Politics

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

Thursday

7 May 2015

Revealed: the party with the most negative election campaign

Which party is the most negative in this election campaign? All of them have spent a great deal of time being negative about their opponents’ apparent negativity, claiming that only their own party is running a positive campaign about the future for this country, and so on. But it’s easy to make grand claims, and even easier not to measure up to them at all. To give us an answer, academics at British Election Leaflet Project at the University of Nottingham have analysed leaflets from the parties in this campaign. They looked at 1,300 pieces of election literature from nearly 300 constituencies. All the leaflets were uploaded on electionleaflets.org. Their

Sebastian Payne

Election night: the ten ‘Portillo moments’ to watch out for

Election night is going to be a long affair but some excitement will ensue if any prominent politicians lose their seats — unexpectedly or otherwise. There is likely to be at least one ‘Portillo moment‘ — akin to the the 1997 election night when then-Tory MP Michael Portillo lost his seat and signalled that the Tories were on course to be out of power for 13 years. In chronological order, here are the big name politicians to watch out for tomorrow morning: 1. Douglas Alexander in Paisley and Renfrewshire South Expected declaration time: 3:00am Region: Scotland Majority: 16,614 MP in 2010: Douglas Alexander – Labour 2010 result: Lab 60%, SNP 18%, Con 10%, Lib Dem 10%

Sebastian Payne

The moment of Ruth

Unusually for a modern Conservative leader, Ruth Davidson seems to enjoy meeting voters. When I joined her on the campaign trail, she had been posing with a giant eagle in Kirkcaldy. Then she jumped on to a Harley Davidson in Stirling. Such props, she says, are a ‘springboard’ to talk about Scottish Conservatism — which, thanks to her, is no longer an oxymoron. Davidson’s sparkling performances in the various debates stood in welcome contrast to David Cameron’s. Not once has she mentioned the ‘long-term economic plan’, or the other clichés issued from Conservative HQ. Her message is simple: thanks to a Conservative-led government, she says, Britain now has less pensioner

Hugo Rifkind

Scotland’s nasty party

You get bad losers in politics and bad winners, too, but it’s surely a rare business to get a bad winner who didn’t actually win. Yet this, since they lost last September’s referendum, has been the role of the SNP. Dismay, reassessment, introspection, contrition, resignation; all of these have been wholly absent. Instead, they have been triumphalist. Lording it, with cruel and haughty disdain, over their vanquished foes. Who, we must remember, they didn’t even vanquish. Well, maybe they’ve vanquished them now. I write this pre-election, with the polls all saying that the Nats will win something between almost every Scottish seat and actually every Scottish seat. Only, of course,

Paul Wood

Washington Notebook | 7 May 2015

This week has been all about the election, the US presidential election that is. It is 18 months away but already the race is sending out sparks and popping like a newly lit fire. On the one hand, there’s Hillary. She takes a trip by van across ‘the real America’ — a near-faultless launch of her campaign, everyone agrees, until she eats a meal in a fast food restaurant and forgets to tip. Then there’s the Republican field, heading for a dozen strong, but perhaps ending up whittled down to just Jeb Bush. This state of affairs caused one frustrated challenger to complain: ‘The presidency of the United States is

Robert Philpot

Children of Gomorrah

In the early hours of 25 July 1943, nearly 800 RAF Halifaxes and Lancasters launched a 50-minute bombing raid on the Third Reich’s second largest city, Hamburg. The pilots used the neo-Gothic spire of St Nikolai’s church in the city’s historic heart as a landmark and killed 1,500 people. Three nights later, just after midnight, the bombers returned. What was to follow was immeasurably worse. The RAF’s target was the city’s overcrowded working-class districts, Hammerbrook, Hamm and Borgfelde, to which many of those who had lost their homes in the previous bombardment had fled. Unusually warm weather and heavy loads of incendiaries combined to create a hurricane-like firestorm. In the

