Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron speaks at the Welsh Conservative Party Conference in Cardiff. (Reuters)
Prime Minister David Cameron torpedoed plans for a series of US-style TV debates before a close-fought national election in Britain, a spoiling tactic widely seen as a move to protect his own high personal ratings and to deprive rivals of publicity.
His intervention injects further uncertainty into what is becoming the most unpredictable British election since the 1970s with neither of the two main parties able to establish a clear lead and the rise of fringe parties making it unusually hard to predict who will govern the world's sixth largest economy.
Britain's future in the European Union and its territorial integrity could hang on the outcome as Cameron has promised an EU membership referendum if he wins and an 'out' vote would prompt another Scottish push to leave the United Kingdom.
Cameron blamed broadcasters for what he said were chaotic preparations for three debates planned before the May 7 election, saying he would only take part in one debate next month if it included the leaders of six other parties, most of them minor.
'This is our final offer, and to be clear ... the prime minister will not be participating in more than one debate,' Craig Oliver, Cameron's communications chief, told broadcasters, prompting rivals to accuse the British leader of cowardice.
Neck-and-neck with the opposition Labour Party in many opinion polls, Cameron has long said he doesn't want to take part in TV debates in the final month of campaigning, arguing they would be an unhelpful distraction.
His rejection of broadcasters' proposals to hold several debates ends months of prevarication over the issue however and kills off the idea of a head-to-head debate with Ed Miliband, the Labour leader and Cameron's main rival to be the next prime minister.
Miliband said Cameron was running scared.
'David Cameron is ducking the debate with me,' Miliband told British TV. 'He is cowering from the public. I'll debate him any time, any place, any where.'
Memories of the last pre-election TV debates - in 2010 - loom large in Cameron's thinking. Watched by 22 million people, they transformed that election, boosting the centre-left Liberal Democrats and depriving Cameron of an overall majority.
Cameron has been forced to govern in a two-party coalition with the Liberal Democrats ever since, an arrangement that has stuck in the craw of many of his lawmakers who argue that their plans to reform Britain have been watered down as a result.
'They had huge audiences and they made a difference,' YouGov pollster Peter Kellner said of the 2010 debates.
'The Liberal Democrats held on to enough of their gains (from the debates) to stop the Conservatives winning outright,' he told the BBC.
'NO UPSIDE' FOR CAMERON
Conservative strategists were sceptical about any upside for Cameron from the debates, fearing they could have allowed Miliband to improve his dismal leadership ratings and appear as a credible prime minister-in-waiting.
With the country's mostly right-leaning press regularly deriding Miliband as a socially awkward nerd, the TV debates were a rare high-profile opportunity for him to prove his detractors wrong.
With the possibility of a televised head-to-head encounter with Cameron now off the table, Miliband faces a tougher task to turn around public perceptions of him.
By insisting on a multi-party format, Cameron can avoid the kind of intense scrutiny a head-to-head debate would have brought, and set up a contest where fringe parties hostile to his own rivals can take part.
He shrugged off charges he was running scared. Instead, he said his final offer was designed to break an impasse over the debates, which have been bogged down in bickering over who takes part and in what format.
'I'm unblocking the logjam by saying let's have this debate, a seven-cornered debate and get on with it before the campaign and then we can actually do what needs to be done and get round the country during the election campaign,' he told Sky News.
His decision sets the stage for a convoluted seven-party TV debate of the kind common in multi-party democracies in Scandinavia but rare in Britain where, until 2010, the electoral system had produced single-party Labour or Conservative governments for more than 60 years after World War Two.
Under Cameron's plan, the anti-EU UKIP party, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, the Green party, the Liberal Democrats, and possibly the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland would also take part. None of the party leaders would have much air time to make their case.
The furore comes as opinion polling in Scotland showed the crucial role that previously fringe parties are likely to play at the ballot, highlighting a surge in nationalism that could see the Scottish National Party (SNP) batter Labour.
Surveys commissioned by Michael Ashcroft, the former deputy chairman of Cameron's Conservatives, showed swings of between 20 percent and 28.5 percent to the SNP, suggesting Labour could lose its safest seat in Scotland, that of retiring former prime minister Gordon Brown.
© Thomson Reuters 2015