Who won the leaders’ debate? All of them.

So who won? That’s the question, isn’t it? Well, not really. This debate, like most such affairs, is not a horserace in which the winner is easily determined. Because not everyone was racing to be across the line “first”. That’s not actually the nature of the game.

The question is not who was crowned the “winner” by the post-debate polls (which are, in any case, largely meaningless and utterly useless in terms of measuring any impact on the wider campaign). No, the only question that really matters is this: who achieved what they wanted to achieve last night?

And the tiresome, boring, correct answer to that is all of them. Let’s run through the list:

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David Cameron: A good night for the Prime Minister. He could have found himself in a 6 vs 1 brawl as everyone else piled in to attack his record.