Tonight’s Clegg Farage debate on Britain’s membership of the EU was far more combative than last week’s. Nick Clegg came out swinging from the start. In a sign of how much Ukip have changed politics, it was Clegg who was behaving like the challenger and Farage the incumbent. But despite this change in tactics from Clegg, the result—according to the instant post-debate polls—was the same: a clear Farage win. Indeed, the polls had Farage ahead by an even bigger margin than last week.
The Liberal Democrats argue that these debates were not about Clegg ‘winning’, but of him enthusing the Liberal Democrat base and appealing to pro-European voters. I suspect that his blanket denunciations of ‘people like Nigel Farage’ and attacks on Ukip for wanting to go back to the days when WG Grace opened the batting for England did that.
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