Family-friendly politics

The urgency behind the “family friendly” agenda – which is to be the theme of the Tories’ spring conference in Gateshead – can be traced to an internal opinion poll presentation delivered by Lord Ashcroft a few weeks ago. Mothers were going off David Cameron, apparently – which panicked the Cameroons not a little, as one of their favourite boasts was that women liked the Cameron/Osborne duet while considering Brown a clunking great fist. Queue panicked policy production: that declaration that they’d claim back the playgrounds from the yobs, and today headlines about six months of fathers’ leave. There will more of this stuff, I’m told, until Ashcroft’s poll improves – and this is the central objective of the Gateshead spring conference.

I gather that almost all internal polling is about the party (and Cameron’s) standing – not on policies.