Presidential candidates boycott radio debate after “aggressive” emails and “extreme dissatisfaction"

A debate between Union President Candidates that was due to be held on IC Radio last night was scuppered after four candidates decided to boycott the show an hour before it went on air.

The show, which initially raised eyebrows after one presenter had been on one candidate’s campaign team, was later sanctioned by the the union’s returning officers.

The presenter in question removed all promotional material for the candidate, whose campaign video he had featured in the week before, from his social media pages and promised to hold a fair and unbiased debate.

The deputy returning officer for the elections then okayed the show. The official Imperial College Union Twitter and the current Union President then advertised it.

57 minutes before the debate was due to begin, the hosts received an email, which they later read out on air. John Golden, Cat Stuttard, Eddy Kardouss and Levi Ordog had decided not to come, because the show's format would have provided "little opportunity" for "meaningful debate" and would have grouped candidates with “grossly different aims”.

This was presumably because the show’s runners had planned to question the Presidential candidates in particular groups of three. The dissenting group also described the presenters’ previous emails to them as “bordering on aggressive”.

The IC Radio presenters then complained on air that they had spent an “unspeakable” amount of time working on the show’s questions, calling the candidates involved in the boycott “unprofessional”.

The presenters had told the remaining candidates: Nas Andriopoulos, Melody Ball and Ivan Brown that the others wouldn’t be showing up and that the debate was cancelled. The show then went on with only one Presidential candidate present: Patryk Fryzlewicz, who was happy to call the incident a “shambles”, lamenting the struggle of the presenters and criticising the candidates who weren’t present.

Yulia Bulgakova, who initially said she couldn’t come due to illness, later told the presenters she stood by the four candidates who had declined to appear.

During their show, the presenters reiterated how they didn’t think their emails had been aggressive, asked the candidates to give evidence of this and said some just hadn't wanted to debate each other. The three then wittered on for an hour about the other candidate’s manifestos.

Melody Ball later told FELIX that she and other candidates (including Cat, Yulia, Eddy, John and Levi) were "not satisfied about the way we have been spoken to when expressing perfectly reasonable concerns about potential bias" and that "the IC Radio team seemed to have wanted to set the candidates against each other and create animosity" between candidates who "had been very supportive".

Ivan Brown told us he "doesn't know how reasonable the claims were, but they may have had some basis".

Raven Connelly Beng Hung said they couldn't attend for a personal reason and it had "nothing to do with a boycott".

After difficulties with the union’s ‘Meet the Candidates’ show last Wednesday, many have expressed their dismay at the lack of any real, challenging hustings this year. We’ll have to just go on their pictures then.