That's it then! The last TV leaders not-debate is over, with tonight's BBC Question Time special featuring audience grillings for Cameron, Miliband and Clegg, in that order.

As I write, an ICM poll is showing Cameron in the lead, with 44 per cent thinking he performed best on the night vs 38 for Miliband and only 19 for Clegg, but in reality there was no clear winner here with all leaders coming under some tough questioning. So what else did we learn?

Miliband would forfeit number 10

Predictably, Miliband was asked about what influence the SNP might exert over a Labour government in the event of a hung parliament and beyond. He ruled out a coalition, as he has done many times before, and he explicitly ruled out any "confidence and supply" deal, which he's only done once before (on The Andrew Marr Show, though he didn't actually say the words himself then.) But, most importantly, he explicitly confirmed to the audience that he would rather forfeit the chance of running the country than enter any such deal—he said he will not "barter away" his manifesto. In practice, this is slightly academic; because the SNP have promised to vote against any Tory government Miliband doesn't need a formal deal to get into Number 10. But such specific spelling out of Labour's position on a deal will see their hands tightly tied in the fraught negotiations from May 8th onwards.

God's own questioners

The stars of the show, most journalists agreed, were the Yorkshire audience, who functioned as a kind of multi-headed Paxman, pounding each leader where it hurt the most—welfare cuts for Cameron, economic trust for Labour and tuition fees for Clegg. I spoke to a few audience members before the show and it was on the last point they all agreed—when I asked if they were pleased Clegg was getting a moment in the spotlight, they said there wasn't much he'd be able to do to win back their trust. Praise is due to the Question Time team, who picked an impressive number of questions backed up by personal experience; politicians don't like having to confront reality, as Miliband had to when faced with a small businessman who needed to use zero hours contracts to stay afloat, for example. The star of the evening was the flannel-shirted hardman who told the Prime Minister "you're wrong" in a thick Yorkshire brogue. "Very Yorkshire, I thought," was Paddy Ashdown's approving verdict in the spin room afterwards.

Clegg didn't shine

The Lib Dems have repeatedly complained about the lack of air time Nick Clegg has had during these debates—he wasn't allowed in the "challengers" show as he's in government, but he wasn't in the first "Battle for Number 10" because he's not one of the two big players. They were obviously hoping for a lot from tonight, sending both Tim Farron and Paddy Ashdown (not best friends of late) down to spin to journalists before, during and after the event. They didn't get all they were hoping for. Clegg did well enough at setting out his reasonable, centrist stall on Europe and immigration, and he was good humoured but firm in his answers to the inevitable tuition fees attacks. But ultimately his strategy at these events—wargaming potential nightmare scenarios for government which don't include Lib Dems—is probably pretty confusing for most voters. As one audience member put it: "I don't think voters want to hear reasons not to vote for another party, they want to know why to vote for your party."

Tweets don't make a twat

You should always take twitter sentiment analysis with a massive pinch of salt, in that it's a pretty terrible predictor of what the wider public think. But it's interesting that TheySay, a social media analysis tool from Oxford's Dr Karo Moilanen, found Cameron provoking the most positive sentiment, and Miliband provoking the most negative sentiment. Twitter, and particularly political Twitter, tends on overall trends to skew slightly to the left, because of the relative age and social background of Twitter users. The Tories overall tend to get a bit more abuse on Twitter than Labour. So for Cameron to win here shows he's getting the online crowd going much more than normal. Tonight he was calm, reasonable, and confident. But maybe his good reviews are just all that passion he's been showing paying off.