Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Thursday

David Blackburn

Best and worst of the campaign: Nick Clegg

Clegg’s best moment: the first TV debate No one could have predicted that 90 minutes of television would have such an impact. But this election has been dominated by the strange re-birth of Liberalism, engendered by Nick Clegg’s performance in the first TV debate. Television is a medium determined by empathy. Clegg embodied the frustration and contempt that many voters feel for the two established parties, and he expressed his alternative vision with ease and clarity in contrast to Cameron and Brown’s garbled debate. The nation swooned. Honourable mention: being the first leader to undergo a Paxman interview. Clegg’s worst moment: the immigration question in the third TV debate Before

David Blackburn

Best and worst of the campaign: Gordon Brown

As we wait for the polls to close, and the final countdown to begin, we at Coffee House thought it would be a good opportunity to look back on the campaign as a whole. And, so, here’s the first in a series of three posts identifying the best and worst moments for the main party leaders. We’ve started with the man who remains Prime Minister for the time being: Gordon Brown. Brown’s best moment: the Citizens UK speech As it happens, choosing Brown’s best moment of the campaign is easy. Alongside so many gaffes, scowls and lies, the flashes of proficiency tend to stick out – and none more so

Brian Reading

How a cow won the 1970 election

The conspiracy theory of history is rarely right; the bungle theory is rarely wrong. So it was at the 1970 British general election. I bungled. The polls gave Labour a 3 percent lead; instead the Tories won. Historians disagree on why this was so. Some blame the margin of error in opinion polls. Others say there was a late swing. If so, I was to blame. It was the Sunday before the Thursday polling. We were panicking. Our Tory backroom boys gathered together three or four future cabinet ministers. I asked how were we to deal with inflation – more important in those days than the budget deficit. We agreed

Peter Hoskin

The party leaders vote

David and Samantha Cameron leaving the polling station in Spelsbury Gordon and Sarah Brown arrive to vote in North Queensferry Nick and Miriam Clegg vote in Sheffield

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Predicting election results is a fool’s errand

Why is predicting this election so difficult? Because voters themselves don’t know what to do. Before each of the last seven elections, Ipsos/Mori ask voters if they might change their minds. In 1983 and 1987, about one in seven said yes. This time, almost half of the British electorate may change their minds. This explains why 2010 has been the most volatile election in recent memory – with all thee parties having been ahead, in some way, during the campaign. And it also explains why prediction is a fool’s game. My gut still tells me ‘small Tory majority’ but I have learned never to bet on my gut. The press

Martin Bright

Message to the Tories: Grow Up About the New Labour Era

I have been deeply disappointed by Tory negative campaigning in the past few days. The Cameroon coup was inspired, in part, by Tony Blair, so to decry 13 years of New Labour is deeply hypocritical. The message, pioneered by Oliver Letwin, was that praise would be given where it was due. Britain has become a better place since 1997 and that is true for readers of the The Spectator as much as (and perhaps more than) anyone else. At the same time, Brown’s leadership of the country and his party has been woeful. The Labour Party has only itself to blame for this. It should have put up a candidate

David Blackburn

Nigel Farage in plane crash

Guido reports that a two-seater aeroplane carrying UKIP’s Nigel Farage was circling in the air before crashing near Buckingham. Farage is understood to have walked away from the accident with only minor injuries and is now on his way to hospital. More details to follow. UPDATE: Reports are inconclusive, but it seems that Mr Farage was pulled semi-conscious from wreckage and may be seeing a heart specialist at Horton General Hospital Banbury.

Peter Hoskin

As the polls open, a topsy-turvy campaign closes

Now’s the time, dear CoffeeHouser. After nearly three years in Number Ten, Gordon Brown is finally subjecting himself to the wishes of the British public. And, signs are, he won’t like what they’ve got to say. Putting the strong possibility of a hung parliament aside, last night’s opinion polls had Labour on or around Michael Foot levels of support. A few folk, like Marbury, have observed that it’s almost like the campaign didn’t happen. And they’re right: there is a peculiar symmetry to the electoral calculus. After all the mood shifts of the past four weeks, we’re back broadly where we started: with the Tories looking to gain either a

Wednesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Country Election

There’s been a sad lack of country music in these parts lately. But now that the campaigning is done, it’s time to make amends for that. So here’s a country playlist for the election. Like you know, if country music can’t explain something most likely it ain’t worth explaining… Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton offer a succinct (if partisan and less than generous) summary of Britain’s journey from 1997 to 2010: Holdin’ On To Nothin’. Non-Labour voters (and disappointed Labour members) suspect Gordon Brown should be singing: Pretend I Never Happened by Waylon Jennings. On the other hand, Gordon takes his text from Emmylou Harris and Calling My Children Home.

