Angus Reid, C4 and the Guardian say Clegg won, Sky and YouGov/Sun say Cameron won, ITV say Brown won. It was certainly a much more even debate than last time.

Clegg will be pleased to have survived a much more hostile reception from the other 2 parties and his closing speech was pretty awesome in my opinion. Brown sounded a lot better this time and I think the polls that place him first or second are pretty accurate. Cameron just came across as a third wheel in the debate, he added nothing much at all and a straight Brown-Clegg debate would probably have been more illuminating. Clegg was talking about the future of social care for a generation and Cameron was harping on about Labour leaflets.

I dunno, I think Cameron wasn’t that bad this time. Think he was worse the first time around….

*Ahem*

The poll that declared Cameron the winner was a ‘Sun\YouGov’ poll.

According to the ITV, Clegg won.

Utterly appalling. Wonder how many this one will fool?

Not happy that Brown was so dishonest about Amnesty… is he really going to deport 900,000 people? rubbish. Disgusting

I liked Clegg’s comment about Cameron ‘ hanging around with a bunch of nutters’ in Europe.

I think I disagree… it seemed like Cameron was worse this time, and vacuous to boot.

I think Clegg put on the best performance, and came out with some brilliant lines… but Brown was probably best on subtance, and certainly had the best opening statement.

I’d love to know the viewing figures, though…

Complete waste of time.

Just making politics more like a sports event for the stupid people. Who’s up, who’s down . They might as well have had a weigh in at lunchtime like a boxing match.

And then you have the political class come and tell you who won.

Sky sports could have done it just as well.

This debate certainly didn’t have the spark or flair of the first one. And it won’t set the world alight like the first one did. In fact in places it was very dull – no wonder poor Adam Boulton moved a couple of the questions on!

From my vantage point it was Brown / Clegg / Cameron but to be honest they were much of a muchness.

The fact is the insta-polls are all pretty in alignment give or take a couple of percentage points – which could be as much down to sampling error than anything else. So Sky jumping around bellowing “Cameron won!” is tosh.

In the Yougov Poll Cameron only got 3pc more than Clegg who got 4 pc more than Brown – all margin of error stuff.

“I liked Clegg’s comment about Cameron ‘ hanging around with a bunch of nutters’ in Europe.”

But people won’t really know what he was talking about. Those who follow politics know what he was referring to, and people have already made up their minds. To those who aren’t following its going to look like an odd attack. People know Tories are nasty but they don’t think they’re anti-semites so I think the attack will reflect badly on Nick.

btw, I missed some of it due to playing football (which we lost) so I missed whatever Brown may have said on the Amnesty. From what Sunny says it sounds like he’s positioning himself to the right of Boris Johnson, which is a bad thing.

#9 Clegg referenced Boris Johnson and deliberately placed himself to the right of Johnson, too. All three leaders were awful on immigration.

Obviously I thought Brown did best, but it really, really doesn’t matter who “won”. What matters is who is right.

BBC claims no major gaffs – Brown is to deport 900,000 people. Why the fuck Clegg didn’t press this point at Cameron God only knows.

Brown was strong on the economy but poor on immigration and Trident. His assertion that Clegg was “anti-American” and his implication that Clegg wouldn’t be able to do business with the US administration was absolutely ludicrous.

Did anyone notice Sky rigged the camera angles? Look at how close the close ups were with Cameron compared to Clegg. Clegg and Brown were shown much further from the camera. They also gave Cameron longer lingering close up shots. Every time Clegg and Brown spoke the camera jumped all over the place – they never gave Clegg a chance to look directly at the camera for more than a second. Sneaky gits!!! We all know Murdoch’s Sky was desperate to get a win for Cameron. I wonder if anyone will mention this in the MSN. This was rigged!

The CEO of YouGov is a Tory candidate… might explain some of the weird polls.
http://www.zahawi.com/page.php?page=about

*he intends to stop being CEO if he wins the election. So that’s alright, then. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/feb/22/nadhim-zahawi-yougov-election-mp

The interesting thing is Comres voting intention. Of course Tories have been crowing about the weird sample driven ComRes results that had them 8 or 9 pts ahead. Now we can see that in a week Lib Dem’s are +1 and Tories -1 with them.

The methodology is probably different enough to not be able to compare, but Tories can’t like that the ComRes results are essentially Lib Dem 36(+9) Tories 35(nc) Labour 24 (-1) Others 5 (-8)

@Mr S Pill, I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that YouGov would deliberately produce biased polls. Besides, it is by no means the case that YouGov is a Tory company. Its president, Peter Kellner, is a blatant Labour sympathiser (and husband of Baroness Ashton).

Sally re comment 7:

Spot on.
That’s the best analogy I have heard so far.

I think Clegg has to make his policy on immigration / amnesty a bit clearer.

If I understand it correctly he wants to tighten up non – EU entry and exit to the UK, through enhanced border controls. This seems to me to provide a mechanism whereby you can determine what you will allow and what you won’t in the future.

It is, after all, precisely that mechanism that both the Tories and Labour intend to use to apply their various controls. Both of these parties consider that to be an adequate way of controlling immigration in the future

It then becomes moot, does it not to assume that, because Clegg wants to regularise the current crop of illegal immigrants that this would attract further illegal immigration. The controls will either work or they won’t.

On a slightly different topic, it is obvious that genuine students that are coming here to study are an economic boost to our Universities and Colleges.

It was impossible for Clegg to shine like he did in the first debate but this second one is still a significant win for him. He’s now a serious player in the election and will continue to get attention right up until polling day…

@17

OK fair enough. But it is interesting that Sky (prop. R Murdoch) ran a poll for the Sun (prop. R Murdoch) that showed the Tories in first place (who R Murdoch wants to win) and the CEO of the polling company is a Tory candidate. Particularly when the other polls are showing Clegg ahead, and also particularly when Sky spectactularly cocked-up after the debate last week (which still hasn’t been explained).
It’s a funny old world.

Why did they have it on Sky ?
Why not Dave ?

So far, all three of my predictions are coming true…. (1/2 already true)

@17 – YouGov’s purpose is not to conduct objective, scientifically controlled polling: they are a private company who produce polls to their customers’ specifications, and they use commercial confidentiality defences to justify non-disclosure of these specifications.

So I think it’s entirely fair to suggest that they might produce biased polls.