Signalling the end to the campaign trail
I came to after my post-debate reverie on the 17th floor of the Radisson Hotel in Birmingham at 6:05am to the dulcet tones of Evan Davis and the Today Programme. Had a bath, caught the 6:30am to Euston.
One scrambled egg and salmon and a black coffee later I arrived having been online throughout the journey putting together an article for tomorrow’s Times. By 8:05 I was sitting in my own flat I north London having risked leaving my super-duper bike on the super-duper new double decker bike racks at Euston.
Two hours from awakening in the middle of Birmingham to returning to my own home. Not a hiccup anywhere, not a jostle, nothing. Talk about unbroken Britain.
Reviewing the one debate that I have attended in the flesh it seemed to me to still be inconclusive. Cameron was smooth, Clegg was Clegg and Brown was tired and a little speedy. It seemed to me a no score draw but reading the papers I was clearly wrong – it was a stunning victory for the Tory leader.
I’m wondering what part the spin room played in achieving this victory. The British version of what happens in America after presidential debates is curious. In the US it’s left to the spin professionals to do the dirty work. You never see the “pols” doing it themselves. But last night in Birmingham the spin room was awash with male politicians of all shapes and sizes dashing about like inshore rescue crafts.
They would spot a live camera or a hack they knew and would immediately accost them with the brilliance of their leaders’ performance. “Hello Peter!” cried Michael Gove to me as I was swept past him. I paused for him to utter brilliant praise about his leader. I asked him: “Would you have told me if he had lost?”
It’s all over now the debating business and today it feels a little like the campaign is too.
The restoration of Tony Blair produces a new strand of interest but it is as if the electorate is now to be left to review its senses from a debating enterprise that notched up more than 20 million viewers.
It has certainly changed the British way of general elections – what else it will change remains to be seen.