A leaders’ debate on foreign affairs that’s heading home

What are you doing personally to help the environment? Odd that – the third question in the international affairs section. I can’t help feeling Sky fancied stretching the rules a bit after they drew the foreign affairs straw and not getting too bogged down in Kazakhstan.

Gordon Brown said he hadn’t taken more than one flight in the election but then they have been in rather short supply. David Cameron says he’s stopped a runway (at Heathrow). Nick Clegg says “I don’t do enough,” which is the sort of approach that probably won him friends last week.

The bulk of this debate is about nuclear power. Gordon Brown painting the others as opponents. Anyone who cares about this issue passionately will probably already know their way round this issue and have decided what take they like. It then all ranged wide of the mark into Europe and much else.
 
Now another corker of a question about should the Pope really come here given position on homosexuality, science, contraception, abuse. Bet they didn’t have that in the rehearsals.

Nick Clegg is talking about “immense feelings of anguish” in the Catholic Church. David Cameron said there were disagreements but he wanted the Pope to have a good visit. Gordon Brown said he’d met the abused and been very affected by it.

This question is good television as an ambush but if viewers really are leaving it till now to work out their vote is it central to the project?

The tv debates, still only in their early life are already mutating from the original rules. The leaders have taken comfort in emphasising they agree with each other in this treacherous political terrain. “No uprising” against the trip, as Nick Clegg said.
 
After this morning’s newspapers, Nick Clegg’s strategists suspect that some newspapers may have written their reviews of the debates before they even happened.