Time for the post-match spin – what did LDV’s readers make of it all?
Update: Sun/YouGov poll result puts Clegg on 51%, Cameron 29%, Brown 19%
ITV poll shows same result: Clegg 43%, Cameron 26%, Brown 20%
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32 Comments
Only Nick gave a smile…and several times (towards the end when he had found his feet), and has anyone counted how many times Gordon said “I agree with Nick” and “Im sure Nick will agree with me on…”
I thought Cameron was awful – shrill, vague, getting posher and posher the angrier he got – didn’t know to handle Brown. Nick did okay, but he is slightly monotone. Brown pretty laid back – interesting to hear him being so friendly to nick
Closing results: –
ITV liveblog poll Clegg 45, Brown 36, Cameron 19
Ch4 liveblog poll Clegg 58, Brown 28, Cameron 13
Comments collected by @paul__lewis (Guardian) from the spin room:
George Osborne: Cameron was “positive, upbeat, personable” and left Brown “on the sidelines”.
Douglas Alexander: “This opens up the whole of the campaign.”
Mandelson: “Everyone thought it was Cameron’s to loose and I’m afraid he lost it.”
I think Nick needs to get his hand out of his pocket next time, his body language wasn’t great
I listened on the Radio rather than TV and agree Clegg was by far the best. Cameron’s closing was, in rhetorical terms, quite good though.
I wrote an artilcle onhere recently that post-debate media narratives are determied by the first 2 questions. Will look forward to seeing if that applies this time.
I thought Brown was better than I expected and Cameron worse, but Clegg certainly seems to have been the “winner” as far as most people are concerned.
There are some live poll results from Angus Reid here:
http://www.angusreidelections.co.uk/2010/04/debate/
Some of them are a bit difficult to make sense of. As of now, 42% of the total are said to be more likely to vote Lib Dem after watching the debate. But the corresponding figure for each group of party supporters is smaller than this. Surely that is arithmetically impossible!
Nick was easily the best, answering the questions, not attacking the others over much, seeming a real person
Cameron seemed plastic, flustered and unconvincing for most of the time.
Brown started well, but soon spent alot of the time asking cameron questions – which Dave handled badly.
If anything Nick lacked a big narrative message, Dave probably did well enought to keep any tories on board, but Nick should be winning over the undecided.Gordon probably kept core Labour voters on board but otherwise would ahve won few converts.
I have to say all credit to Nick, I don’t think any other Lib Dem MP would have done as well.
Anthony Aloysius St – the poll chimes with what I was saying
about 50% of Labour and Tory supporters think their man won, compared to 75% of LIb Dems thinking clegg was best. Over 50% of undecided and supporters of other parties think Nick was best – way ahead of Cameron and Brown (both under 20%)
Overall
16% of people are more likely to vote Labour (mostly Labour!)
18% of people are more likely to vote conservative (the vest majority already conservative)
43% of people are more likely to vote lib dem – (only 1/3 of these were already likley to vote lib Dem, about 20% of the 43% coming from Labour, Conservative and undecided)
The only word of caution is more likley to vote is incredibly vague – but what the real voting intention polls – it’s importnat lib dems keep up the momentum.
This is a truly superb result 🙂 I don think Lib Dems even dared to hope it would be such a big win!
“43% of people are more likely to vote lib dem – (only 1/3 of these were already likley to vote lib Dem, about 20% of the 43% coming from Labour, Conservative and undecided)”
Some caution is needed on these figures. If the figure is less than 43% in each group individually, it can’t amount to 43% in total when you add all the groups together!
Mind you, it’s a sobering thought that around 20% of Tory supporters and 20% of Labour supporters say they are more likely to support the Lib Dems. If they all actually switched, that would place the Lib Dems ahead of Labour and the Tories …
On the health service Nick could have done an aside, “of course, it was a Liberal invention” and he needs to say “did you know… Liberal Democrats are going into this election in lst or 2nd in 250 seats.”
Not many know that , and its credibility.
DC failed when he was given a question by Brown and didnt answer, on police, education, health, Brown came at him and he just didnt bother to knock it back.
They will both go for Nick a lot more next time, for sure.
There are two sets of figures – accross and down.
The 43% more likley to vote lib dem + 32% just as likley and 19% less likley and 6% not sure = 100%
Of the 43% of people more lilkey to vote lib dem: 19% are Labour, 22% con, 33% lib dem 10% other 17% undecided = 100%.
I’d better post here, hadn’t I. I have put a lot of effort on this site, over the past year or two, into trying to make sure we did not become Britain’s third conservative party. Perhaps (who knows) with some success. In the process, I haven’t always been terribly supportive of our leader. Well, he did pretty damn well tonight.
Sorry – the penny’s dropped. The Angus Reid figures add up to 100% along the rows, not down the columns. It’s not that 20% of Labour supporters are more likely to vote Lib Dem. It’s that 20% of those more likely to vote Lib Dem are Labour supporters. Seems an odd way of presenting the data, but still …
“has anyone counted how many times Gordon said “I agree with Nick” and “Im sure Nick will agree with me on…””
Fourteen thousand, two hundred and eighty one is I believe the final verified count. He seemed to agree with Nick on everything other than the closure of Burnley’s A&E unit being a bad thing!
