quite firm about him not fiddling with his BlackBerry too much, 'cos it can be, you know, quite annoying."

Yes, and you are annoying us, the commentator remarked. He went on to say how he cannot fathom how political advisors may think that the boring description of the minutiae of everyday life will make a jot of a difference to his vote. What would influence him are ideas and policies not personalities.

As he put it - and, yes, "he" has a name but it escapes me as he's new on Sky - he'd rather be spared the tedious details. What he is interested in is whether Mr Cameron is best placed to run the economy and govern the country. We know Mr Cameron is not perfect, just like all of us, and he does not care to see him so closely. Some personal distance would actually help in visualising a person in the role of Prime Minister. Too much familiarity with the nitty-gritty of mundane home life may have the opposite effect.

These comments reminded me of a study by Anthony King, from the department of government, University of Essex, in 2003. I looked it up again; the following is from the abstract:

"A widely held belief concerning democratic elections is that the votes of many individuals are influenced by their assessments of the competing candidates' personalities and other personal characteristics and that, as a consequence, the outcomes of entire democratic elections are often decided by 'personality factors' of this type. Experts on the electoral politics of six countries - the US, Britain, France, Germany, Canada and Russia - set out to assess how far this emphasis on personality and personal characteristics is actually warranted by the available empirical evidence... They conclude that, even with regard to the US, the impact of personality on individual voters' decisions is usually quite small and that, more often than not, it cancels out... there are no signs that the importance of personality factors in determining election outcomes is increasing over time."

A poll published in The Sunday Times of London two weeks ago - seven years after this study - says that 89 per cent of voters claim that what spouses say about politicians' personalities will have little or no impact on their vote.

According to Prof. King's study, what really matters are "voters' long-standing party loyalties, their views on issues and their judgments of how well or badly Presidents, Prime Ministers and parties have performed - or will perform in office".

This is essentially what the Sky critic was saying. I am of the same mind. I was glad, though, to hear such remarks coming from a person in his late 20s because whenever the argument arises - boiling down to form at the expense of substance - those who disagree with my position, invariably end up saying that younger voters are more concerned with personalities and celebrity gossip rather than serious politics.

I find it rather patronising to assume that an entire cohort of voters don't care about the arguments over reducing the deficit but might be swung by the personal details of a potential Prime Minister who leaves his clothes lying about, because it depicts him as "normal".

One of the reasons why politics and political campaigning have taken this focus-on-personalities turn is that there is so much media now. All the time new angles and perspectives are needed in order to fill up television and radio airtime, newspaper column inches and space in websites and blogs.

Media fillers, feeding irrelevant details about Prime Ministers and wannabe Prime Ministers, probably do not swing one vote in his or her favour; on the contrary. Yet, "personality politics" is replacing the debate on ideas. New Statesman columnist Mehdi Hassan points out that we have too much of it: "political coverage has been reduced to which leader has the nicest smile... and who can emote best in reality-TV-style interviews... Voters are told to vote for the guy they 'like' or identify with rather than the guy who can best govern the country."

As the run-up to the May election increasingly gets to bear the marks of a reality TV world, Ms Cameron might consider reading the book of another MP's wife, Alicia Collinson, on how not to morph from an asset to a liability. In Politics For Partners: How To Live With A Politician, Collinson writes - biographically - that no one is interested in what a politicians' spouse has to say unless it is controversially different from that of the politician, in which case, both are in trouble.

Dr Dalli is shadow minister for the public service and government investment.