It has started. Last week we all went off to the Campaign for Science and Engineering at the Institute of Engineering and Technology for the debate between Lord Drayson, Dr Death, and the other guy -- that is, Baron Drayson of Kensington, the science minister; Dr Evan Harris MP, the Lib Dem science spokesman; and some other guy MP, the Tory shadow science minister (played here by Adam Afriyie). You can watch it yourself, here.

In the audience of, what?, 500?, I was one of the ten not wearing a suit. Was this really the target audience? They didn't look like scientists. They didn't dress like scientists. They couldn't possibly be scientists? Had I gone to the wrong place? But the participants open their mouths and with each opening syllable confirm that we're in for a nerdy ride.

Things kick off with the first of many deeply insightful and probing questions from the audience: "how committed are you to science?" We learn that all three are "committed to science." Great. Things very quickly turn to money, as you'd expect at a time when the physicists and astronomers are about to start loosing their jobs as the funding crisis sets in. Drayson reassures us that there have been no cuts. Just "savings found" and "enforced efficiencies". Presumably the sort of "savings found" that involve people loosing their jobs and work not getting done -- he didn't go into the details. The Tory guy promises to keep the science budget steady if elected, but goes on to make an awkward and embarrassing dodge when asked repeatedly whether the Tories would keep the science ring-fence. He does promise that the Tories will pay off science teachers' student loans in full, though. (There's no explanation for why simply paying teachers a living wage wouldn't work.)

There's talk about how important it is to measure the impact of science when handing out money. I think I drifted off for a moment while Drayson droned in politics-speak, but jerked awake as the Tory held up his iPhone as the best example of the unanticipated impact of science that he could think of. Harris's example of the surprise impact of basic science is much better -- the use of Plasmodium resistant mosquitoes to tackle malaria (if only that actually worked). The point that both Harris and Afriyie are trying to make is that attempting to measure the impact of basic scientific research in advance is impossible, and therefore the current practice of making people compete for funding based on impact is absurd. And yet Afriyie goes on to suggest that we should do it anyway as, erm, an interesting exercise?

Then there's some chat about the Nutt Sack affair. Drayson says something bland that neither defends nor condemns his colleague Alan Johnson, he of the sacking. The Tory at least manages to the unite his opponents and the audience in outraged jeers by arguing that as democratically elected representatives, ministers should be allowed to sack any scientific adviser they want on a whim. Harris gets very vocal on the topic -- we already know him, after all, as the MP most damning of Johnson and almost certainly the current parliament's greatest champion of evidence-based policy making. Asked whether we need more scientific expertise in parliament, Harris makes one of the most important points of the evening: no, we don't. That is, we don't need more parliamentarians full of obscure scientific facts. What we do need is for parliamentarians (and civil servants) to understand how science works: the scientific method, how peer review works, how statistics work and how people can make mistakes with statistics, and how to expose the people who are trying to mislead you with statistics -- the expertise to know when they can trust their advisers. You probably recognise it: it's skepticism. Evan Harris says we need to fill parliament with skeptics.

In their summing up, while Harris is still fuming about Nutt Sack, the Tory guy tells us that if there is one thing that was made clear during the evening it was that all three spokesmen were "very passionate about science." Really? Evan Harris clearly understood and cared about the science, was passionate about Libel reform and the Nutt Sack issue, and he told nerdy jokes and generally won the loudest applause from the audience. Drayson was probably passionate about science once, but any passion he still has gets lost in bland politics and management speak about "finding economies", "ring-fencing budgets", and "realising potentials". The tory guy, though? Just seems to be passing through on his way up.

The most depressing thing of all, though, is that we probably have five more months of this to sit through.