The former Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, has said the media’s focus on a possible Labour/SNP coalition in the general election helped hand a majority government to the Tories and was the equivalent of “hundreds of millions of pounds of attack advertising funding” for David Cameron.

The former deputy prime minister said broadcasters’ and the media’s “endless crystal ball gazing” about the likelihood of another coalition government meant the Conservatives were not properly questioned about the policies they would pursue in power.

Clegg said the media had amplified the Tories’ main “attack message” about the dangers of a tie-up between Ed Miliband and Nicola Sturgeon and “terrified” voters and pushed them towards voting Conservative.

“It had a determining effect on the outcome, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind about that,” Clegg told the Royal Television Society conference in Cambridge on Friday.

“I saw it in seat after seat after seat, this growing alarm about the SNP and Labour and the amplification of the Conservative message and the way it was being echoed in the broadcast media terrified a lot of English voters and pushed them in a Conservative direction.

“The second perhaps even more serious consequence is that we now have a government in power which was not subject to any meaningful scrutiny at all about what they might do if they were in power on their own.

“You have got a government which almost accidentally got into power – they didn’t expect it at all – was never asked any searching questions on what they would do if they were ever in power on their own, that is not helpful in a democracy.”

Clegg said there were “big vested interests” in the right-wing print media but said broadcasters at election time had to be “beyond and above” that.

“Basically what happened was the massive amount of broadcast coverage devoted to the possible hypothetical outcome of a Labour/SNP government was like giving the richest party in British politics, the Conservatives, hundreds of millions of pounds of additional attack advertising funding.

“That was the effect, that was their attack message. It had a determining effect on the outcome and meant the government that was elected wasn’t rigorously scrutinised.”

Why did the election pollsters get it so wrong? Read more

Poll after poll in the run up to election night predicted no single party would win an overall majority, only for the exit poll on the night to rightly predict that the Conservatives would return to power ending five years of coalition government with the Lib Dems.

What if the polls had been right?

Tom Baldwin, Ed Miliband’s senior media adviser during the campaign, said: “If the polls had been right it would have been much easier for us to get broadcasters and the press in general to discuss the risk of a Tory second term.

“The last three weeks of the campaign shouldn’t have been about a hung parliament but whether David Cameron was heading for a majority government and what that would mean.”

Baldwin, in a pre-recorded interview, said the ill-fated “Ed stone” was a result of the party’s “growing desperation to get coverage back to the issues, back to our positive agenda”.

“It wasn’t our most glorious moment, it should probably have been stopped before it emerged blinking into the glare of publicity.”

Downing Street director of communications, Craig Oliver, in another recorded interview, said broadcasters had “some very specific questions to ask themselves … broadcasters managed to persuade themselves the one result that actually would happen was impossible. A lot of people who should have been reporting the election wanted to commentate on it.”

But Clegg said the danger of a Labour/SNP tie-up was the Conservatives’ primary “attack message”.

“I bet they were continually ringing you guys [journalists] saying why don’t you focus on the SNP, that was why they got elected,” he said.

“Clearly we went into the election damaged goods because of the coalition and braced for a bad result. It went from a bad result to a catastrophic one partly because of some extremely effective, well designed, well executed and well resourced campaigning techniques from the Conservatives.”

James Harding, the BBC’s director of news and current affairs, admitted there was “too much coalitionology” in the run up to the election.

“There were a couple of important reasons for that. Asking a question is different from getting it answered. There was an effort by broadcasters and journalists of all stripes to try and get at the big issues – welfare cuts, future budgets, the fact they weren’t addressed doesn’t mean those questions weren’t asked.

“Every single party had an interest in the coalition narrative – the Lib Dems had their Ukip narrative, the Tories had their Labour/SNP, Labour had a coalition narrative which for them was the Tories weren’t doing as well as people expected. That said there are really important lessons in this for all of us.”

Independent commission

Clegg said a US-style independent commission should be created to govern and oversee the party leader TV debates in the next election in 2020 after the last round was dominated by a long, drawn-out negotiation between broadcasters and politicians.

“What we need to do is just drain this whole process of the politics and the argy-bargy and negotiation and threat and counter-threat,” he said. “What happened was absolutely farcical for everyone concerned.”



And Clegg had a warning for Labour and its new leader Jeremy Corbyn, saying there was a difference between the minority of the population who were immersed in politics and those for whom it rarely impinged on their lives except on election day.

Labour members and supporters: how do you rate Corbyn's first week? Read more

“The danger for all of us is we are talking to ourselves in an echo chamber where politics is becoming entertainment and most of it totally doesn’t impinge on millions of people’s ordinary lives at all,” he said. “That difference has become amplified through social media.

“We are terribly surprised they act differently to how we expected them to act when the election comes … it’s actually not that surprising because they have been travelling down a completely different path.

“I hear it in the Labour party now. One of the reasons why they are in such terrible danger is they are confusing the fact that a couple of thousand people turned up to a debate to hear Jeremy Corbyn with what the British public [want]. They are clearly not the same it is ridiculous to conflate the two.”