The media hype has been going on for days. Across the country people were sat in front of their TVs waiting for it to begin. This will change our politics we were told. This was going to decide the election. Oh, then they showed the leaders debate and everybody fell asleep.
We learnt very little from this debate. Gordon Brown spent most of his time trying to cuddle up to LibDem voters and gave the clearest signal yet that Labour will push for a Lib-Lab pact after the election. David Cameron did what he is a good at - he performed well and confidently but we didn't expect him to do anything else did we? And then most people learnt what Nick Clegg actually looked like. Oh and for those that did know who the leader of the Liberal Democrats is, Nick Clegg (who will never be Prime Minister of this country) reminded us he was the MP for Sheffield, then he did it again, and again oh and just in case you didn't catch it, he did it again.
There were the obvious dividing lines between the parties. Gordon Brown thinks that if the state doesn't do just about everything the world is going to collapse. The Tories showed us that it is possible to live in a world without the nanny state. Whilst Nick Clegg kept reminding us that we'd had Tory and Labour governments for the last 65 years but left us no clearer what the Liberal Democrats believed in other than some abstract concept of 'fairness'. Then they all told us how they'd been to meet Mrs Jones, who lives in Burnley, worked for 50 years in the NHS, has had her house burnt down by yobs, served in the Royal Navy, likes eating babies and every other detail about Mrs Jones' life in order to back up each answer. Enough with the anecdotes please!
They might as well have done the debate in a room without any other human beings in it at all as the audience were so pointless. They weren't allowed to clap, they weren't allowed to laugh and the could only breath at specific intervals designated by the production team. Although I did notice that on at least one occasion one lady broke rule 45.7b and could clearly be seen....smiling. The shame. The limited role of the audience in the debates took out all life from the debates and left them sterile, stage-managed, pre-rehearsed pieces of political theatre. I want to see Margaret Beckett-esque booing (for those that don't know what I'm referring to she was once booed constantly by a Question Time audience), I want to see people turning on one of the leaders and I don't want all my questions asked by members of the medical-related professions.
It would be wrong to comment on such an auspicious occasion without commenting on how the participants looked. First of all, the fiasco of Alistair Stewart's tie ranks alongside Peter Sissions' famous 'Burgundy tie' moment after the death of the Queen Mother as a sheer catastrophe in TV tie moments. Cameron dressed well and again performed with style. Clegg, well apart from the momentary shot of his bum we got from some handy ITV camera work, he kept staring in to the lens getting closer and closer; I felt like he was going to stick his head out of the television at one point. Then there was Gordon, when is someone going to tell him not to smile - it really is quite off-putting.
I had my doubts about whether these debates were at all appropriate for our parliamentary system and they did just personalise politics even more making this whole debate about Clegg-Cameron-Brown and their personalities. Those who shared my doubts should feel vindicated; we were right.
We were told this was going to be a massive boost to our tired and broken democracy, if this is all the political class to offer then I have little faith that interest in our political system can be restored.
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