As the credits rolled on the final televised showdown of the 2019 election, there was a visible lifting of the mood in Boris Johnson’s camp: the most perilous week of the campaign had passed without a major political meltdown.
When the public verdict on the BBC debate came through from YouGov — a 52:48 victory for the prime minister over Jeremy Corbyn — Mr Johnson’s communications chief Lee Cain smiled at the echo of the 2016 Brexit referendum result.
“I like 52:48,” he said in the “spin room”, the off-camera area filled with a scrum of supporters of both candidates ready to provide their own ready interpretations of events in the studio to press and cameras.
At the start of the week, the visit of Donald Trump and the televised head-to-head debate loomed like icebergs in front of the Tory campaign. But Mr Trump was on his best behaviour in London and Mr Corbyn failed to land a killer blow on primetime television.
The prime minister now hits the road ahead of December 12 to try to mobilise the Tory vote in marginal constituencies, but the known unknowns have now been neutralised.
Only the prospect of a series of polls showing Mr Johnson is on course for a big victory — potentially persuading some wavering voters they do not need to lend their vote to the Conservatives — haunts Tory officials as the campaign enters its final week.
Mr Johnson’s team identified at the start of the campaign that the final head-to-head debate with Mr Corbyn would give the Labour leader perhaps his last chance to change the course of the election.
“You don’t win elections with these debates but you can lose them if you have a complete shitshow,” said one ally of the prime minister.
The prime minister arrived at the Maidstone television studios in Kent five hours ahead of the debate to finalise preparations, a sign of the seriousness with which the prime minister was taking the event.
The prime minister then retired to a nearby hotel with Michael Gove, Cabinet Office minister, who played the role of Mr Corbyn in rehearsals. Brett O’Donnell, a US Republican debate guru who prepared George W Bush and Mitt Romney for presidential debates, took charge.
Mr Johnson’s team feared that Mr Corbyn would try to pull a “stunt” — for example confronting Mr Johnson with a leaked document — but were confident that the prime minister’s arguments on Brexit and leadership would prevail.
In the event the Labour leader did brandish a leaked Treasury document on border arrangements in Northern Ireland, but he did not ambush Mr Johnson with any surprise new piece of information — for instance, another embarrassing gem from his rich archive of newspaper columns.
On the Brexit exchanges, Mr Johnson performed best — sticking to his core campaign slogan of “Get Brexit done” with metronomic efficiency.
But when it came to the more philosophical question of whether capitalism or socialism is the best model to run an economy, Mr Corbyn offered the more coherent response and won more applause from the audience, confirming a public yearning for reform of the free-market system.
The testiest moment came during an exchange on racism, when Mr Corbyn came under pressure about revelations about anti-Semitism. Labour has been under huge amounts of scrutiny in recent days following a leaked submission to the Equality and Humans Rights Commission.
Mr Corbyn did, however, relentlessly focus on Mr Johnson’s “trust” issue, the question of whether the prime minister can be relied upon to tell the truth or to act in the country’s best interests, rather than his own.
Mr Johnson’s refusal to face the toughest interrogator in British broadcasting — Andrew Neil — has opened up a weak flank for the prime minister, with Mr Corbyn able to suggest in last night’s debate that the prime minister was running scared and had something to hide.
Although Tory officials claimed on Friday that Mr Johnson’s decision to turn down a face-to-face interview with Mr Neil on primetime BBC television was because his format was “tired and broken”, the row may be cutting through to voters.
Around 7m people have viewed Mr Neil’s monologue this week when he challenged Mr Johnson to come on to his programme and outlined the questions he wanted to ask. “The theme running through our questions is trust,” the presenter said on Thursday.
“And why, so many times in his career in politics and journalism, critics and sometimes even those close to him have deemed him to be untrustworthy. It is of course relevant to what he is promising us all.”
And when asked in the debate what punishment should be dealt to politicians who lie during campaigns, Mr Johnson scrabbled around before concluding they should “crawl through the House of Commons scourging themselves with the offending documents”.
