Spot the difference: “Miliband flops as outsiders shine” (Daily Telegraph). “Labour buoyed as Miliband edges Cameron in snap poll” (The Guardian); “Ed sunk by nightmare of Nicola” (Daily Mail); “Cam hit for six” (Daily Mirror); “Oops! I just lost my election” (the Sun’s front page headline over a picture of Ed Miliband).
The Times was circumspect, “Enter the outsiders”, as was the Independent, “The technicolour vote” and i, “The dawn of rainbow politics”. The Daily Star was refreshingly honest : “No clue who’s won it”. The Daily Express’s headline reflected that it is still caught between Tory loyalty and a desire for Ukip: “Cool Cameron on top... but Farage keeps up fight on EU and migrants”.
Post-debate polls were as mixed as the headlines. But, aside from the editors betraying their political agenda by boosting their favoured prime ministerial candidate, the clear winner was the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon.
The event was made for sketch writers, so let’s see what they had to say.
It was an “oratorical pile-up”, wrote Michael Deacon in the Telegraph, “like sitting through a two-hour penalty shoot-out – between seven different teams”.
John Crace in the Guardian agreed. Unimpressed with “the Weakest Link line-up”, he thought “it was democracy at its dullest and most deathless... Mostly the arguments were tired and familiar and no one really landed a blow in anger”.
Quentin Letts in the Mail also likened it to the Weakest Link. He thought it “a hoot, a mixture of bar fight, bitchfest and Grand National steeplechase”. Although “it was hard to discern any clear winners or losers” he did pick out Nick Clegg for chatting up the camera lens. “That boy is a smoothie in a TV debate”, he wrote.
Donald McIntyre in the Independent saw the line-up as “the Borgen model” and considered it “striking” that with three women on stage the tone changed “and steered the debate in a somewhat more leftward direction”.
Similarly, Anne Treneman in the Times noted that prior to the debate there had been “speculation about whether the fact that three of the leaders were women would change the tone of the debate and make it less aggressive, less shouty”. But, she noted, it was the women who took on Nigel Farage while “the men just stood there, arguing their points, and looking earnest”.
Leo McKinstry, writing in the Express, found the debate “messy” with the seven leaders indulging in “rehearsed soundbites, dodgy statistics and hollow bombast”. Cameron “came across best on the economy... He dominated proceedings” while “Farage, a superb natural debater, was his ebullient, eloquent self”.
By contrast, the Indy’s McIntyre observed that Farage “was at the more primitive end of his spectrum, raising, for example, his latest spectre of foreign Aids patients costing the taxpayer £25,000 a year”.
And Kevin Maguire, in the Mirror, was in no doubt that |Nicola Sturgeon was the winner while Farage was the loser. “She landed punches and he punched himself in the face”, he wrote.
He was full of praise for the “fighting performances” of all three women - Sturgeon, Leanne Wood of Plaid Cymru and Natalie Bennett of the Greens - and realistically pointed out to Labour that “the message from Sturgeon is that the SNP won’t be easy to shift”.
Indeed, across all the newspapers, there was praise for Sturgeon’s performance. But no-one in England, Wales and Northern Ireland will be able to vote for her party, of course.