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British politicians are trying something new ahead of elections next month. The leaders of the two biggest parties are going to debate, US presidential election-style. The World’s Laura Lynch reports.

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MARCO WERMAN:  This week Britain officially launched the campaign for next month’s Parliamentary elections.  This time around they’re featuring something new, well something new for a British election anyway; live televised debates with the Prime Minister and two challengers who want his job.  The World’s Laura Lynch reports from London.

LAURA LYNCH:  You can’t accuse the British of being trendy when it comes to electioneering.  Political debates are a time honored feature of U.S. campaigns, but it’s a first for Britain.  And Stephen Coleman, a professor of political communication at Leeds University says it’s about time.  He says it’s good for democracy and for voters.

STEPHEN COLEMAN:  It allows them to watch the perspiration on their forehead as they’re under pressure.  And it also allows them to see when there is evasion.  It allows them to see how politicians don’t want to address certain issues.

LYNCH: And so political advisors here are turning their eyes and ears across the Atlantic, trying to learn lessons from the past, even 50 years past.

RICHARD NIXON:  It’s that that keeps the prestige of America up.  Not running down America the way Senator Kennedy has been running it down.

JOHN KENNEDY:  I really don’t need Mr. Nixon to tell me about what my responsibilities are as a citizen.

LYNCH: The Nixon-Kennedy presidential debates of 1960 proved pivotal.  Kennedy’s relative ease in front of the camera gave his campaign an enormous boost.  The leaders who will take to the stage in Britain know the stakes are high.  Doug Haddaway was one of Al Gore’s top strategists in the 2000 U.S. election.  Haddaway says the novelty of the debate in the U.K. guarantees a big audience.  So maybe the candidates and their teams would be wise to listen to the advice of a veteran.

DOUG HADDAWAY:  I remember working with Al Gore who was quite the sweater under hot TV lights.  So we had to negotiate the temperature of the room.  It was like in the fifties and you had to wear a wrap to go and watch the presidential debate.

LYNCH: In Canada, consultant Patrick Muttart played a key role in helping Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative party win two successive elections.  Recently, Muttart emailed some information suggestions to a friend in Britain working for the Tories.  Suggestions that ended up in a newspaper.  The included ensuring the drinking wasn’t too cold and having leader David Cameron stare at Prime Minister Gordon Brown to make him uncomfortable.  Muttart says he has no formal role in the Tory campaign, but he knows all the candidates will be doing the same thing.

DAVID MUTTART:  They’ll be practicing interruption and how to effectively confront your opponent without looking too overbearing.  And I think, most importantly, they spend time looking at the clip, practicing the one word, the one sentence, the one moment that will drive the news coverage.

LYNCH:  And when it comes to the actual debating, British politicians, he says, would be well advised to look to Canada rather than the U.S. for lessons learned because the Canadians are more practiced at the art of verbal fisticuffs.

MUTTART: I find U.S. political debates at the presidential level to be a little bit more robotic than Canadian or commonwealth debates.  Certainly the leaders’ experience in the House of Commons will prepare them.

LYNCH: That is a big difference.  British leaders are used to the cut and thrust of daily debates, used to staring each other down across the chamber.  Here is a recent exchange between David Cameron and Gordon Brown.

DAVID CAMERON:  We’ve just had what we had all along from this Prime Minister, no answer, endless cover-ups, not giving the information, not answering the question, dithering on all the important decisions.  How much longer are we going to have to wait until we get rid of this useless bunch of ministers?

GORDON BROWN:  When the people look at what the Conservative Party propose, they will see they were wrong on Northern Rock, they were wrong on the restructuring of the banks, they were wrong on help for the unemployed, they were wrong on help for mortgage owners, they were wrong for help for small businesses, wrong, wrong, wrong.  That’s the Conservative Party.

LYNCH: Still relatively few people actually bother to watch Parliamentary debates.  But millions are expected to tune in to the three debates during the campaign, increasing the pressure on the leaders to sharpen their attacks.  Former Conservative Party advisor Michael Dobbs worries there’ll be more heat than light.

MICHAEL DOBBS:  I have real doubts that this is going to be good election politics.  It’ll be great television, of course, for a while at least, because it’s like the shootout at the Okay Corral.  I mean these guys are going to get into the ring and it really is a matter of life and death for them.  But whether this is actually going to enhance our democracy, it’s going to inform people better about what they should be voting about, I really have serious doubts.

LYNCH: In the past, doubts led one leader or another to scupper efforts to hold debates in Britain.  This time, though, the leaders seem united in their need to sell themselves to voters in prime time.  They know from watching what’s happened abroad there is both risk and reward in letting Britain catch up to the rest of the election debate pack.  For The World, I’m Laura Lynch in London.

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