Further thoughts on the final leader’s debate
My immediate reaction to the final leader’s debate of the general election campaign last Thursday was to call it for Clegg first, then Brown, and then Cameron last. However, the consensus of the polls and the commentators over the last few days was to put Cameron as the winner, followed by Clegg, with Brown last. Did I get it wrong? Did I let my partisanship blind me to what really happened?
I have been wondering about this and I do want to, in part, change my mind. I think I was right in my judgement – but only for the first half of the debate.
The format of the debate was to discuss economic questions first. In answering the questions on the economy Nick Clegg gave the best performance. Gordon Brown, playing to his strengths, was also more effective than he had been in the previous two debates. Cameron I thought was weak.
But then the debate changed and more general questions were allowed. Nick Clegg came under intense pressure to defend his party’s policies, notably on immigration. He did this robustly but he lost the opportunity to go on the offensive and make fresh arguments on his terms. Brown, away from economic issues, also did less well. So I could concede that maybe Cameron did ‘win’ this half of the debate.
However, overall I still believe that Cameron was the loser. I repeat what I said in the last post. The Tories are in the hunt for a majority. To secure that Cameron needed not only to win but to win in a big. He needed to provide a game changing performance to shift the likely outcome of the election away from hung parliament territory. He did not achieve that.
This content was originally posted on my old Strange Thoughts blog.
1 Comment
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No, the news coverage was confused between the polls of the audience and the polls of the undecided voters. This close to the election, especially after the first debate made Nick a contender, decided voters are simply going to say their guy won. The polls of undecided voters put Nick overwhelmingly ahead and IIRC Cameron last. That was the real poll by which to judge – the poll of people who hadn’t made up their minds yet – but the news media screwed up. Nick won.
However, he didn’t win enough IMHO. He didn’t challenge Cameron of the fact he’ll allow a child to be expelled without appeal. Great for ‘discipline’, but what about what happens to the child? He didn’t take on Brown and Cameron going after ‘life on the dole’. How is it life on the dole if a single father decides not to take a job three hours away because it will leave him worse off, after transport costs, than he was before. That’s a recipe for broken Britain right there and surefire evidence that neither plutocrat Cameron nor emotionally-retarded Brown think about the human beings effected by their policy decisions. If we were to win, Clegg should have gone chasing after Tory votes by pointing out that (a) rehabilitation is scientifically proven to be the real way forward if you’re serious about cutting crime, (b) incentives is the way to get people off benefits, not force, (c) small class room sizes is the way to deal with discipline, not investing headmasters with draconian authorities and removing the appeals procedure, (d) Cameron’s policies on immigration are a fraud designed to appeal to the Daily Mail reader. They’re not a real solution. Just like he should have called Cameron on his support for rolling back a woman’s right to choose last week when the pope was mentioned. Instead Nick, no doubt following advice from Cowley St ‘strategists’, decided his task was to take down Gordon. And he won, easily. But Tory voters left the debate feeling happy about their choice in Cameron and in that regards the audience poll was accurate; 34% of them will vote Tory and it’s a damn shame.