… AND BREATHE OUT. The third live debate rumbled to a close with Ed Miliband staring through the screen of your TV, out into the world to find David Cameron and challenge him to debate him head to head:

‘Go ahead Dave… Make my day. Ya feelin’ Tory, Punk?’

With his balls on the podium, Miliband issued a national ‘Come at me, bro’ to his election rival, who can only have damaged his party’s chances with his absence. Imagine being a candidate in a swing-constituency and your Leader is sat at home with his feet up on a Lib-Dem backbencher chuckling into his Quinoa? You’d be livid.

Of course we must not forget poor Nick Clegg, the man who seems to get the mop out and clean up in most televised debates wasn’t allowed to join as his party wasn’t a ‘challenger’. It’s alright, mate, you only missed out on the biggest scale broadcasting of progressive politics the country has seen in a generation…

Progressive is indeed the word, tonight we saw a strange arrangement where three parties were ‘proper leftie’, one was central left and the final was stood out on the right having a pop at the studio audience.

Indeed, Farage turned on the audience who booed him, unable to accept for a moment that perhaps what he was saying was abhorrent to all areas of the ‘carefully selected’ studio audience. This was cracking telly for sure, and brilliant to see Farage jeered, however I worry that the debate may have strengthened his position. 

If anything, this debate made Farage look more of an outlier than ever before, when in actual fact he was the sole representative of hard-line Neo-Liberalism at the debate. You’re this far into an article about a debate you might have just watched, so I know you’re at least a tiny bit politically engaged, but for the vast majority of people who see UKIP as a protest vote, they may have just been convinced. I abhor the man, but well played, Nigel.

Meanwhile, Miliband was busy repeating rehearsed phrases and holding onto an imaginary piece of toast - he even showed us which side his bread was buttered on, rejecting the bullish Nicola Sturgeon’s calls to join forces and lock David Cameron out of Government. Personally, I’m hoping that she meant this in a literal sense, with Dave being forced to scramble around outside for the plant pot he hid the spare key in.

For me, the absence of the Tories meant that there was a refreshing focus on issues that mattered to standard people. I’m refusing to call us ‘working people’ as I’ve heard that phrase more times than I’ve blinked in the past fortnight. Cameron would have inevitably used his magical ‘sensible balanced, balanced and sensible, long term economic plan, balanced term economic sensible, sensible economic term balance…’ mantra to Derren Brown us all into voting for him.

The economy is important, but the fact is that most of us sadly only have a cursory understanding of what it is and how it works. We know after the campaign so far that both major parties have a script they’re sticking to and won’t budge on, so it was good to shift the focus elsewhere this evening.

Switching on the debates, I’ve got to say I was expecting a proper Milibashing. Three rival parties and one that stands for everything Labour doesn’t made it look to me as if Cameron had stepped to the side and left Ed to get hells bells kicked out of him. Yet somehow Miliband came out reasonably unscathed from the attacks against him and his party, we know the SNP will jump into bed with him as did the Greens, Lianne Wood Plaid her anti-labour cards out on the table for all to see, and Farage… Well there’s more chance of Millwall getting to the Premier League than that coalition happening. 

Miliband ruled it out, but I think we might actually see a Labour/SNP coalition. If only they would rule out Scottish independence, Sturgeon and Miliband would make a cracking leadership team. I think one of the best points Sturgeon made was that she could help Miliband be bolder, it would be the first truly left wing government in a generation.

Having said that, the debate could also have split the leftie vote and strengthened the Tory position. If more disenfranchised voters swing to UKIP and the Tories pick up, we could be seeing the BlueKIP coalition, a genuinely terrifying prospect for anyone who’s not a fat cat hedge fund city wanker.

For now, it’s almost too close to call. Who’d have thought the election would see a more exciting run in than the Premier League, eh?

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