Politics

Inevitably the lowest attacks have been saved until the week of the election. For months now the neat drip-feeding of anti-UKIP stories from Conservative Campaign Headquarters direct to the UK press has done everything possible to depict UKIP as a racist, xenophobic, bigoted party. This has been significantly ratcheted up ahead of Thursday’s vote. Today’s pages include the Times repeating a story from last year in the hope of successful guilt-by-association. The story is that Geert Wilders (the ‘Dutch Xenophobe’ as the Times headlines him) would like Nigel Farage to join him and Marine Le Pen in an anti-EU Brussels voting bloc. What neither the Times nor any other newspaper wishes

The polls are all over the place this morning. Ukip is either on course for a thumping victory, going to be edged into second by Labour or has fallen into third place depending on which is your preferred pollster. But all three Westminster parties are operating on the assumption that Ukip will win, as I say in the Mail on Sunday. Certainly, Labour are getting their excuses in early. Those close to Miliband are quick to point out that Tony Blair never won a European Election and that the party machine will be concentrating more on Thursday’s council contests than the European Elections as having a strong council base will

We have had much occasion to reflect, recently, on Disraeli’s dictum that Britain ‘does not love coalitions’. It’s now becoming depressingly clear that coalitions don’t much love Britain either. What started off as functional coalition government has descended into the most appalling policy blackmail which I looked at in my Daily Telegraph column yesterday. I said that granting ‘minority’ status to the Cornish was the result of such a horse-trade. We’ve had more examples today. The Daily Mail has stood up the fact that the Cornish move was in return for Clegg approving a £600 million reform of Town Hall pensions. The Times leader joins this theme, saying the horse trading is

The British jobs miracle continues – and in ways that continue to surprise. Your CoffeeHouse baristas have been crunching the numbers. They’re startling in a number of ways. For example:- 1. David Cameron’s record at job creation is better than any of his last four predecessors – including Tony Blair in a boom. See chart above. 2. Jobs are being created so quickly that even the March Budget prediction is out of date. The above graph shows a dotted line, indicating the OBR projections. The thick red one, above, shows that we’re already ahead. 3. British citizens are being hired Not always the same as British-born, you understand, but those holding a British

‘We don’t do God,’ was Alastair Campbell’s put-down when his charge, Tony Blair, was tempted to raise the issue of his faith. Unfortunately, it seems to have become the motto of David Cameron’s government. It is a month now since 276 girls were kidnapped from a school near the town of Chibok in northern Nigeria, and still the Foreign Office’s statements on the crisis read like a deliberate exercise in missing the point. ‘Continuing murders and abductions of schoolchildren, particularly girls in Nigeria by Boko Haram, are a stark reminder of the threat faced by women and girls in conflict-prone areas,’ Mark Simmonds, minister for Africa, said this week. ‘Young