By Ivor Gaber

POLITICS is about experience and never was that more so than at the Argus’ hustings at the Thistle Hotel in Brighton.

The five politicians on the stage had varying degrees of experience, but there could be only one winner.

Caroline Lucas, fighting to retain her Pavilion seat, likes to paint herself as the non-politician, politician, but in truth she has been an MEP and then an MP for the past 15 years – and it certainly showed, straight from the opening statements.

At one extreme, so-to-speak, was the UKIP candidate for Hove, Kevin Smith, who haltingly read his introduction (and at one point came to a grinding halt) whilst at the other, Caroline Lucas delivered an almost entire party manifesto within her allotted 120 seconds.

But it was a slightly skewed manifesto, on the one hand it was an unashamed pitch for the Labour vote and on the other – as with Basil Fawlty and the war – the Green candidate somehow forgot to mention the Green council.

Conservative Simon Kirby, fighting to retain his seat in Kemptown and Labour’s Purna Sen, going after Lucas in Pavilion, both gave professional introductions, setting out their personal and party stalls with aplomb.

Chris Bowers, the Lib Dem’s Pavilion hopeful – very hopeful, with the latest constituency poll giving him just 8% of the vote – was the surprise package of night.

His opening statement was energetic and he continued in that mould throughout the evening.

The evening’s first question about Europe garnered clear statements in favour, and against, a referendum.

But Lucas perhaps gave something of a hostage to fortune when she said: “I worry about people who are in favour of the EU but against a referendum” – perhaps it hadn’t occurred to her that those in favour of staying in the EU worry that other people, the majority, might not agree with them resulting in a UK withdrawal.

The debate then moved on to – TTIP – to the uninformed it might have sounded like a discussion about how much to leave in gratuities in a tea- room on the front.

Fortunately most of the panel were more knowledgeable and knew that it referred to the ‘Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership’, a treaty currently under negotiation that would pit the rights of multinational corporations against European governments.

This led to an impressive bit of double one-upmanship (or should that be one-up personship?) when Chris Bowers noted that he had written about this on a Liberal Democrat blog to which Purna Sen said: “Yes I read your piece Chris”.

UKIP’s Kevin Smith opined that the other panellists were worrying unnecessarily since it wouldn’t be coming in for weeks, or even months, to which Lucas mischievously, but audibly, murmured: “So that’s OK then.”

A questioner from the Socialist Party of Great Britain wanted to know what the panellists were doing to overthrow capitalism.

Not a great deal appeared to be the consensus, although when Simon Kirby suggested: “At the end of the day you can’t make changes overnight” it led me to wonder, so when else can you?

I was similarly distracted when a questioner about education said: “Parents speak with their feet.”

It made me think that, unlike parents, politicians try to do the opposite – avoid putting their foot in their mouth, which most of the panellists, most of the time, did – avoid that is.

But the big theme of the evening for me was the Labour vote – everyone was after it.

Labour’s Purna Sen did it openly, Conservative Simon Kirby did it by saying that for him the NHS was the most important campaign issue and Caroline Lucas never stopped ‘tearing lumps out of Labour’ (as Clarence Mitchell, her Conservative opponent in Pavilion, later put it).

But the most naked, and perhaps surprising, grab for Labour support came from a UKIP council candidate in Portslade who spoke passionately about the problems of Brighton’s homeless.

Caroline Lucas was so surprised at this particular intervention that she talked about her “cognitive dissonance” – perhaps the first time in the history of election hustings such words have been uttered.

But this was Brighton after all, which was why Purna Sen no doubt felt confident in saying: “People here will have read the Spirit Level” (for those who haven’t, it’s an academic analysis of why societies are better off the more equal they are).

However, the highlight of the evening came after the main debate when I was buttonholed by Matt Tay lor the ‘Independent’ candidate for Kemptown, inexplicably left off the platform.

As I promised I went to his website and discovered that if I voted for him I would be voting for “A cure for cancer, volt-free tidal energy and a new king, King Arthur” – now that’s what I call real politics.

*Ivor Gaber is Professor of Journalism at the University of Sussex and is writing a regular column reviewing the election campaign in Brighton.

He will be chairing the Argus’ second hustings – this time focusing on the battle for control of Brighton Council – at the Thistle Hotel at 7 pm on Thursday April 23.