TV debate: Boris Johnson played defensive football, and Jeremy Corbyn was a tired centre forward who couldn’t get near the goal

The two leaders stuck to their scripts – the lack of surprises was a victory for the prime minister, who played the debate like the captain of a football team sitting on a comfortable lead

A friend of mine has developed a nice line in watching the election on TV and muttering the phrases that politicians are about to say. “Two referendums”, she says, just before Boris Johnson declares that the great danger of a Corbyn government, propped up by Nicola Sturgeon, is that there will be two referendums next year.

She could have watched the whole of tonight’s BBC TV debate, reciting the lines the two leaders were about to come up with a few seconds before they actually delivered them.

Jeremy Corbyn wanted to represent not the 48 per cent or the 52 per cent but the whole country, he said, and nobody voted to lose their job. Johnson had a great Brexit deal, oven ready, and dismissed fears about the NHS being for sale as “pure Bermuda Triangle stuff”.

It was like a football match between two teams that knew each other’s game plan too well. That was fine for Johnson, as he was sitting on a two-goal lead, whereas Corbyn desperately needed to find a way to disrupt his opponent.

Instead, it was Johnson who threatened to break through first, winning the first applause of the night from a subdued audience, with an attack on Corbyn, accusing him of pretending to care about the union when he had backed the IRA’s violent campaign to break it up. Never mind that Corbyn has never supported political violence, it allowed Johnson a cheap shot that was on target.

All Corbyn had in reply was an attack on Tory privatisation of the NHS. Some of the audience clapped, but it was as if they felt it was their duty to level up the crowd noise. There followed a predictable exchange: Johnson said the last Labour government had introduced privatisation in the form of PFI; Corbyn said the Tories voted against the creation of the NHS in 1948.

This was going nowhere, and Corbyn increasingly seemed like a tired centre forward who couldn’t get near the opponent’s goal. Johnson had toned down the show-off tricks. No nutmegs or overhead kicks from the crowd pleaser of yesteryear: just solid, disciplined defensive play.

By the time Corbyn should have been making his breakthrough to expose Johnson as the unsafe choice for the nation’s future, his message was reduced to “Let’s invest in our prison system” and “there are no plans whatsoever to disband MI5 or any part of the security services”.

Those were not slogans that could have been predicted in advance, but neither were they the sort of thing to shore up the collapse of the Labour Leave vote in the midlands and the north of England, or carry Corbyn forward to win those university seats in the south that will take him on to a hung parliament and into 10 Downing Street.

That means Johnson was the winner of the debate, because he didn’t lose. It was a showcase of democracy. Unlike the first debate, both leaders had plenty of time to set out their case, and to question each other. That meant it was excruciatingly dull to anyone who has been paying any attention at all to the campaign so far, such as my slogan-predicting friend – though if new viewers started here, they would have discovered the main themes of this election, as the two leaders presented them.

But there was nothing here to disrupt the Tories’ 10-point lead in the opinion polls.