Hill+Knowlton Strategies

What are we agreed on after the first full week of the 2010 election campaign?

Well the biggest event of the week was the leaders’ debate and almost everyone agrees that the LibDems’ Nick Clegg won. The manifestoes, so far, have only dominated one news cycle rather than set the agenda. And the Tories are still ahead – but not decisively – in the polls.

What we don’t know, and the plethora of polls don’t yet help us on this, is what link there will turn out to be between the debates and how people vote. And we won’t know that until May 7. But…….

Yes, Nick Clegg was the best performer. That doesn’t mean the country is going to turn LibDem but it will put doubt in the minds of some who were tending to Labour or the Conservatives.

Up until the debate, it appeared that this was a contest between a leader the country seems tired of in Gordon Brown, and one they are not truly convinced by in David Cameron. Clegg’s performance as a peer of the two in the debate underlined to voters that there is an alternative.

But how will the next two debates shape up?

This is not Gordon Brown’s natural forum. He had a shaky start to the debate talking too much about what he had done, rather than bonding with the voters and talking about us. He became much stronger as the debate went on, agreeing with the popular Clegg and battering Cameron on detail.

Brown is unlikely to make a connection with the public in this forum but he did show he was capable of winning respect. That will be his aim in the next debate.

For Cameron the debate was not a crisis but he lost most. After a very good beginning, he allowed himself to be swept away by the combination of Clegg’s charm and Brown’s detail. He sounded like a leader of the opposition having a pop at the government rather than having a programme for government of his own or a vision of Tory Britain.

He now needs to win the second debate.

Brown will have to start earlier – yes he has stamina the others cannot match but doing your best in the last half hour could well be when swing voters have turned off.

Clegg needs more of the same and not to be rattled by the increased attacks he is bound to attract.

But the pressure is on Cameron. He needs to be combative without losing his cool. He needs to look confident not cocky. He needs to come across as prime ministerial.

Cameron’s tone of optimism at the Tory manifesto launch was spot on. He wilted somewhat in the debates.

The other interesting point in the week which links with the debates but got less coverage, was the Daily Telegraph’s poll in the marginals. It should a healthy Tory lead over Labour in most of them.

But crucially, it showed that the LibDems are still ahead in LibDem/Tory marginals. Clegg’s performance must surely strengthen that position.

Cameron’s fear is that he gets into the predicament of Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination. Her victory seemed inevitable for months. But as soon as it was rattled by Obama, as soon as there was a doubt, that sense of inevitability quickly disappeared and the momentum shifted remarkably quickly.

David Cameron in Number Ten has looked like an inevitability for some time now. There is a question mark after the debates. He needs to regain the momentum either before the debate, or in it and make sure he keeps it.

This doesn’t look like an election Labour can win. But there are the first real signs that a Labour LibDem coalition might just be a possibility.

The polls are going to look very odd over the next few days. The question is where they will settle and we won’t know that for weeks.

Short campaigns don’t usually change election results. But then we have never had leaders’ debates before.

Could this be a different sort of campaign? It already is.

What we do know now is that this campaign will have many more twists and turns – at least in the two debates to come.

With this degree of uncertainty conclusions have a limited shelf life, sometimes as short as a news cycle. But at this point a hung parliament has moved from being a statistician’s guess, to a political possibility.