Should 'Brain Fade' in Political Interviews Really Matter?

The biggest win a political interviewer can get during election time is the "brain fade". That's when you ask a politician about something live on air and they seize up, unable to grasp the facts from their frazzled brain. Anyone who pulls this off is likely to grab headlines and control the news agenda for that day.

Jeremy Corbyn got caught out on Tuesday, on Radio 4's "Women's Hour", when he was trying to announce a policy of 30-hours-a-week free childcare for all kids before they start school. Being asked how much it cost led to a lot of excruciating dead air as he searched for the figure on his iPad and shuffled through his manifesto.

In a way, this is good – if you want to run the country, you should probably know your shit, and journalists should be looking to trip you up.

But what do these moments actually tell us? They tell us that party leaders can't retain loads of numbers in their heads at all times. So what? What does that really mean, other than a rare sign that politicians are actually human?

What it means is that our politicians are expected to be competent managers of a system with a set of assumptions that are not really up for discussion.

The brain fade over the child-care policy meant there was no talk about, say, whether means testing is actually cheaper than a universal system, or of the way means testing can discriminate against vulnerable people. The question of affordability doesn't allow for the wider cost of not having childcare, or alternatively whether it's a good thing for the state to step in because we're too busy working to look after kids.

The fact that questions about cost are everywhere carries the assumption that "we" can't afford nice things. It's an implicit approval of austerity – the logic that a national economy is like a household budget and so we have to live within our means. Which is bullshit. Austerity doesn't work. You can see that because the Tories' plan to deal with the deficit keeps receding further than David Willett's hairline. And with austerity politics pushing people into poverty, there's a question over who this presumed "we" who can't afford things is.

But still, we keep hoping for a "gotcha" moment, usually about cost – a stumble on a deeper political level is less likely to make front pages.

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The biggest brain fade of this election came from Labour's Diane Abbott. She didn't know how much her policy of 10,000 extra police officers would cost. You can see why it became the big story – it was totally excruciating to listen to.

It's a great car crash, but again: our glee at watching a politician stutter over numbers means we don't ask anything else.

It wasn't that long ago that people were having interesting discussions about the police. How does it look for democracy when riot police are caving protesting students' heads in? How should we feel about the IPCC ruling that the killing of Mark Duggan – which started the London riots – was justified? More police on the streets would definitely make everyone feel safer, right?

However, in the painfully proscribed electoral echo chamber, Labour's desire to look sensible led them to turn the debate around policing to a question of "more" versus the Tories' "less". Abbott then gets played, because once you're being that reductive, it doesn't take much to ask, "How do we pay for them?"

There have been attempts to change the script, like when Jeremy Corbyn gave a speech following the Manchester attack in which he related terrorism to – among other things – British foreign policy. But that didn't go so well: the reaction was quick and damning, with people rushing to call it "crass". Theresa May said it amounted to saying that the attacks are "our own fault" (oh, and by the way, vote for me).

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Never mind that the Parliament's Home Affairs select committee has noted that perceived grievances about foreign policy is one of many complex reasons people become radicalised. Some things just ought not to be said.

The brain fade, on the other hand, is a failure to say what must be said. And when you're grasping to find those figures that just won't leap into your head, there's no way you could say something more ideological – that just wouldn't work.

In that sense, it's a symbol of a national conversation that takes place within a very narrow framework.

Maybe the answer is not to stick to this script. My guess would be that if someone tried to talk to Nick Ferrari or whoever about anything outside those narrow parameters – something that undermines the whole premise of the question – you'd probably be met with an uh and an erm and exactly the same sort of panicked stuttering.

@SimonChilds13