THE televised debates have electrified the election campaign and the final one may well have settled it. It did not do what the first in the trilogy did, nor what Gordon Brown and Labour desperately longed for it did not change the game.

Instead it may well have entrenched what was once fluid, firming up voters' choices that once seemed in a permanent state of flux. Brown appeared to recognise as much in his closing statement, his last appeal to the jury for a reprieve. “I know that if things stay where they are, then in eight days' time, David Cameron, perhaps supported by Nick Clegg, would be in office.”

The headlines that Brown needed from the BBC showdown in Birmingham were the kind that Clegg garnered two long weeks ago in Manchester, proclaiming he had turned the election on its head. He needed to wield that great clunking fist and knock his two younger rivals to the floor, pounding them with such a virtuoso display of economic gravitas that the pair would be reduced to looking like jibbering, barely numerate novices. That was the stuff of Labour fantasies. And fantasies they remained.

Brown was solid, of course, ramming home his core point that the recovery was too fragile to risk a premature withdrawal of state spending. He was full of detail, rattling off aspects of his rivals' manifestos that suggested he had read those documents closer than they had. Several times he confronted Cameron with a policy dredged from the small print — on, for example, a cut in corporation tax for banks, offset by a withdrawal in support for manufacturing industry — that seemed to come as news to the Tory leader.

Yet only rarely did any of this cut through, as the political professionals put it. Brown was at his best recalling the anger he felt on the eve of the banks' collapse, the decision he had had to take lest the entire financial system crumble, reminding viewers why he was surely the most qualified of the three men on stage to steer the country towards a stable recovery.

Most of the time, though, he spoke a technocratic language that most Britons simply don't speak, rattling off plans and schemes that few people can digest. And so, by this test, the battered, exhausted-looking Brown, never able to fix the camera with his gaze, lost once again. Most of the instant polls gave him third place for the third time.

That made Cameron the winner. All evening the Conservative leader spoke in a language people can understand.

— The Guardian, London