Clegg, 43, and hitherto best known for having told an interviewer that he had in his life slept with "no more than 30" women, was scored the easy winner in the first post-debate poll. No fewer than 61 percent of respondents said they thought he won the debate, against 19 percent for Conservative leader David Cameron and 17 percent for Prime Minister Gordon Brown. (The remainder were don't knows.)

The first full-scale opinion poll taken after Clegg's TV triumph was the YouGov poll that appeared In The Sun newspaper Saturday. It showed the Conservatives with 33 percent (down by 4 percent) and Labor pushed into third place with 28 percent (down 3 points) and the Lib Dems storming into second place with 30 percent (up 8 points).

This bounce for the Lib Dems, whose parent Liberal Party hasn't held power in Britain since 1915, may not last. Much of it can be explained by Clegg's relative novelty value, by the voters' cynicism about the two main parties and the siren call of "change," which Clegg represents. It also demonstrates the way British voters, most of whom used to vote reliably for the parties their parents had supported, have become more volatile.

British elections are no longer decided by the famous "floating voter," that small band of less than 10 percent of the electorate who were prepared to change their vote. As well as the Lib Dems, there are Welsh and Scottish National parties, the far-right British National Party, and the anti-Europe U.K. Independence party, all whittling away at the traditional dominance of Labor and Conservative.

The latest surge of the Lib Dems is altogether more dramatic. Being in second place in the polls may not give them a real prospect of taking power but it clearly makes them the kingmaker in what looks likely to be a Parliament in which neither Labor nor Conservative holds a clear majority of seats. In British politics, it is the number of seats a party wins that counts, not the percentage share of the vote. And those seats are won on a first-past-the-post basis, so Labor's strength in smaller urban constituencies means they can win more seats with fewer votes than the Conservatives.

As a result, that poll in which the Lib Dems came second and Labor came third would produced a House of Commons in which Labor would have 276 seats, the Conservatives would have 245 and the Lib Dems would have 100, with 29 seats to be shared among the smaller parties. This isn't just counter-intuitive, it is a mockery of democracy and an unanswerable argument for a change in the British voting system.

The chances now that Clegg and his Lib Dems will hold the balance of power in the next Parliament, and thus decide whether Cameron or Brown is to be prime minister, are now very much stronger. So who are these people, and what do they stand for?

The traditional Liberal Party of the 19th-century statesman William Gladstone, and of the mercurial Welshman David Lloyd George, who led Britain to victory in World War I, has long gone, along with its base in the Nonconformist churches (Protestant, but not Church of England) and in the manufacturing classes of the industrial revolution. In recent generations, the Liberals have been a party of the Celtic fringe, in the northern Shetland and Orkney islands and in the southwest of Devon and Cornwall, King Arthur and Camelot country.

But the Labor Party's drift to the left in the 1970s and early 1980s provoked a split. Labor moderates broke off to form the Social Democrat party, which later combined with the Liberals to form the Lib Dems.

Traditionally defined by what they weren't, being against both Conservative and Labor, the Lib Dems were also known for being vaguely Green, very pro-Europe and good at local government and looking after local services. And in Vince Cable, former chief economist for Shell, they have a highly credible potential man to run the Treasury, since he was warning of the looming recession and budget deficits years ago.

The Lib Dems were against the Iraq war from the start. They propose to take most people on below-average incomes out of the tax system entirely, paid for by higher taxes on the wealthy, and they would phase out tuition fees for university students. Their most distinctive policies are to oppose replacing Britain's Trident nuclear deterrent force and to ban retail banks that serve the public from indulging in investment banking.

There are two main problems with the Lib Dems. The first is that their demand for a voting system based on proportional representation would probably keep them in power forever as the central party able to make deals with Labor or Conservatives. The second is that a hung Parliament after the May 6 election would lead to a kind of coalition government with no clear dominant party and a prime minister constantly having to satisfy two different party blocks.

Given the perilous state of the British economy, with the budget deficit at 11 percent of gross domestic product and debt rising ominously, that could provoke a very swift and deep fall of the pound, forcing higher interest rates (if the markets would lend Britain money at all) and an instant financial crisis.

This is becoming a frighteningly thrilling election.

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