British Leaders' Debate? A Yawner

Did you not notice how British democracy was transformed last week? Changed utterly, and for the better? According to our television companies, or at least the men and women involved in their political coverage, that is what has just taken place.

For half a century they gazed jealously across the Atlantic, where since Nixon and Kennedy in 1960 the American presidential candidates have engaged in formal televised debates; all that long while they have argued that it is nothing short of a democratic scandal that we have not been able to witness the same sort of contest here.