All evening Sky built up the battle for Number 10 as if it were the Champions League final. It felt as if every TV campaign programme idea had been aired in quick succession. Astonishingly, when the lights finally went up on the studio, to reveal an already pink-faced David Cameron sitting across a shiny table from the old inquisitor, it was even bolder than billed.
Despite months of disuse, none of Jeremy Paxman’s combative instincts had faded. Straight away he knocked Cameron off his balance with a hard tackle on food banks, and never gave him a chance to get it back.
Then it was zero-hours contracts, broken promises on government borrowing and rich friends with unpleasant (and some illegal) personal habits, to welfare cuts and foreign policy disaster – the prime minister was knocked all over the shop, reduced to repeating that “it’s been very difficult”.
Although Ed Miliband can sometimes shake him in the Commons, Cameron so rarely faces public challenge – although he was heckled by an Age Concern audience earlier in the week – that it’s novel to see him sagging against the rope, spitting out broken teeth. More than that, he began to look not just battered but rattled. And that was more dangerous for him.
Cameron’s sense of entitlement has always been weakness and strength. After 10 years, he was never going to make inroads into many voters’ sense that he’s an out-of-touch toff. But in a way that’s been a protection. Out-of-touch toffs are at least supposed to be good at running the country. Instead he wobbled. He looked fallible.
You could feel the tension ebbing as the ads came on and Paxman was wheeled off (probably still snarling and snapping at the end of a chain). When we were allowed back, it was to the balmy atmosphere of questions from the studio audience. It’s not that their questions aren’t good, but the audience is polite and respectful and the sense of jeopardy has drained away.
Miliband came on with the advantage of not having been in power – if not quite a blank sheet, then still with scope to explain to people who may not have been paying attention what his Labour party stood for apart from not being New Labour.
All the same, he started defensively, against more pointed questioning than Cameron had faced. He’d clearly set himself the challenge of getting people to like him, but he couldn’t really answer the questioner who wanted to know why she, a working class woman, felt demonised for doing well.
In a nice move, he went out of his way to be polite about Cameron. He thoughtfully reminded Tory voters of the two things they most resent their leader for: same-sex marriage and meeting the UN international development spending target of 0.7%.
It’s been clear for a while now that one reason why Labour will run into trouble over the next six weeks is its failure to develop a clear narrative of what was right, and wrong, about the New Labour years.
Nor does it help when he says he wants to move on, but without offering a really compelling description of how he would be different.
That left an interviewer of Paxman’s calibre with plenty of targets. On immigration, the economy, energy policy, Miliband often struggled. But the one bit he had word-perfect was the answer to the inevitable question that essentially amounts to “are you a knob?”. He does the sincere defence beautifully. He’s not quite Clint Eastwood, but he shut Paxman up.
It felt like a Miliband win. But, however brilliant Paxman is, his interrogation still doesn’t have the edge of the two prime ministerial contenders going head to head. And it won’t have done the big job and cut through to voters filled with dread at the thought of six more weeks.
