Clegg and Farage’s real mission: getting their voters to turn up

‘You guys always love the zero sum game, you know, politics as Premier League football,’ Paddy Ashdown said this morning when asked whether he accepted whether his leader had lost last night’s LBC debate on Europe. This sounded ridiculous initially: of course politics is like Premier League football. The party that comes second in a general election doesn’t skip away arguing that it was the taking part that counts, it retreats to lick its wounds.

But that assumes that for the Lib Dems and Ukip there was one specific group of voters who they were trying to persuade last night. Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage may have looks straight into the same camera and appeared to be addressing the same audience, but they were aiming for different listeners.