Leaders' Debates - they work!

In between all the coverage, the spinning, the 'who beat who and who was paying' of the 12hrs or so since the first Leaders' Debate, one thing has really struck me. The Debates work. They really work.

Yesterday my non-political friends would normally shudder, sleep, or hide (or all three) whenever I tried to talk to them about the election. This morning, quite the reverse - there is huge debate about the political Parties and their policies. One colleague who admitted she couldn't pick Nick Clegg out of a line-up before last night is now considering voting for him. There's a discussion in our kitchen as to why David Cameron slightly dodged an answer on police spending; was it that he didn't have enough time to get into the detail, or is there something wrong there? Our team meeting this morning kicked off with a chat about whether Gordon Brown is simply unable to get his personality across or whether, god forbid, he has and that's actually it!

Put simply, there's a buzz about the whole election in a way that I haven't seen for some time. People are interested; they're re-engaging with politics. Could the debates be the catalyst that finally allows people to forget about the excesses of politicians, or at least allows them to separate politicians from politics and policy?