THE great hope in last night’s debate was that the leaders would aim their fire on Nigel Farage. He and his ragtag party were on something of a high going into the debate with the news that they’d received a million pound donation. Farage had spoken to reporters outside the debating chamber looking irrepressibly gleeful: was it the huge cash injection or perhaps the knowledge that he was the bookies’ favourite to triumph in the debate? Whatever the reason, one couldn’t help but pray the other leaders would join forces to trounce him.

However, for that to happen, we’d have to imagine that the leaders were united by something other than distaste for genteel racism. Could politics unite them? After all, you could argue every other leader present was on the left, so perhaps they were positioned against Farage thanks to ideology, not just through common sense and decency. But then we’d have to endow Miliband with the misnomer of ‘left-wing’, so perhaps the theory of a lefty alliance against the flush Farage wouldn’t transpire. But one lived in hope…

“I’m the only person saying what a lot of you at home are thinking” said Farage in his opening statement, setting himself up immediately as the maverick. Miliband chose to plod along on safe ground by pledging more doctors and nurses. Sturgeon played the same wise card she did in the first UK-wide debate in mentioning Scotland but blending that with the need to work with people in Westminster.

This set her miles apart from Leanne Wood who is far too focused on Wales to the detriment of the wider debate, and to the boredom of the non-Welsh audience. This threatens to push her into obscurity. She even made a point about council tax on holiday homes, which may well be an issue for beautiful stretches of rural Wales, but is hardly keeping the rest of us awake at night. Sturgeon is far too canny to allow this to happen to her, never restricting herself to Scotland in these debates.

Sturgeon received the first vigorous burst of applause when she chided David Cameron for not being there to defend his record, and then mocked Miliband for not being bold, saying the SNP will “hold Labour to account and make them bolder” and she continued to receive the loudest applause and warmest audience reactions. She excels when on the attack against Westminster. How could it be otherwise?

As for my dream of the leaders uniting to attack Farage, it didn’t come true. Instead, they had the knives out for Cameron. Indeed, Farage didn’t make any kind of impact. Normally we can rely on him to stir up some disquiet or outright laughter, but last night he seemed oddly subdued. Maybe he’s had lessons in etiquette, such as being advised not to shout about immigrants and AIDS, without which he’s rather muffled. He eventually sputtered to life in demanding that social housing be kept for British citizens, but this drew only a weak pattering of applause, and he then blundered terribly by attacking the audience. How arrogant a man becomes when a million quid is slipped into his pocket.

Yet frozen-out Farage found himself back in the game when Trident was raised, and Miliband was forced to agree with him. It must have been horrendous for Miliband to have been seen as a clumsy bookend with Farage, placed on both sides of three strong women arguing for the nuclear monstrosity to be scrapped.

Sadly, Farage slipped back into his tactic of denouncing foreign-born people with HIV and mocking our supposed “International Heath Service”. Perhaps this was a conscious decision as he knew he was giving a lacklustre performance, so gambled that the controversy in the last debate might be dragged up again, pushing him into the headlines as it did last time. Instead, he was reminded sharply by Natalie Bennett – the first time she made a laudable contribution – that 40 per cent of our NHS staff are foreign born. The clear lesson being that immigrants may take, but they also give, and our health service couldn’t function without them.

The juiciest question was the final one: what will this lot do if there’s a hung Parliament? Sturgeon answered bluntly, saying she’ll “never, ever” do a deal with the Tories and extended a hand to Miliband saying she’s willing to work with Labour to keep them out. What was his response to this mature and honest gesture? “It’s a no, I’m afraid”, he said, moaning she wants to “break up the country” and shaking his head like a toddler being offered broccoli. However, he rather redeemed himself in his strong closing statement which was basically him saying “’mon then” to Cameron.

But have the voters grown weary of these TV debates? We were subject to three in the last week, the first two of which quickly became dull and repetitive, with the latter simply being a noisy embarrassment.

Perhaps the BBC are sensing our boredom and so have resorted to silly graphics and gimmicks to grab our attention. Half of the screen last night was taken up by “The Worm”, a graph showing the reactions of a selected audience to what was being said. By all means, make the graph available online, but having it snake and jump across the screen was absurd.

Picking a winner in these things is never easy, unless we’re discussing last night’s debate in which case it’s very easy indeed: Nicola Sturgeon won. She was sparky, assured and engaging and she slapped Farage down regularly. Beside her, he seemed the grubby schoolboy, made of rats and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails whilst she was the dignified headmistress, hushing the brat and restoring order and logic. Most importantly, she offered to work with Miliband to keep the Tories out of power, and Labour’s redundant pride forced him to say no. Three weeks to go until he’s furiously back-pedalling.