Friday, April 23, 2010

Who Won?

"Clegg again," said the summariser on Radio 4, "the other two couldn't land a telling blow." "Brown," thought my parents, "Cameron and Clegg were just waffling most of the time." Cameron comes out on top, was the instant response of Sun readers, though you suspect they'd say the same if he was buried under a whale, the wreckage of a twenty-storey building and the entire continent of Africa. The Guardian, though, scored it much the same as last week - a narrow win for Clegg. (There was no Daily Mail equivalent, but only because they were still trying to work out why Clegg hadn't come on stage wearing a swastika armband, vowing to legalise paedophilia and give your pension to asylum seekers).

As was the case in the first debate, it was Brown who had all the best unintentional one-liners - "I was speaking to young people only yesterday" - but Clegg who provided the only genuinely funny put-down: "You can't deport 900,000 people - you don't know where they live," during the exchange on immigration (or "imnigrants" if you're the leader of the Labour Party).

Cameron was too busy wheeling out misleading statistics - "Sometimes (immigration's) been 200,000 a year. That's the equivalent of two million a decade." Except it hasn't, has it, you superficial moron? - and last week's gags about "border police on the M5" to crowbar his "1,100 business leaders" into every single possible part of the debate (if you love them so much, Dave, why don't you just let Mothercare and Next run the whole bloody country?). He did manage to make eighty-four-year old Grace Lane's day, though - by promising to sort out her state pension in 2016.

Bet she can't wait.

1 comment:

Bryan said...

Don’t hold your breath Grace.