Rod Liddle

Miliband’s tablet of stone may cost him my vote

You have the advantage over me. You know the result of the general election, whereas I do not — a consequence of the moronically linear progression of time. Indeed, you may already have fled to one of those countries with a much lower tax rate and less fantastically irritating politicians — Algeria, for example, or Benin. Or Chad. And you are reading this digitally on some patched-in fibre-optic service, the electricity generated by goats trotting forlornly around a gigantic hamster wheel outside — but you are nonetheless delighted with your new life, despite the flies and the occasional gang of marauding, maniacal jihadis. At least you’re not here to experience Britain

Wednesday

6 May 2015

Isabel Hardman

Nervous Tory candidates say race too tight to call

Tonight’s a nervous night if you’re an candidate for re-election in a marginal seat (or in Scotland). You might have an impressive get-out-the-vote operation, or you might have spent the past five years wheeling and dealing in Westminster on behalf of your constituents so that you have a strong personal brand, but it might be that voters just aren’t that into your party. Or, in spite of your best efforts, you. A good number of the Tory candidates in marginals who I spoke to today feel as though the race is too tight for them to have any idea whether they will be back in Westminster next week. The same

Steerpike

David Cameron visits a zoo with no animals

The feral travelling Tory press pack were suited and booted this morning in the pouring Cheshire rain and led up a muddy path to a giant rock. No, David Cameron was not going to unveil his answer to a Miliband’s carved pledge stone, in fact he wasn’t going to say anything at all. You can imagine the spin doctor’s train out thought for the last day of full campaigning in the longest, most tiresome election in modern memory. Let’s got to the zoo! Let’s go to tigers enclosure! Tigers are brave, PMs need courage and so on. Or perhaps they wanted to win Piers Morgan’s vote; he has revealed today

Fraser Nelson

Nick Clegg got coalition wrong. Tomorrow, he’ll pay the price

It’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for Nick Clegg. He’s a decent man who took a tough decision to put his party into coalition with the Conservatives, and lost half of his support as a result. Tomorrow, his party will be hammered. His great miscalculation was imagining that in England the Lib Dems would emerge with a list of achievements voters would applaud – as they did in the 2003 Holyrood elections when, after four years of coalition, the Lib Dems overtook the Scottish Conservatives to become the third-largest party. On the radio the other day Clegg vainly paraded his boast list, his own version of Kelly Clarkson’s Because

Steerpike

Miliband’s adviser Stewart Wood says he is ‘loving’ #JeSuisEd

A little Twitter fad had emerged this afternoon where fans of Miliband tweet pictures of themselves eating sloppily along with the hashtag #JeSuisEd. It came about after the Sun went to town this morning on the Labour leader, reheating his famous bacon sandwich antics. While Labour can hardly stop their supporters from hijacking the #JeSuisCharlie meme that was set up in honour of the journalists massacred in Paris earlier this year, surely Miliband’s chief aide Lord Wood, a bright Oxford tutor, should know better than to use it for a quick laugh online? The compassionate left out in force again.

Sebastian Payne

How did David Cameron spend his final day campaigning?

David Cameron’s 72-hour tour of Britain has finished up in the north west this afternoon. I have followed the Prime Minister to two campaign ‘events’ this afternoon — both purely for photo opportunities and neither involved meeting any ordinary voters. By this point in the campaign, knocking on doors is probably not the most effective use of time, so the best Cameron can hope for is to look enthused and feature in some colourful snaps. His first major event of the day was at a building site at Chester Zoo, in the heart of the Northern Powerhouse. A new tiger pen is being constructed, an ideal opportunity for the Prime Minister to

Hugo Rifkind

If the SNP doesn’t hate the English, why do so many of its supporters behave as if they do?

