Leonard's car-crash interview spoke volumes about Scottish Labour

The ‘‘car-crash’’ interview is a fascinating sub-genre of politics on television, but like real car crashes, they are never quite the same. Each one throws up its own unique characteristics. Richard Leonard was shown to be easily wrong-footed, stumbling to find his ignition, and by the end was left hopelessly alone under the studio lights, accused of being undemocratic. Then the credits rolled.

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"Car-crash" interviews have a rich history. David Frost’s 1967 exposé of the Sri Lankan born fraudster Emil Savundra virtually invented the term “trial by television”. Kirsty Wark’s polite laceration of Margaret Thatcher over the Poll Tax in 1990 was an important moment in establishing the narrative that Scotland was different.

Media students now and in the future will be shown Jeremy Paxman’s landmark interview with Home Secretary Michael Howard, in which he asked the same question 12 times. Paxman’s approach has since tipped into cliché and has become an interview technique used more often than not by those who have run out of ammunition.

Richard Leonard’s car crash was different again. It was a classic exposé of conflicted ideology, powerless meanderings, and a live dissection of the “branch office” accusations that continue to cripple Labour in Scotland.

Until the party machine extricates more autonomy from London, Labour will continue to be an easy target for journalists, critics and political opponents alike. Johann Lamont has made the point forcefully in the past, but no one in London was listening, and so the lacunae in Labour’s national organisation gets deeper.

Seeking to be hard on another referendum, Leonard walked into a gaping elephant-trap, and ended up seeming undemocratic and contemptuous of the electorate.

I realise there will be people out there, including several close friends, who will splutter their coffee over their paper, but I feel genuinely sorry for Richard Leonard. He finds himself on the wrong side of constitutional history. He is in a position that is uncomfortable if not untenable, having to defend ideas that are not his own, support conference resolutions that are not sufficiently nuanced to the political mood in Scotland, and in a more visceral way having to face up to the anti-Semitism scandal within the Labour Party, with neither the power nor the authority to assert his opposition.

This week, a proposed motion from Labour’s East Renfrewshire branch demanded mandatory diversity training. It was struck down from the Scottish Labour Party conference and referred back to the already compromised party leadership in London.

Margaret Thatcher was another victim of a 'car-crash' interview that redefined the narrative in Scotland

Last week, I read on a couple of outlier Twitter accounts that Richard Leonard’s Yorkshire accent is also part of the problem. I have to disagree. There is ample evidence of successful Yorkshire leadership in Scotland.

One of the current top scorers in Scottish football is the Beverley-born striker Sam Cosgrove of Aberdeen (no relation). His blustering and determined style of play might be described as characteristically Yorkshire, and his accent and demeanour suggest he is no shrinking violet.

Mick McCarthy, the former Celtic defender, and one time captain of the Republic of Ireland, was from deepest Scargill country, the belligerent pit villages around Barnsley. His self-belief and pitch-side oratory was the stuff of the miner’s strike.

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Nor is it all blustering men. Nadine Aisha Jassat recently launched her new book to a capacity crowd at the Women’s Library in Glasgow. It was only as she read her poems aloud that she realised her rhymes were dependent on a Yorkshire accent.

Not one of these can be described as having been held back by their Yorkshire accent.

What people hear in Richard Leonard’s voice is not Yorkshire. What they hear is hesitancy, lack of conviction and compromised policies, all of which become exaggerated in the exposed light of First Minister’s Questions or the unforgiving heat of a TV studio.

Leonard's car crash has come after other Labour Party comrades have failed to avoid the pile-up of Brexit. The party’s evasive and understated policy on European membership has left its MPs vulnerable to difficult interviews. Too many have entered TV studios unsure what Jeremy Corbyn is really thinking, how it tallies with conference resolutions and how to lay a glove on Theresa May’s catastrophic performance over the past six months.

If there is a Brexit shame-list it is Scotland being ignored, the DUP inheriting undue influence and Labour skittering around with no clear policy.

For all their serendipity, ‘‘car-crash’’ interviews can be predicted and avoided. Politicians should never be trapped by statistics, a lesson that Diane Abbott has consistently failed to learn.

Much better to return to the higher ground of policy than be dragged into the quicksand of figures. The late Tony Benn had a strategy for doing exactly that, which he called ‘‘resetting the agenda’’. No matter what the interviewer asked, he would re-frame the question to allow him to put his point across and not become bogged down in arithmetic.

Richard Leonard struggles to reset the agenda. He had several opportunities to steer away from Gordon Brewer’s questioning and return to his key message. But quite what his key message actually was remains a mystery.

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Another elephant-pit to avoid is the old red-tie or yellow-tie question. In this scenario, the interviewer posits a choice between two options, designed to steer the politician into making a choice and being dragged down a road of unknown challenges.

The choice is almost always overly simplistic and so the politician’s job is to challenge the question and return to safe ground.

On the question of whether there should be another Scottish independence referendum, Leonard chose the yellow tie and waffled on about public appetite, exposing himself to the counter-accusation that he was being undemocratic ... not a good look for a Labour leader. He should probably have said: “Yes, I accept that there is a mandate for another referendum, but let’s see how the next set of elections pan out. I’m confident that people will reject another ballot.”

One thing that Richard Leonard cannot use as an excuse is technology. He was in a Glasgow studio face-to-face with the interviewer. That is not always the case. Scottish politicians of all persuasions often have to deal with down-the-line interviews in which they are stuck in a small closet-studio with a remote camera and an earpiece.

Even for the most experienced broadcasters this is a difficult challenge. There may be a delay or feedback from the sound generated in the London studio; the Scottish politician is almost certainly at a disadvantage in listening to the flow of debate; and the remote camera can often lead to unnatural eye-lines and the appearance of being caught in the headlights.

Worst of all, you can be positioned as peripheral to the real debate in the studio, a voice that the presenter has to reluctantly come to, thereby slowing the pace of the show.

One of the unseen benefits of branch-office politics is that Richard Leonard is rarely called on to conduct interviews down-the-line into the London studio system. I suspect that is a compromise he can happily live with, especially this week.