They won’t do that again. Seven leaders lined up like skittles all nervously fingering their plastic lecterns. In charge was Julie Etchingham who’d spent many hours in wardrobe creating a fetishistic look. Severe blonde hair. A spotless high-necked tunic as white as sharks fangs. Heavy black-rimmed specs. She looked like the gorgeous physics genius who works for James Bond’s arch-enemy. During the debate she lacked authority. When candidates shouted at each other she joined in and tried to harry them or close them down. More coolness needed. And she was glued to a lectern like the speakers. Roaming among them with a single portable microphone, she might have umpired more effectively.
Leanne Wood of Plaid Cymru almost wept during her overture. ‘I’m from the Rhondda,’ she said in lilting tones. ‘And I’m speaking to everyone back home in Wales tonight.’ She sounded homesick. Perhaps she should have been allowed to go back on the bus with tea and a bun.
Aussie deportee Natalie Bennett defied expectations by bringing her brain to the studio. She promised to cancel student debt, hike the minimum wage and increase foreign aid to one per cent of GDP. Someone should tell her lunatics can’t vote.
The format was too cramped and disjointed to create a winner. Miliband didn’t score. Not even in his own net. Nor did Cameron who was smack next to Nicola Sturgeon. The brainy little elf was clearly hoping that her red-pink dress, and matching views, would provoke Flashman to swing a punch. She lost no time accusing him of ‘pushing children into poverty’. And she vowed to invest in the future of kids not nukes. Cameron simply blanked her. SNP game-plan neatly foiled.
Clegg was the surprise of the night. He pulled off a coup by ambushing Cameron and accusing him of trying to cut the education budget during the coalition’s salad days. Cameron looked miffed at this act of mutiny. But not that miffed. The back-stab may have been agreed in advance to rescue the LibDems from oblivion and stuff Labour.
Miliband had two sticky moments. He was caught off guard by Clegg who proudly trundled out his famous apology for breaking the tuition fee promise. (He’s become addicted to this confession.) Clegg then invited the Labour leader to purge his own conscience and say sorry for knackering the economy. Miliband, on the spot, swivelled away from Clegg and began lambasting Cameron instead. He wasn’t pursued. On the NHS Miliband was interrupted by a straight question. ‘What about mid-Staffs?’ His response was to offload a heap of numerical flannel about reducing waiting times from 18 months to 18 weeks. Or was it 18 days to 18 seconds? Again, there was no follow-up. The format was the problem. Truth-evaders were allowed to wriggle free.
Many billions were promised for the NHS. Clegg said eight, Cameron five, Nigel Farage ten. He proposes to find the cash by quitting Europe. He got into a moral tangle by complaining that foreign HIV victims fly here to cadge NHS drugs. He sounded callous. Leanne Wood told him he should be ashamed of himself. Nicola Sturgeon pounced:
‘When someone’s diagnosed with a dreadful illness my instinct is to think they’re a human being.’
In a scoreless draw, Cameron came out looking calm, reasonable and authoritative. So maybe he shaved it in the end.
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