BORED OR JUST DECIDED?

By RAY FLEMING IF the the viewing figures for last week's Question Time on BBC TV are a guide, there may be a massive abstention at Britain's polling stations on Thursday. The three party leaders appeared for halfan-hour each on Question Time and the audience held steady at four million throughout the 90 minutes. However: on ITV, Footballers' Wives attracted 5.8 million viewers and, on Channel 4, 4.1 million watch a documentary about a man who spent a month eating nothing but meals at McDonald's. How depressing! Certainly, the election campaign has lasted too long and has been too heavily concentrated on the three party leaders to the exclusion of some of the more, shall we say, colourful characters. Even so, one might think that the programme that came nearest to the TV debates in the US Presidential campaigns, should get more than one fifth of the twenty million or so viewers in the UK. Does the lack of interest suggest that most people have already made up their minds or that they don't much care? Meanwhile there was an interesting flip in the polls yesterday when the latest from YouGov/Telegraph showed the Labour and the Conservatives separated by only three points instead of the six or seven which was the steady reading for most of last week. At the same time, however, the “new improved” Populus poll, described as a “four-day moving average” in The Times, showed that the gap had widened to 42-29. The Liberal Democrats remain anchored in the low 20s. There is said to be some discontent in the party with Mr Kennedy's performance. The interview he gave on BBC radio's Today programme yesterday morning was quite awful, muddled and unconvincing; John Humphrys attacked him mercilessly. At one point Kennedy dismissed Humphrys' summary of his position on the Iraq war as “total rubbish” but then more or less repeated it as his own version. Perhaps Mr Kennedy is a slow-starter, not at his best early in the morning?