Nick Clegg had been biding his time all along. Having been forced to suck it up while David Cameron ran rings round the Liberal Democrats in coalition, he now wanted a very public revenge. With the sterile formalities of the opening statements out of the way, Clegg rushed in ahead of everyone to unburden his five long years of hurt. “How could you have governed the country so badly?” he said accusingly.
Understandably David Cameron looked rather taken aback. Like everyone else, he had been under the impression that the Liberal Democrat leader had been more than happy to go along with his policies. If he had been so unhappy all this time, why hadn’t he said so earlier?
Clegg looked around expectantly; back in 2010, Cameron and Gordon Brown had been falling over themselves to agree with him. This time, though, he was on his own. The only Nic anyone was likely to agree with was Nicola Sturgeon.
For the first hour of the debate, the women bossed it. Sturgeon was relaxed, smiley and channelling charm. She didn’t even bother to contradict Nigel Farage’s assertion that Hadrian’s Wall was the Anglo-Scottish border and she got in an early dart at Miliband by saying she agreed with him.
That must have hurt the Labour leader. Natalie Bennett was in the same position Ed Miliband found himself in last week. Expectations were so low that she only had to stand up to exceed them: she did rather better than that, coming out with one of the evening’s more memorable soundbites in “austerity lite or austerity heavy”.
Leanne Wood was mostly happy to play for the Welsh vote, so the others left her alone. No one quibbled when she said she didn’t believe in setting arbitrary targets for cutting the deficit and then said she had cut it by £30bn by 2020.
The men were having a trickier time of it. Cameron started nervously as if not quite sure whether attack or defence was his best tactic. Miliband appeared to have taken his cue from ITV presenter Julie Etchingham’s Star Trek top. “Here’s what I believe,” he said in his least believable “I bring peace from a far-flung universe” voice; playing the statesman by rising above the petty squabbling of those around him is an acquired skill. Sincere looks to camera and repeated pre-scripted soundbites just doesn’t cut it. The passion cut in just a bit too late.
Farage was as sweaty as expected but less of a force. He briefly came alive for his party piece on immigration but his time seems up as the self-appointed “voice of reason”: the only politician who can be trusted to tell the truth. He seemed tired, far too polite and spent much of the time looking at the wrong camera.
The Weakest Link lineup had made it all too easy for him to be voted off; Farage is at his best when he’s in a one-to-one ding-dong. Here he was just one voice among many and was easily drowned out.
Then this was always set up to be a debate that no one would win. That’s why the prime minister agreed to it. When seven people compete to be heard, no one is. Mostly the arguments were tired and familiar and no one really landed a blow in anger. It was democracy at its dullest and most deathless.
The tone had been set with the first question on the economy from a teenager called Jonny. By the time the seven leaders were cut short by Julie, Jonny looked as if he wished he’d never asked.
Nor was it entirely clear who appeared the most thrilled when the whole thing was over: the seven leaders or the audience. Everyone had been counting down the minutes with more than an hour to spare.
Taking his cue from Paxman the previous week, Miliband rushed up to Cameron while the cameras were still rolling at the end: “Are you OK, Dave?” Dave was fine. Everyone was. Almost nothing had been decided and little would be remembered.
