WESTMINSTER 2010:PRIME MINISTER Gordon Brown and his two main competitors, Conservative leader David Cameron and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, will spend much of today in final preparations for tonight's first leaders' debate in a British election.
The 90-minute confrontation, to be shown by ITV at 8.30pm, and the first of three during the campaign, is expected to attract an audience of millions, and could have a significant impact on the outcome of the election.
The three camps have each carried out “mock debates” to prepare. Tony Blair’s former press chief Alastair Campbell has spent hours studying Mr Cameron’s television performances and has played the role of the Tory leader in the prime minister’s “warm-ups”.
Conservative MP Damian Greene has, according to Tory sources, played “a fine dour Scot” impression of Mr Brown during Mr Cameron’s training, while Liberal Democrat MP Chris Huhne has been “unsettlingly good” at playing the prime minister in Mr Clegg’s preparations.
The Conservative leader is expected to seize on Mr Brown’s admission last night that he had not regulated the banks sufficiently during his time as chancellor of the exchequer and should have “put the whole public interest first”.
Mr Brown said: “In the 1990s, the banks, they all came to us and said, ‘Look, we don’t want to be regulated, we want to be free of regulation’. All of the complaints I was getting from people was, ‘You’re regulating them too much’. And actually the truth is that globally and nationally we should have been regulating them more. So I’ve learnt from that. So you don’t listen to the industry when they say, ‘This is good for us’. You’ve got to talk about the whole public interest.”
Mr Cameron said: “This is a big moment I think, because Gordon Brown told us two things: he said this all came from America and he said that his judgment was right in every regard. He’s now saying those two things aren’t true, that there were big mistakes made here in Britain in the regulatory system that he designed and I’m glad that he’s finally admitted that some of this was made in Britain by him.”
Earlier, the Liberal Democrat party launched its election manifesto, promising tax cuts for low-paid workers, a clampdown on tax evasion, higher pay for soldiers and better pensions for the elderly. However the party also promised a sharp increase in air travel and sharp falls in tax reliefs on pensions.
Both Labour and the Conservatives, said Lib Dem treasury spokesman Vince Cable, had “ignored the elephant in the room that is the deficit” – £160 billion in the last 12 months and likely to be just shy of that figure in the next year – throughout the election campaign so far”.
Labour did not want “to talk about” the deficit because it did not want voters to blame them, while the Conservatives did not want to deal with it openly lest voters started to think about the type of public service cutbacks they would bring in if they won, Mr Cable added.
The third-largest party, which won several seats in 2005 on the back of student opposition to Labour’s introduction of third-level fees, said it would abolish these by degrees, beginning with final-year students. He said £2.5 billion would also be put aside for smaller primary classes and one-to-one tuition for struggling pupils.
In a direct appeal to Liberal-leaning voters, Mr Cameron last night praised some of the Liberal ambitions to have “a more family-friendly, greener Britain, a more liberal Britain”, but, he said, such voters should “come with us in the modern Conservative Party and we can get it done”.
*Conservatives have extended their lead over Labour to the highest level since the start of the campaign, an opinion poll showed yesterday. The Sun'sdaily YouGov poll put support for the Conservatives on 41 per cent of the vote, nine points ahead of Labour who were on 32 per cent, Sky News reported. The Liberal Democrats were on 18 per cent.