THE QUESTION on all minds was the same – would the wonderboy Nick Clegg stumble and fall? Like Icarus, tempt fate and fly too close to the sun? But the second much-hyped TV debate between Britain’s party leaders on Thursday night proved decisively that the Lib Dem leader’s performance last week was no flash in the pan.
Although post-debate polling suggested his scores were down, though still the “winner”, the point was made again most forcibly that this race is a three-way contest, broadly of equals. And his trump card, the “new” brand, no longer tired old Labour’s preserve, still has credible currency.
That very old Labour figure Harold Wilson famously declared “a week . . . a long time in politics.” Indeed. The last seven days, in which Lib Dem polling on the back of the first debate has pushed the party up from 20 to 30 per cent support, could now give it its best result since 1923. It appears to have blown away the psychological hurdle that held the party back for generations, the perennial dilemma of the “wasted vote”. The historian Timothy Garton Ash even suggested yesterday that “British elections will never be the same again. In a fortnight Britain may never be the same again.”
The new landscape was reflected in Tory leader David Cameron’s repeated, almost begging, insistence that only a majority Tory government would be able to provide the leadership the country needed. Dogged but uninspiring Gordon Brown – one commentator described him as a “bystander” – though distancing himself more from Nick Clegg, clearly had the coalition possibility, the first since the second World War, in mind.
We are, it appears, in virgin territory, with bewildered political scientists – because of the vagaries and iniquities of the first past the post system – increasingly loath to make any predictions on seat outcome. Some see the innate conservatism of the electorate eventually in the next two weeks driving it back to the faithful duopoly. But most now predict a hung parliament. And were the elections to be held today, with the Tories’ percentages now in the low to mid-30s, the Lib Dems, around 30, and Labour just less, a most bizarre outcome could well be the result. Labour with the smallest percentage share of the vote could have most seats; the Lib Dems with a higher share, could have half as many seats; and the Tories, with the highest vote share, could languish in between. Such a result would do little for the credibility of the “Mother of Parliaments”, or for the renewal that the British body politic sorely needs.