Their wives were paraded before us so that we could see how desirable the three candidates were in crude socio-biological terms. The consensus was that Clegg’s wife was the most attractive with thick luxuriant hair. All three candidates stood at the podium and all were careful to straddle the ground, taking up considerable room, like alpha males saying: “I will not be shifted, I will not be knocked over, I will emerge triumphant from this battle.”
And then they started talking. We all knew that Brown had a deep, powerful voice that makes him sound like a dominant leader. Cameron’s movements were more vigorous, there was a lot of symbolic punching and prodding and gripping and chopping. When Cameron spoke, Clegg did not just glance his way, he gazed at him and we could decode this primitive signal for what it is. Subordinates gaze more at high dominance individuals than the converse. So it looked, in the first debate, as if there might be a clear pattern in the positioning of the three individuals in the dominance hierarchy.
But then Clegg did something remarkable, something unthinkable in the animal kingdom, he stopped trying to lock antlers. He withdrew from this particular contest and instead worked on building a relationship with the audience. He literally and symbolically stepped to one side and gestured towards the other two so that he could be a spectator, like the audience itself, on Brown and Cameron going through with their political battle. He attacked Brown, but before Brown could reply Clegg put his hands in his pocket as if to signal: “You can’t attack me now, you’re too late, old man.” Clegg positioned himself beautifully: he wasn’t like them, he was more like us, this was the future, the end of two party politics, the end of chest-thumping and dominance displays, the end of Tory and Labour.
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