Me and my cynicism: I thought there’d be no way of judging who the winner of a stale and boring ‘debate’ between Dave, Gordon and Nick was…. and I was wrong. Really wrong.

I wanted to be as open minded and neutral as possible, but after the first round I concluded that I was failing… that I must still have some residual soft spot for the Lib Dems because, to me, Nick Clegg appeared to be… well… winning. I resigned myself to objectivity fail.

To me Cameron looked wound up tightly, his nerves clearly getting the better of him. His folksy style came across as a bit patronising and over-rehearsed… but perhaps the only problem here was the contrast with Clegg… Clegg who looked the audience at home straight in the eye and sounded confident, relaxed and strangely normal. If this is Clegg’s mask, it is a mask that never slips. Brown, as always, looked strange and awkward… but it was one of his better performances. No stutter, no mistakes… a calm and grounded performance from him that I’m sure comes at the more optimistic end of expectations.

But for me the whole thing was won by Nick Clegg during the section on cleaning up politics, where the sort of realpolitik tricks and games of the House of Commons came to bite both Cameron and Brown on the arse. Both said they supported recall of corrupt MPs and how they ‘agreed with Nick’, but then Nick said “but we put forward a vote to give people the power to sack their MPs, and Labour’s MPs voted against it and the Conservatives didn’t even bother to show up.” He got to say it twice, in fact.

Normally this sort of thing remains hidden from the public eye: “Lib Dems get something shot down” is hardly news. But the message this sent – that the other two parties want to clean up politics, but only if they themselves get to take credit for it - makes a mockery of their claims to want to make politics more honest and clean. Perhaps the leaders’ debates do actually perform a useful function in this democracy after all.

But as I watched the debate (and monitored the instant reaction from Twitter) it was obvious it wasn’t just me thinking that Clegg was actually, honestly, really winning. It was turning into some bizarre alternative universe:

Newspaper front pages started appearing announcing Clegg’s general carpeing of the diem. My housemate appeared to suffer a spontaneous conversion to the Lib Dems, joining the “We got Rage against the Machine to Number 1, now let’s get the Lib Dems into office!” facebook group, and that group gets itself another 7,000 members during and after the broadcast. Nick Clegg starts ‘trending’ as the third most talked about subject on Twitter. At one point ‘I agree with Nick’ becomes a trend, too. Polling results are sending the Lib Dems bouncing off the walls in joy. Otherwise perfectly normal people start making Obama and Indiana Jones comparisons…. I kid you not. The world, for a few hours, turned inside out. I blame the Volcano.

To say they’re a happy bunch today is quite the understatement. They are, in all seriousness, as motivated and excited as I think I’ve ever seen them, although I bet behind the scenes they’re going to start playing down expectations for the next two debates. But you know what? I’m happy for them. I’m not going to rejoin, but for one shining, beautiful moment, it became possible to imagine that Labour and the Conservatives won’t rule this country for the rest of time.

Because it’s the Lib Dem’s day I’m going to leave the final word to Millenium Dome, Elephant, one of the more bonkers Lib Dem blogs (written, as it is, by a stuffed toy), who’s written a rather more biased and amusing review of the debate:

First let’s hear the leader’s opening statements:

Captain Clegg: Hello! I’m different to the Labservatives

Mr Frown: Remember, I just destroyed the economy but the Conservatories are really, really scary

Mr Balloon: Bleep. Thank you for purchasing the Leader-bot 500. I am programmed in over six million forms of public relations.