Bizarre though it seems, Brown has missed a trick by not agreeing to TV debates. YouGov polling figures from 17th July revealed that Brown has a 71% disapproval rating; by contrast, Cameron’s approval rating stands at 57%. Yesterday’s ComRes poll gave the Tories an 18 point lead. Labour’s best hope of reversing those dire figures is for Cameron to slip-up publicly or make a pig’s ear of a live debate, as he did against David Davis during the leadership contest, although that wasn’t enough to stop him winning that contest.
Obviously, putting Brown on TV is a very risky strategy – Sir Humphrey Appleby would have described it as ‘courageous’. The chances of Cameron messing-up are remote – he is not the sort of politician who claims to have ‘saved the world’ – and, crucially, I suspect Mr Brown would have made Richard Nixon look like Cary Grant.
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