The BBC opposition leaders’ debate wasn’t great political theatre, but it did turn into a fascinating experiment in human behaviour. A third of the way through, Nigel Farage suddenly imploded, attacking the BBC for putting together a left-wing audience – which he then went onto to insult and dismiss as an irrelevance, the real audience being at home.
On this occasion, Farage was almost certainly wrong about BBC bias. I am sure that David Dimbleby was telling the truth when he said that the audience had been put together by a polling company to reflect the balance of voting intentions. And yet Farage was right to detect that the audience, which had initially received him with applause, had started to turn against him. It wasn’t because of anything he said – his contentious bits, trawling up once again his point about foreign HIV patients, had yet to come.
The audience swung because, although it had itself been handpicked to represent the balance of nationwide political opinion, the same was not true of the people on the stage.
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