Politics

Towards the end of last week, the Tories were looking a bit miserable. Their slow response to Labour’s non-coms announcement, coupled with a ‘dead cat’ response from Michael Fallon which made the party look rattled and unpleasant had left the Conservative campaign looking unusually disorganised and slow-witted. But ministers have tried to pick things up, and some of their announcements in particular have left Labour in a similar mess. The story that David Cameron’s party will meet the £8bn demand for health funding from NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens has left Labour hopping around looking a bit cross and awkward. This was not how the party had planned things:

If the election in England is the political equivalent of trench warfare with Labour and the Tories inching forwards and then back, what’s going on in Scotland is a rout with the SNP driving all before it. What is remarkable is how the Nationalists are even in with a chance of winning seats such as Edinburgh South West that voted No by a more than twenty point margin. At the moment, everything their opponents throw at it seems to bounce off the SNP. The so-called Sturgeon memo, which claimed that she had told the French Ambassador that—contrary to all her public protestations—she would prefer Cameron to Miliband as Prime Minister,

Ed Miliband famously forgot to mention the deficit in his 2014 conference speech, but you would have thought that at least some prospective Labour MPs consider it to be a crucial issue facing Britain. The country is, after all, spending £46bn a year on debt interest payments alone – the equivalent of the Defence, Home Office and Foreign Office budgets combined. But not so, according to new research presented at a briefing by Ipsos MORI this morning. The pollster interviewed new prospective parliamentary candidates from each of the four main parties – all standing in marginal or safe seats – and asked them to name their political priorities. Of the

So far, what an infuriating election campaign. We have the most extraordinary array of digital, paper and broadcasting media at our fingertips — excellent political columnists, shrewd and experienced number-crunchers, vivid bloggers and dedicated fact-checkers. There has never been a general election in which the interested voter has had access to so much carefully assembled and up-to-the-minute data. And it’s unpredictable, and it matters: the recovery on a knife edge, the future of the UK, our future in Europe — all that. It ought to be thrilling. So why is the campaign proving so tooth-grindingly awful? Simply because the parties have chosen to refuse to tell us what we need