Sky Debate Confirms Three Horse Race
After a very exciting week of poll surges, popularity drops and the hype of last weeks first ever prime-ministerial television debate, Sky’s leader debate over foreign affairs had huge expectations.
The Liberal Democrats experienced an unprecedented gain in the polls, as a result of their leader, Nick Clegg’s, performance on the domestic affairs debate on ITV. With Labour falling to third place, the Liberal Democrats overtook them with a huge boost of over ten points. Some later polls even showed the Liberal Democrats even overtaking the Conservatives.
Therefore the Sky debate was a critical factor, in determining whether Clegg’s popularity was sustainable or not. David Cameron, expected to put in a much greater performance, with Gordon Brown, also expected to improve significantly, were both anticipated to come down hard on Clegg, to try and subside the Liberal Democrat poll popularity.
So when Brown started off so strongly, with a clear opening and domineering impact on the first question over tackling the Europe problem, it seemed that this was a prime-minister who had been clearly struck by the week’s disastrous Labour position in the polls and looked to make serious amends. Where the theme of Brown’s debate last week was, ‘I agree with Nick’, it was completely contrasted, with tonight’s phrase, telling Clegg to ‘Get real’.
Both the Conservatives and Labour separated themselves from Clegg on the Trident issue; the only point in the debate to which Brown or Cameron really had a chance to deliver a killing blow to burst the ‘Clegg bubble’. The Liberal Democrats do not want to renew the current Cold War nuclear weapon, to which no real argument from the opposing leaders ever solidified, leaving Clegg, rather serendipitously, unscarred from this topic. As a result, for the rest of the debate, Clegg remained prominent against the other candidates.
Cameron was noticeably stronger and much more dominant than last week, keeping a consistent stance throughout the entire 90 minutes. The same cannot be said for Brown; he progressively got less and less assertive. However, the prime-minister was much more aggressive, than last week, with the other two party leaders. He criticised Cameron on being anti-European and Clegg of ridding the UK’s security by stopping the renewal of Trident.
Regrettably though, on Brown’s part, Cameron responded with a very forceful claim, stating Labour had produced leaflets of lies about the Conservatives, about pensions and elderly health treatment. All of Cameron’s claims were correct, reinforcing and ending the debate with Brown conceding another poor performance.
The polls after the debate, however, were extremely mixed. YouGov/Sun suggested there was a Conservative victory, with the Liberal Democrats coming second. Another poll, Comres, put Nick Clegg as the most popular leader of the debate.
It seems from this mix there was no clear winner, with too close a call between Clegg and Cameron. It seems Labour will remain in a bottom third place in the polls, and Clegg looks to have sustained his party poll surge. However, each of the results had barely any breathing space between them. It seems the televised debates really have created a three horse race.
This was Clegg’s hardest debate to face tonight, because of his party policies over Europe and Trident. The next BBC debate on the economy, next Thursday 29th April, will be fiercely analysed, to see whether Clegg can keep second place, ahead of Brown, but also, to see how much of a realistic challenge Clegg poses to threaten Conservative popularity.