Ross Clark

I have worked out the only possible way to build a viable government (but it’s not pretty)

For the past few days the BBC website has had an interactive game where you have to build your own coalition, using a series of possible results from tomorrow’s election. It ought to be marketed as an educational test, far more challenging even than Michael Gove’s rigorous school tests. But finally, I think I have done it. I have worked out the only possible way to build a viable government using the composition of the House of Commons which the polls appear to be predicting. Take Nate Silver’s analysis of the polls this morning, which predicts the following: Tories 281 seats, Labour 266, SNP 52, LibDem 26, DUP 8, Sinn

Isabel Hardman

The new Lib Dem party strategy: drown voters in leaflets

If you want an idea of how exhausting this election has been for some voters in marginals, just watch this video of a Green supporter in Bristol West: I profiled the seat, where the Lib Dems are trying to hold off a ‘Green surge’ among middle-class voters, here and I was rather impressed with quite how many leaflets Stephen Williams had managed to produce even before the short campaign got underway. It will be a tough seat for the Lib Dems to hold, even if the Greens don’t win, as Labour appears to be in front currently. But perhaps Williams is trying a new ‘get out the vote’ strategy, in which

Isabel Hardman

Last ditch attempts to win votes are pointless without months of legwork

All three party leaders are in the middle of their last-minute campaigning efforts, travelling across the country with little sleep. But what are they actually doing during these last few hours before polls open? David Cameron underlined that this isn’t just about meeting voters but about the photo opportunities by deciding to have a cosy chat with members of the farming community in Brecon… at 6 o’clock in the morning. The press were held back by this rather pointless pen (which later fell over) while the Prime Minister held his morning chat. To be fair, farmers do get up very early, though more to deal with their animals than for

Alex Massie

Why I am voting Labour

This is a bastard election full of bastard choices. In such circumstances some triage is required. Once everything that is impossible has been eliminated what remains must, for tomorrow at least, be the truth. Which is why, as I wrote in today’s Times, I shall be voting Labour. For the first time. Ever. It is not a vote cast lightly or with much confidence. But though my constituency, Edinburgh North and Leith, has an admirable Tory candidate the sorry truth is that he cannot win tomorrow. This being the case, it is not illogical to vote for the least bad candidate who might have a chance of prevailing. In this instance,

James Forsyth

Tory backbenchers increasingly reconciled to another coalition

Speaking to various senior Conservative backbenchers in the past 24 hours, I’ve been struck by how much support there is for the formation of another coalition. There is a recognition that if the Tories have around 290 seats on Friday morning—which is at the optimistic end of the election projections, it is simply not realistic for them to try and run any kind of minority government. The view among those I have spoken to is that Cameron should be given a decent amount of flexibility to negotiate a deal with the Liberal Democrats as that is the most likely way for the Tories to be able to begin to put

Robert Smith

Newspaper readers decide elections, not editors

How much influence will newspapers have in this election? Less than ever before in print, if circulation figures (above) are anything to go by. Yet paranoia remains. On certain days, newspapers do get excited and act like they’re trying to win the election. Today’s Sun digs up that infamous picture of Ed Miliband and urges readers to ‘Save our bacon‘, the Telegraph pictures Nicola Sturgeon with the headline ‘Nightmare on Downing Street‘, while the Mirror leads with ‘Major fail‘ on comments by the former Prime Minister on inequality. Meanwhile, the Times and Mail have followed the Independent and Evening Standard in putting their weight behind a Cameron-led government. The truth, of course,

Isabel Hardman

David Cameron defends ‘con trick’ line about Ed Miliband’s plans

Is David Cameron talking up the SNP as a naughty campaign tactic to hurt Labour? This morning the Prime Minister denied that charge in his Today programme interview, saying: ‘I don’t accept that; I’m fighting the nationalists in Scotland. Indeed, I’ll be there later today standing up for Conservative candidates who want a strong United Kingdom and also want our economy to continue to grow and continue to create jobs and all the other things the United Kingdom can do together. ‘But if you want to know, what would I do as prime minister on Friday to make sure our United Kingdom stays together, I would say let’s complete the

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