The Spectator’s Notes | 6 November 2004

‘It’s that Florida 2000 feeling all over again’, said the BBC anchorman at breakfast on Wednesday. It wasn’t. George Bush was well ahead in the popular vote nationally and seemed set to win even without Ohio. The only similarity with Florida 2000 was the Democrats’ (and therefore the television’s) desire to take away the legitimacy of the result. But what is most frustrating about coverage of US elections in Britain — and it is happening more and more with our domestic election coverage — is the paucity of hard information. Elections have results, lots of them, in congressional districts, in Senate races, in states, across the nation. It’s like football or cricket. If you’re interested enough to be watching, you want to know the scores, and what they mean. I watched and listened to the BBC for a couple of hours without ever being given actual figures for all the states that had declared. Instead we cut back again and again to the exhausted and disappointed John Simpson with the Republicans, Bridget Kendall with Kerry etc., with the endless, dire ‘What is the mood?’ question. Jim Naughtie gave us slow-moving interviews with moderately well-known people about what might happen over the next four years. So much more interesting to learn about swings, surprises, black votes, blue-collar votes, turnout figures, the character of key counties in key states. You get all this on Fox from the brilliant Michael Barone, editor of the Almanac of American Politics. British television seems to have no real electoral experts at all.

Anyway, as discussed in this column on 2 October, the ‘warmongers’ are winning. First John Howard, now George Bush and, next year, probably, Tony Blair. This doesn’t automatically mean they are right, of course, but it should moderate the hysterical tone of their denouncers. These three English-speaking nations are not being dragged into madness by undemocratic leaders.