Rumble in the jungle it wasn’t, to the disappointment of anyone still sitting on the edge of their seats at the end of this third trial-by-media novelty. Nothing approaching a knockout blow, and not even any meaningful jabs below the belt. David Dimbleby, in the role of referee, barely glanced over the top of his glasses, let alone had to intervene.
Brown, distancing himself rather effectively from the legacy of the last 13 years, articulated his key message of fairness, while doing a fair job of implicating the Tories in the current economic mess by referring to the ‘same old conservative party’, while Cameron stuck to his script of Labour’s wasted spending and ongoing lies to the electorate.
It was Brown’s strongest performance by far, with the line “I had to nationalise Northern Rock” – now there’s a great conversation stopper – thrown in more in sorrow than in anger. Despite this, stiff body language and a rictus grin ensured that he still looked more like a Victorian automaton than a Prime Minister waiting to take up the reins of power again. He seemed to lose interest in his own answers by the end of his delivery, and was at his strongest when depicting either of the other two a “risk” towards the end of the debate. It’s a clever message in these most risk averse of times.
Cameron, despite his PR training, came across as strangely disengaged, with his eyes neither meeting the camera nor the questioner. His determination to stick to his own script rather than answer the question misses by a mile the first two tenets of the classic media training advice of ABC – Answer (the question), Bridge (the sentence) and Communicate (what you actually wanted to say when you agreed to come on the programme). Again, he suddenly seemed to remember that we should be reminded that Labour had in fact been in power for the last 13 years towards the end of the debate, and so rather failed to capitalise on the point.
So once again Clegg, with his direct engagement with the questioner, resulting in lots of shots of members of the audience nodding in agreement as he gave his response, came out top by a small margin. Oozing empathy, he talked of having “a really good salary”, used personal experience to good effect, and hammed up his exasperation with the ‘old’ parties. His position in the middle of the rostrum gave him something of a parental air as disagreements broke out over his head, and he made good the opportunity to present himself as the mediator.
There’s a lot less of ‘I agree with Nick’ going on these days, and no doubt the knives will still be out for the rank outsider in the desperate-to-be-influencer printed media in the final week.
The big loser? The English language. It appears that the opposite of ‘ordinary’ isn’t extraordinary any more. It’s banker.