I have an appalling confession to make: I didn’t watch the first two leaders’ debates. There, that’s a weight off my shoulders.
I caught snatches of both events on radio, but I could only manage a few minutes at a time before the red mist descended and I’d start shouting insults at Gordon Brown or Nick Clegg.
Tonight, I made myself watch the whole thing on TV. (I once had to sit through an hour of video of Burmese government troops beheading rebels, so I felt I really should be able to cope with a 90 minute political debate.)
Cameron looked and sounded pretty good – but then, he was saying what I like to hear: that it was time to start rewarding good behaviour and stop rewarding bad behaviour. Not a complex message, and one that only needs to be made at all because of thirteen years of a government which has turned morality and common sense on their heads at every opportunity. Nice suit, good voice. Together, assured. He assiduously avoided any eye contact with Gordon Brown – in fact, he treated the Prime Minister as if he was a dead man walking.
Hardly surprising, really, because Gordon Brown had evidently died sometime earlier in the day, and not even the mortician’s art could hide the alarming green hue of his rapidly decomposing flesh, or the terrible dead quality of what had been his one good eye. One presumes the unconvincing attempts at animating his rapidly stiffening limbs were made using electrodes and a small generator: the set-up malfunctioned spectacularly right at the end when all the corpse’s facial muscles suddenly tightened, producing what is always referred to in genre fiction as a “rictus grin”. It was truly alarming. Evidently, digital recordings of snippets from earlier budget and conference speeches had been pre-selected to be set running at appropriate moments. The lip-synching wasn’t very good.
When it comes to Nick Clegg, I’ve been employing my standard reactions to things I don’t like – shouting at them or sticking my fingers in my ears and closing my eyes and pretending they’re not there. Instead, tonight, I watched him carefully.
He is a spectacularly irritating man.
The way he kept trying to connect with each questioner in the audience by asking them a little question and using their names was repulsively phony: has he been studying America’s TV evangelists to get that true tang of frankly creepy insincerity?
His arguments were those of a 15-year old school debater, but less convinclngly delivered. He rivaled Gordon Brown for sheer humourlessness. His attempts to reprise his earlier success with the “these two represent the old politics” ploy went embarrassingly awry. But I did learn two important things I hadn’t previously realised: apparently the early years of a child’s education are “very important” – no doubt a shock to educationalists across the globe – and, referring to Britain, he told the TV audience, “this is your country”. Thank God he cleared that one up!
His presentational style and appearance are that of the new deputy head of the 6th form at one of our more demotic private schools giving assembled parents a run-down on the “A” level results and sadly reporting that two boys have had to be expelled after being found off their face on drugs behind the bike shed.
Is this vacuous boy-man what all the fuss has been about? Really? Are we really this infantile as a nation?
As for our new-found obsession with floating voters and the silly little coloured lines indicating their reaction to whatever is being said at the time:oh please! If people don’t know how they’re going to vote by now, they should have their democratic rights rescinded.
As for who actually won the debate, David Cameron did, by a mile. Mind you, Michael Crick, Newsnight’s socialist Political Editor thought Brown had put in a really solid performance. He must have meant “solid” as in “block of wood”. Ted Heath could have done better than this. Brown was abjectly, pitifully, excruciatingly abysmal. He was as bad as it is possible to be on TV without actually bursting into tears and wetting your pants.
The only honest commentator appeared to be the man from MORI, who was responsible for interpreting the worms for the BBC (I forgave him as soon as he started talking). Cameron clearly won. Clegg did worse than before. Brown did badly.
Any floating voter should have stuck with Newsnight and listened to a discussion of the debate by Mrs. Ed Balls, Michael Gove and Paddy Ashdown. Pantsdown was ghastly, as always – undoubtedly the most unpleasant politician I had to interview at the BBC and reportedly foul to his aides. Michael Gove was clear and incisive and straightforward and ran rings round the Lib-Dem has-been.
As for Yvette Cooper – well, Labour doesn’t really matter any more. In a week’s time, like Christopher Lee’s Dracula in the first Hammer remake, the British electorate will run along the table and rip down the curtains, exposing this Undead Government to sunlight: it will writhe and shriek for all of half a minute as it dissolves into dust, before a gust of wind blows it away, leaving behind nothing except for one staring, glass eye.
Well, I can dream, can’t I?
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