Martin Bright

The Labour Party Must Look to the Next Generation Now

I have just watched the last images of the election campaign on the Ten O’Clock News on the BBC. David Cameron was surrounded by some seriously off-putting party apparatchiks (why not choose some of the perfectly presentable and normal-looking young people for CCHQ rather than these awful gargoyles?), meanwhile Gordon Brown was struggling to fill a room and Nick Clegg was being mobbed.  I remember a Labour spin doctor (OK it was Damian McBride) telling me that he knew Gordon could never win a beauty contest against David Cameron. He didn’t seem to have twigged that modern elections are beauty contests – that is one of the reasons Tony Blair

Peter Hoskin

Two more polls point towards a hung parliament

Is this it? A couple more polls have been released, and – like all the others tonight – they point towards a hung parliament. An ICM poll for the Guardian has the Tories on 36 percent (up three points), Labour on 28 percent (no change), and the Lib Dems on 26 (down 2).  And a ComRes effort for the Independent and ITV has the parties on 37, 28 and 28, respectively. Most Tories I’ve spoken with this evening are, they say, mildly pleased with the opinion polls.  Not overjoyed, of course – but they feel their party’s greater firepower in the marginals means that numbers like those above will translate

Peter Hoskin

And now YouGov…

You want more numbers? Well, the YouGov figures for the Sun have just come in, and they are: the Tories on 35 percent (no change), Labour on 28 percent (down two), and the Lib Dems on 28 percent (up 4). So far tonight, all the polls have been in hung parliament territory (on an uniform national swing). And most have Labour and the Lib Dems more or less on level-pegging. More polls here and here.  There’s a good handful still to come, so keep your seat calculators to hand. UPDATE: YouGov also conducted some marginals polling. Here are Peter Kellner’s words from the YouGov website, by way of an explanation:

Peter Hoskin

Times/Populus has the Tories close to a majority

So the Times/Populus results are in, and they have the Tories on 37 percent (up one), Labour on 28 percent (up one), and the Lib Dems on 27 percent (down one). On a uniform national swing, this would leave us in hung parliament territory. But Tories I speak to are pretty confident that numbers like these, if replicated tomorrow, could give them a majority. Elsewhere, TNS-BMRB has the Tories on 33, Labour on 27 and the Lib Dems on 29.  Angus Reed for Political Betting has Tories on 36, Labour on 24, and the Lib Dems on 29.

Peter Hoskin

Let the games begin

Make no mistake: tomorrow’s election is just so many beginnings. The beginning of a fiscal footslog for the next government. The beginning of the Lib Dems’ struggle to maintain attention and support. The beginning, perhaps, of backroom negotiations to determine who gets to govern our country. But, of all these beginnings, there’s one which threatens to be more violent and compulsive than all the rest: a Labour leadership contest. Over at Spectator Live, we polled CoffeeHousers on who will emerge victorious from the bloodbath, and the results are now in. David Miliband came out on top with 46 percent of the vote. Next came “other” on 16 percent (who did

Peter Hoskin

The first opinion poll of the evening is in…

…and it’s from the Daily Express/Opinium. They have the Tories on 35 percent (up 2), Labour on 27 percent (up 1) and the Lib Dems on 26 percent (down 1). So, an 8 point lead for the Tories. I know plenty of CoffeeHousers have had their fill of opinion polls. But, obviously, the shifts and percentages take on an extra piquancy tonight. Tune back later for more.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Translating polls into seats

There’s an odd disconnect at the moment. Pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to predicts that the Tories will win 300 seats plus (the one exception was someone on the Union side who thought that they could hold the Tories to 280) but the polls show them winning significantly less than that.   Now, this is partly because nobody is sure how you translate votes into seats in a three-way contest. People are also factoring in that the Tory vote is more certain to turn out and that the Tory operation is more confident that it knows where its voters are than the other parties. But it is a testament to

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Limits of Cameronism

It stops at the Tweed. Dave was in Glasgow and East Renfreshire yesterday on the Scottish leg of his 36-Hour-Dash-To-Save-the-United-Kingdom but, while symbolically useful, it won’t have done him or his party that much good north of the border. Today’s Scotsman poll puts the Tories on 17% in Scotland. More remarkably, the Scotsman finds that Brown has a +4 approval rating in Scotland while Cameron endures a -2 rating. I can’t help but feel that many of my compatriots are employing a double standard here. As Cameron put it: “Of course it is always frustrating when you are not always getting through.” “I believe in the UK and I will

David Blackburn

Government in waiting?

I’m sceptical of the value of newspaper endorsements. Readers are often irritated by being told which way to jump – if you’ve read the letters page of the Times recently you’ll know what I mean. However, the weight of Fleet Street support for the Tories is significant. In addition to the usual suspects, the Sun, the Times, the Financial Times and the Economist have all defected from New Labour since 2005. Today, the Evening Standard joins them, endorsing the Conservatives in a general election for the first time since 1997. As with the endorsements in the Times, the Economist and the FT, Labour’s exhaustion, Cameron’s comparative vitality and the belief

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Nail a Cretin and Win Some Bubbly – final chance

So much epic bilge has been talked in these last four weeks that it will take me a long time to sort through the posts to find the most spastically stupid contribution. But expect a decision by nine o clock Friday morning. Obviously there have been some important entries since my last post on the subject: “What stupid bitch thought it would be a good idea to let me meet that bigoted racist old cow”, or words to that effect, from the Prime Minister, for example. But Cameron insisting that I must choose “hope – not fear” runs it pretty close. Please append your suggestions below. Meanwhile, I think my

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Niall Ferguson: Britain should call the IMF now

Should David Cameron just call the IMF immediately? Like, on Monday? This argument has been doing the rounds in Tory circles and tomorrow’s Spectator has an important contribution from Niall Ferguson. He advises that Cameron takes a two-pronged approach. Prong one is to ‘axe ruthlessly’ and prong two is to call the IMF. He says: ‘There is a very real danger that [things] could now spiral, Greek style, out of all control if foreign confidence in sterling slumps and long-term interest rates rise. Mr Cameron needs to do two things right away. He must instruct George Osborne to wield the axe ruthlessly with the aim of returning to a balanced