Newsnight – staging an election

BBC Newsnight, 6 May 2015

I was invited onto the BBC’s Newsnight programme on the eve of the election, to discuss the drama of election campaigns and why theatricality matters in politics.

And if I was rather generous about the Ed Stone, I suspect poor Ed was trying to ape the German Reichstag, in which a glass dome high above the chamber makes manifest the importance of democratic scrutiny. Architecture can be a useful metaphor at the heart of power. Too bad engravings like “4. CONTROLS ON IMMIGRATION” don’t carry the same sense of aspiration.