Scottish election 2026: Why Sunday's BBC Debate Night leaders special could be a game changer
A gaffe or a flash of anger may not decide the election but it could change the political momentum
I blame Adlai Stevenson. That’s a sentence that hasn’t been written in a long time but the 1956 Democratic presidential candidate is the man responsible for televised election debates.
He challenged the incumbent Republican President Dwight Eisenhower to a confrontation in the hope of showing the Second World War military leader was out of touch with what post war America needed.
The two men couldn’t agree terms so the actual debate ended up being between former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith. Yet again, women were left to do all the hard work.
Black-and-white photos from the time show two women in pearls looking nervous on either side of a man in an evening suit and bow tie. He was the host and tomorrow night that task falls to me in the 2026 BBC Scottish election debate.
Horribly wrong
A lot has changed since those early days but they remain high-risk encounters. In an era when political messaging is rehearsed and carefully stress-tested, 90 minutes of live debate in front of an unpredictable audience is the tight rope where it can all go horribly wrong with everyone watching.
That’s why British politicians resisted the format for so long. The UK’s first TV election debates didn’t take place until the 2010 general election, half a century behind America.
According to Ric Bailey, the BBC’s chief adviser on politics, UK leaders were historically opposed to televised debates because they saw them as too presidential amd not reflecting our system of parliamentary democracy. All that has been swept away in our visual age with its focus on personality politics.
I hosted the SNP leadership debate and the last general election debate on the BBC and up close, they are fascinating studies in human behaviour. We rehearse camera angles and the beginning and end of the show but everything in between is down to the participants, who arrive like prize fighters, hyped up and raring to go.
Often they have spent days preparing, trying out attack lines, testing defensive positions and thinking about how they can cut through and make an impression. Nowadays another factor is also in play. Increasingly, political debates are less about the whole show and more about what ends up being a short clip on social media.
When Anas Sarwar turned to John Swinney during the general election debate and said, “read my lips – no austerity under Labour”, I knew we had a viral moment and so it proved.
Lucky to live in a democracy
That puts the participants under even more pressure. They can arrive with a carefully worded policy argument but what ends up endlessly shared on social media can be a gaffe or flash of temper and, on that, reputations are made and broken.
When the end credits roll after 90 minutes, there is a palpable sense of relief as the tension evaporates. In that moment, everyone knows how well or badly they performed. No TV debate has ever decided an election but they can change momentum and provide moments that come back to haunt those concerned.
According to The Economist, only 25 countries in the world are now fully functioning democracies. We’re lucky to be one of them and I believe scrutinising our politicians live on TV every five years is part of the process of keeping that alive.
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