TV Debates: No TV magic but Miliband dispels his image

If you want to see politicians looking uncomfortable it’s no good looking on stage during a TV debate.

The real pressure comes backstage in the so-called “spin room” where supporters of all parties gather to convince the Press they haven’t just seen what they they just saw.

Ministers stand around like nervous pupils at the school prom hoping someone will come up to them and ask them to dance. Or ask them their opinion on who won the debate.

Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt knows all about talking politics with school pupils when he last week asked a 10-year-old how they’d vote he was told Ukip, “to get all the foreigners out the country”.

Caught on camera with the candid kid, Hunt quickly turned away but the episode showed how treacherous TV can be.

Top politicians know this. It’s why they approached this year’s debates with one goal in mind don’t mess up. And none of them did, making for a fairly anodyne set of set-pieces unlikely to sway many voters.

But for Ed Miliband, not messing up was good enough given expectations were so low.

The Labour strategy of putting Ed in front of the TV cameras as often as possible has proved a masterstroke. The Tory team have had to change their attack line from claiming he couldn’t run the country to accepting he could but that Nicola Sturgeon would be yanking his chain.

Given Miliband’s main drawback at the start of the campaign was that most folk including a large number of his MPs thought he was just a gonk, dispelling that opinion puts him in a decent position coming out of the debates and going into the last half of the campaign.