The X Factor's gift to British democracy
Televisually a far better viewing experience than I had anticipated. In good part because of the crisp handling by Alastair Stewart.
On points its hard to depart from the consensus that Clegg took his chances and gave a consistently competent and relaxed performance. The geography of the line up appeared to disadvantage Cameron in that body-lingually he appeared to be being squeezed by the other two and forced back on his heels.
The prediction was always that the Lib Dems would always be favoured by being there at all. But Clegg ensured they did better than that, and the polls reflect that.
For Cameron, ahead in the polls but not by enough, the pressure was on. His problem is that whilst he did his stuff consistent with the performances that have brought him thus far, he did not manage to exceed expectation to anything like the degree that Clegg was allowed to.
In this sense then, Clegg’s success in succeeding, and Brown’s failure to fail, have left the Tory leader no further forward and possibly, even if not the points loser, the political loser of the night.
The Tories needed to emerge last night definably ahead. They needed to be assisted by a lacklustre Liberal Democrat performance, coupled with a Labour implosion. Both were denied them.
Of the three men, for Brown this was the least natural environment. He emerged even tempered, and never appeared to lose control. It doesn’t seem to leave him much further ahead, but neither does it seem to leave him any further back.
In yesterday’s Snowblog I wrote of the ‘American import’ that the ‘thing’, the debate, represents. The American tuition was evident. Clegg’s engagement with the camera was by far the best – I do not know whose input that might have been – possibly his own. But it was a wise use of the medium.
The most notable American influence in the debate was the wheeling out of individual and anecdotal stories. They didn’t work – they were thin and largely inconclusive, sometimes begging the question as to whether they were true. They don’t seem to work in a UK context.
Whatever last night delivers – the ‘X Factor’, ‘Big Brother’, and ‘Britain’s Got Talent’, had prepared a UK TV audience for its first ever mass engagement with pre-election Westminster politics. Will they come back for more? Those programmes alone suggest they usually do – for a bit anyway.