I thought Cameron was slickest, but he had the least to gain and so it was probably a net loss for him, Brown was dreadful but probably not as dreadful as I was expecting, and Nick was a bit hyperactive and slightly repetative at times, and I wish he’d tone down the pleading, exasperated eyebrows routine, but overall he did very well starting from a position where he had most to gain already. I can’t see how it could be viewed as anything but a massive gain for the Lib Dems.
That said, the format was awful and overall the debate was completely tedious and forgettable, and I wouldn’t be suprised if it convinced a few people to not vote at all, or to give their votes to an Other.
Cameron really looked like he felt out of place. Reminded me of the Nixon debate in 1960.
Sky News say Clegg won it, they put Brown last by one point from Cameron on 31.
The Daily Telegraph’s Whitehall Correspondent, Christopher Hope, says, “Clegg won it, hands down, and has made the Liberal Democrats a serious third force in this election.”
Bloody hell….the Daily TELEGRAPH !
Its on their website but, will they print it?
Yes, whether the print media run on Clegg winning is another matter. They have a history of “forgetting” key facts like that…
Btw, hands-down “best” quote of the evening went to Cameron for:
‘I was speaking to a black man the other day about immigration…’
You could see him cringing as he realised he was saying it.
“The MailOnline had Mr Clegg on 43 per cent, Mr Cameron on 40 and Mr Brown on a woeful 17 per cent.”
That’s the DAILY MAIL!
I thought Nick did really well and was the clear winner, and this seems to be the general feedback across the board. Well done!
I always had my doubts about Nick, was a Huhne supporter in the leadership election, but Nick has gone up massively in my estimation both with his performance tonight and with Paxman on Monday.
PS Is Cameron really thinking about nuking China?
Note the Telegraph rather sourly put inverted commas around “Clegg ‘wins’ election debate”. So it might be a win, but the Telegraph are now seeking to call it a “win”.
Look for the Tory press to spin this by saying it doesn’t really matter at all.
The Tory press won’t spin it, they’ll ignore it. Instead, they’ll attack on Trident and try to make Nick sound like Michael Foot in 1983. I can almost hear tomorrow’s Daily Mail story being written now. Well, balls to ’em. It won’t work.
Front pages:
http://www.politicshome.com/uk/article/7929/front_pages_friday_15_april_2010.html
So all four broadsheets go with “Clegg wins”, Mirror front page is just weird – Man vs Boys, but bottom line is “kid Clegg shines”, Sun dodges question of who won (but does give poll results buried in para 2), Mail front page is mostly volcano, but does run “Clegg wins” strapline, no FT, no Express.
The “Super-Gord” Mirror headline is hardly a surprise really.
“PS Is Cameron really thinking about nuking China?”
To be fair I think he just wants to pay billions of pounds of our money to keep that option open.
The Daily Mail doesn’t even have the debate on the front page, this despite immigration being one of the major talking points this evening. If that doesn’t tell you something, nothing will.
I don’t feel quite so foolish for having misinterpreted those figures, having read Anthony Wells’s comments this afternoon, which misinterpret them in exactly the same way. Maybe he should read LDV …
I didn’t watch it, but the reports seem to be more Clegg winning because he came across better than the others than because he really enthused people. It shouldn’t be difficult to come across better than the others, and I agree with the comment Stephen Tall made elsewhere that Clegg’s Town Hall meetings have probaby helped him enormously.
So, it’s good news (like David Allen, I might not like Clegg, but I still want to see us win, and he is our leader, and maybe just what some of what those of us who are sceptical about him have been urging has sunk in), but it needs working on.
I had the experience of door-to-door knocking trying to get nomination forms filled in for the local elections in wards where we’ve done nothing and have few/no members. It’s a good way of finding out what the punters REALLY think of us. There’s few who are actively hostile, most just don’t know (or care) enough about us to have an opinion. Time and time again, the reaction I got (I was door knocking as if canvassing) was a genuine “Huh? I don’t know anything about you, so how can I say whether I would support you?”. Active support for Labour and the Tories was VERY low, funnily enough Labour seems to be holding out better in the bigger more middle class homes.
Getting as far as people realising we exist and we have policies that are at least as sensible as the others is a good thing, it has been achieved here, at least amongst people who have interest enough to follow the news. Now we need to work on getting people to vote for us because they really like what we offer.
We’re running some excellent local campaigns in many places which just aren’t getting reported in the national media. This will often help us, stealth victory because our opponents didn’t realise what was happening. The Westminster bubble is STILL thinking of this in terms of national swings based on national party image. They just don’t get it. The decline of strong political loyalty and the drop in serious media political coverage means the local campaign counts for a LOT more than used to be the case.
That doesn’t mean the national image counts for nothing, so a continued good showing by Clegg will be a big boost to those local campaigners still trying to pull out the sceptical and still fighting “oh, I don’t vote for you, because you can’t win” attitudes.