17:25

The ITV leaders debate has exposed the patchwork, oddly shaped nature of the UK’s political system. The only two party leaders with a realistic chance of becoming prime minister, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, have declined to appear – further highlighting the weakness of this format, in which the speakers spent much of the debate virtue-signalling, untested.

We had leaders of two nationalist parties whose candidates only stand in small parts of the UK, in Nicola Sturgeon of the Scottish National party, and Leanne Wood from the Welsh nationalists Plaid Cymru. Yet neither are candidates in the election. Tim Farron of the Liberal Democrats, Caroline Lucas of the English Greens and Paul Nuttall of Ukip are standing, yet none has a realistic chance of being in the next government. The Greens will likely end with one MP, in Lucas. Ukip are likely to end with none at all.

Only Nuttall, the one outsider among the five, was directly challenged over his policies. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, is the only one of the five who has served in government. Yet her 10 years in power in Edinburgh was not under direct scrutiny in this debate, facing an audience in Salford that can never vote for her. Likewise Wood.

Sturgeon made assertions on Scotland’s economy for which there is no evidence, implying that the SNP’s policy of lifting 100,000 small businesses out of paying business rates has helped the economy. The Scottish government has never tested the benefits of that policy for the Scottish economy, which is on the cusp of official recession.

The SNP (@theSNP) FM: "Growing the economy means doing more to support business, in Scotland we're taking 100000 businesses out of business rates." #ITVDebate

Clearly aware of this, Sturgeon had the insight to qualify her own answers – confirming how odd this debate really was. Keenly aware that her government’s patchy record on education is a fierce topic of debate in Scotland, she said: “Nothing is more important to me than education, where there are some challenges we are working really hard to address.”

Unprovoked, she said the same about housing: “We’ve got challenges; we’ve not done everything right.” It is quite unclear what meaningful impact this programme will have on the final outcome of the election on 8 June.

