People will say that Nick Clegg won this

It’s over. I think people will be inclined to say that Nick Clegg won this. He has raised his game. He has, in the past, looked like a man who has lost interest in his own answers.

Not tonight. The Tories wanted to use this debate to frame the argument between them and Labour… but Nick Clegg has not been sidelined, has not allowed himself to be love-smothered by Mr Brown and has done himself only good in this debate.

In the cutaways, David Cameron sometimes looked uncomfortable, didn’t dominate the event in the way that you might expect the main challenger for office to have done, even though he used popular (populist) examples to get his arguments across better than the prime minister.

They won’t be fed up in the Tory office but I think they will spot space for improvement in the third debate and they will be a bit worried about Nick Clegg’s performance.

As for Gordon Brown, reciting a policy to last paragraph or a statistic to the last decimal point doesn’t get you breakthrough. But he can’t reinvent himself for the second and probably more importantly for the third debate because that would look barmy.

He must hope that the great British public are not assessing all this with the magnifying glass that we in this Spin Room are and are tuning in instead to the bigger message on the economy and risk which has so far consolidated his vote and held the Tories back from the lift off moment some of them really thought they would have had by now.