Here’s a list of things that you wouldn’t want to be called if you were a party leader facing an election in 60 days’ time. Scared. Arrogant. Cynical. Hypocritical. Cowardly. Calculating. High-handed. Feeble. Duplicitous. Undemocratic. Chicken.

Like iron filings flying on to a magnet, these accusations are all sticking to David Cameron over his refusal to appear in any TV debates except the one he has condescended to offer and that no one else wants. The result has been to combine all his opponents into an anti-Cameron coalition of scorn for the prime minister.

Nigel Farage jeers that the Tory leader is “running scared”. That makes this one of those very rare occasions when the voice of Ukip is in complete agreement with Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP. Nick Clegg has gone a bit class war on his coalition partner by ridiculing the Tory leader for a display of Downton Abbey arrogance. Ed Miliband calls the prime minister “weak”, which must be highly enjoyable for the Labour leader when he’s had that thrown at him so often by the Tories. The row over TV debates has brought forth from Mr Miliband some of his best lines for a while. He’s revived the old Martini slogan by proclaiming that he is ready to take on the prime minister “anytime, anywhere, any place”. In a speech yesterday morning, he mocked his Tory rival as “not so much born to rule as determined to hide”.

The relationship between Number 10 and the nation’s principal broadcasters is now approaching a state of war, an uncomfortable place for both sides, and not where any party leader wants to be at election time. Downing Street accuses the TV companies of arrogance for presuming to tell the prime minister what to do. The broadcasters are attempting to call his bluff by declaring that they will press ahead with their three proposed debates, regardless of whether or not Mr Cameron turns up. The dismissive retort from the lofty turrets of Number 10 is that everyone else must accept the prime minister’s take-it-or-leave-it offer of just the one, multi-party debate, to be held outside the formal election campaign period, or there will be no debates at all.

That we would reach an impasse was predictable – and, indeed, predicted. I reported to you back in January that the odds against TV debates looked extremely high because the Tories had long ago concluded they had much to lose and little to gain by agreeing to put up David Cameron against his competitors. They didn’t want to give Nigel Farage the chance to score what one of the prime minister’s allies describes as a “free hit”. They didn’t want to give Nick Clegg, currently struggling to get much attention for the Lib Dems, additional exposure. They particularly didn’t want to cede equality of status to Ed Miliband and allow the Labour leader the potential opportunity to improve his poor standing with the public by outperforming expectations. The Tories have been trying to have it both ways by framing the election as a choice of leadership, but not letting the voters see the credentials of those leaders tested in a head-to-head between the two candidates to be prime minister. Badly burnt by what happened in 2010, from the off the Tories have sought to prevent debates at this election.

They now seek to blame the broadcasters and the other parties for making a mess of the negotiations. That is just hilarious. The negotiations got stuck in a “logjam” because the Tories refused to come to the table when everyone else was ready to talk. When they did finally deign to turn up, they threw repeated spanners into the works. None of the parties have behaved in a completely unpartisan fashion. But a wide variety of sources confirm that the principal obstacle to reaching an agreement has been the Tories. First, they didn’t want the debates in the campaign period, an inherently ridiculous position. How could the leaders debate properly before they had published their manifestos? Then the Tories demanded the inclusion of the Greens. When that was conceded, they suddenly wanted the cast list extended to the Ulster Unionists, knowing that was bound to lead to demands from the other Northern Irish parties for their inclusion as well. The only surprise was that the Tories did not argue that it would only be fair to invite the Monster Raving Loonies. This is why the talks failed. When one party to a negotiation is determined to prevent it from being successful, and that party is representing the prime minister, securing agreement is mission impossible.

There is a way of avoiding this morass in the future. That would be to emulate the way that the Americans manage their presidential debates and legislate to create an independent body to set the rules. As we report today, Labour is now proposing a variant of that. Ed Miliband is doing this for self-serving reasons. It is a way of keeping the heat on Mr Cameron. But just because it suits Labour’s partisan purposes to promote the idea doesn’t make it a bad one.

An independent commission to govern debates would get us out of the indefensible situation where one person can attempt to sabotage the whole thing because they don’t want to defend their record and debate their competitors before the country.

What do we know about this election? One thing we know is that a large swath of the public is alienated from and angry with the entire political process. I am not starry-eyed about TV debates. They are not to be confused with Socratic dialogue. They are not a miracle cure for public disenchantment. But as they demonstrated last time, they do have the capacity to engage a large number of voters, many of whom might not tune in for any other form of politics. When there is so much alienation from the mainstream parties, there is not only some obligation on them, you’d think there would also be a self-interested imperative, to try to reconnect with the electorate. The age of deference is dead. Mr Cameron may not have noticed this, but everyone else has. TV debates even happen in Mongolia – a point the Tory leader himself used to make back in the days when he called them “part of the modern age” and “a really good thing for our democracy”.

A further thing we know about this election is that it is deadlocked. Our Opinium poll today has the Tories and Labour in a dead heat. Neither party has found a way of breaking the stalemate. Both need a game-changer. A head-to-head debate between the two rival leaders might provide that. It would certainly concentrate the nation’s mind on the choice before it. Does it want some form of Tory government or does it want some form of Labour government? As someone said to the country: “You will decide who’s in charge. Who represents us. You will decide whose hands are on the steering wheel. It can only be me as prime minister – or Ed Miliband as prime minister.”

That was David Cameron speaking yesterday. He’s quite right: it will either be him or Ed Miliband who is prime minister. Which is the unanswerable argument for why there should be a head-to-head debate between the two of them. If the question is whose hand should be on the steering wheel, the country is surely entitled to see a debate between the two contenders to be the nation’s driver. Mr Cameron has manoeuvred himself into the self-evidently absurd position of wanting to have a presidential election, but refusing to have a presidential debate.

The Tories have pursued this course because they made a cynical calculation that whatever damage they might suffer from blocking debates would be temporary and minor. There was less risk in running away, so they thought, than there was in taking part. Many seasoned Westminster operators, of all parties, thought they were probably right. I am beginning to wonder. This is underscoring many of the negatives that the Tories already suffer from. The hit David Cameron might take for being seen as frit of debating Ed Miliband – and, more importantly, frightened of scrutiny by the British people – could be more serious than he originally anticipated. That probably explains why he has already buckled a bit by accepting that there should be one debate, even if it is still not the debate that anyone else wants.

There is now a standoff with the Tory leader on one side and everyone else on the other. Will David Cameron blink? Two things we have learned about him during his time as prime minister. He hates exposing himself to attack. And he can be extremely stubborn about changing his mind. We will see which of those strands of his personality prevails. He will hate climbing down. To surrender now would make him look weak. Yet he will no less hate being defined as the no-show prime minister, a man too cowardly to debate Ed Miliband and too cynical about democracy to subject himself to public scrutiny. That could make him look even weaker.

The Tories wanted to make this election turn on the character of the Labour leader. This has made the issue the character of David Cameron.