Sadly I missed the debate last night – I was busy being wined and dined at Gary Rhodes’ swanky restaurant in Tower 41 – but it looks to have had as much impact as its advocated hoped.

There were quite a load of sketchy push-polls from various media outlets after the debate last night which will reflect the bias of their readership – the Sun, the Mail and Sky News all have particularly egregious entries. Happily, three proper polling outfits also took the temperature last night: YouGov, whose daily tracker has been the default for the election thus far, ComRes and Angus Reid. A slightly incredible poll from Populus also appeared in the Times – Populus are a legit outfit but their claim of a 61% Clegg victory just isn’t credible. That Clegg carried the night isn’t really in question but that lead is just a bit too fantastic.

The top-lines are as follows: YouGov has NC51, DC29, GB19. ComRes has NC 46, DC 26, GB 20. Angus Reid has NC48, DC20, GB18. Over the span of the three pollsters that’s probably strong enough to take with a degree of confidence – it’s worth noting that the YouGov panel didn’t allow for respondents to select “Undecided” or “None”, which is why Clegg and Cameron have slightly higher scores (and which suggests that Brown’s 20% is pretty much stable).

Angus Reid has released its table – which is still being updated so you’ll have to excuse me if the numbers have shifted slightly in the interim, although I’m fairly confident that the themes will prove to be static. You’ll immediately see that Clegg has by far the most support from his own party – 81% of Lib Dems got behind their leader, while the Labour faithful backed Brown only 51% of the time. What should really worry Cameron is that he only kept 46% of Tories with him. Conservative panel members were slightly more likely to approve of none of them than Lib Dems or Labourites, but couldn’t match the skepticism of those who went into the debate undecided. Clegg drew over 30% of each of the other major parties’ support, suggesting that any poll bump will be drawn equally from both sources. He also hoovered up over 50% of the independents on the panel.

All in all, 43% said that they would be more likely to vote for Clegg in the aftermath of the debate. The post-debate analysis may push that number up, especially if a dominant media narrative springs up and starts to drive some momentum in the Lib Dem’s direction. The Dems can also probably expect a bit of a funding boost off of the back of this. There’s talk this morning of the Lib Dems having a credible shot at second place; at the moment I think that’s fanciful, but there are still two more debates and plenty of events ‘twixt cup and lip.