Andy McSmith's Sketch: Feisty audience is the real star of an enlightening show

Question Time format shed more light on the trio than a three-way debate

'I wonder if you have got any plans for next week, when you are out of a job', one audience member said (PA)

It turns out that David Cameron was right after all. Putting the three party leaders in front of an alert and often hostile studio audience, one after another, actually shed more light than a three-way debate conducted from behind lecterns was ever likely to. The audience was the star of the show. Some were passionately anti-Tory, others equally hostile to Labour, and most were contemptuous of the Liberal Democrats. They gave the three leaders the sort of grilling politicians used to face in those dear dead days when they held press conferences and spoke to journalists.

“You say you know what needs to be done, so why won’t you announce where these cuts are coming?” David Cameron was asked.

One man asked Ed Miliband: “Don’t you comprehend how much respect you would get from the audience if you are absolutely honest?”

The most interesting answers from the two potential prime ministers came when they were asked about a hung parliament. Of course, each insisted that he wanted and expected an outright majority, thus giving Clegg his best one-liner of the evening, after he had been asked about the “darkened room” in which the last coalition deal was reputedly thrashed out. “If either of them still thinks they are going to win an outright majority they need to go and lie down in a darkened room,” he said.

That aside, each leader revealed something about the negotiations that are likely to begin a week from now. David Cameron asserted that he would not enter into any deal that ruled out a referendum on Britain’s future in the EU. That seemed to eliminate the possibility of a new deal with the Lib Dems, given that Nick Clegg later insisted that he would agree to a referendum only if the EU was claiming new powers over its national governments. “I don’t know what they’re going to think next Thursday,” he said, of the alleged shifting Tory position on Europe.”

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“We’re not going to do a deal with the Scottish National Party,” he said. “We’re not going to have a coalition: we’re not going to have a deal. And let me just say this: if it meant we weren’t going to be in government, not doing a coalition, not having a deal, then so be it. I’m not going to sacrifice the future of our country, the unity of our country. I’m not going to give into SNP demands around Trident, around the deficit, or anything like that. I repeat this point to you: I’m not going to have a Labour government if it means deals or coalitions with the Scottish National Party.”

It may be too late now for those words to quell public worries about the rise of a Tartan army, which is damaging Labour’s standing south of the border, but it was a valiant attempt.

David Cameron was on confident form, dealing unblinkingly with hostile questions. He sounded like a man who thinks he is entitled to more years in Downing Street. Miliband soldiered through his half hour grilling with wide-eyed sincerity, like someone anxious to do his best. No one made any serious mistakes, and enlightening though the evening was, it is not likely to change many minds.