Politics

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

Tuesday

5 May 2015

Steerpike

Another joker comes out for Labour

Eddie Izzard, Martin Freeman, Steve Coogan and Russell Brand. What is it with professional funny-men backing Labour? It’s a little odd that when Miliband is trying to show the world what a serious, potential statesman he can be, he puts jokers in Labour’s election broadcasts. Robert Webb, of Mitchell and Webb fame, is the latest to come out for Ed: ‘I don’t need the Labour Party to have the kind of leader you’d want to put on a T-shirt and God knows they continue to oblige me. Ed Miliband’s favourite track is probably “Persuading in the Name Of” by Reform Against the Machine. It’s not my rage he needs, it’s my vote.

Steerpike

Bow Group chairman Ben Harris-Quinney faces a patrons’ revolt

The Bow Group’s chairman Ben Harris-Quinney is not having a good day. Last night Bow Group patrons Michael Heseltine, Michael Howard, Norman Lamont and Nirj Deva MEP released a strongly-worded statement distancing themselves from the think-tank’s Ukip endorsement under Harris-Quinney’s leadership. Now all of the Bow Group patrons, including Sir Gerald Howarth, Adam Afriyie and David Davis, have signed the statement: ‘As Patrons of the Bow Group we believe that this country’s best interests are served by voting Conservative in all situations. Ben Harris-Quinney does not speak for us or represent our views.’ Harris-Quinney’s troubles don’t stop there. He has just been grilled by Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics, where group patron Michael Heseltine also voiced his

Steerpike

Lucy Powell says promises on Labour’s 8ft ‘Edstone’ may be broken

Oh dear. Lucy Powell has managed to mess up yet another media appearance. Appearing on Radio 5 Live, Powell attempted to justify Ed Miliband’s decision to commission an 8ft 6in stone with Labour’s election promises inscribed. When the presenter suggested that a stone wouldn’t make voters believe in a politician’s promises, Powell came out with a rather off-message reply: ‘I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the fact that he’s carved them in stone means he’s absolutely not going to break them or anything like that’ listen to ‘Lucy Powell says promises on Labour’s stone may be broken’ on audioBoom

Steerpike

Cameron wins 81 seat majority in the (junior) General Election

At last, David Cameron has won an election. First News, a weekly newspaper for school children, organised a national Junior General Election and surprisingly the PM has romped home with 40 per cent of the vote. The Greens beat both Clegg and Farage, and Miliband managed just 22 per cent of the vote. Running these numbers through the BBC’s election seat calculator, it would give Cameron 407 seats and a majority of 81. Here are the results in full: David Cameron, Conservative: 40 per cent Ed Miliband, Labour: 22 per cent Natalie Bennett, Green: 18 per cent Nick Clegg, Lib Dem: 9 per cent Nigel Farage, UKIP: 6 per cent Nicola Sturgeon, SNP: 4

Daniel Jackson

Scotland is on the verge of becoming a one-party state

My constituency is one of the SNP’s most coveted prizes. If they win in Midlothian they can win almost anywhere. This is Gladstone’s old seat, where the modern political campaign was born. He wrested it away from the Conservatives in 1880, after a series of stirring speeches on the government’s foreign policy failures. On Thursday the SNP are hoping to pull off a similar upset. The momentum behind the nationalists is incredible. Everything I’ve seen and heard in the last couple of weeks points to an SNP victory here. My entire family is voting for them. My mother suggested that I should do the same. ‘Give your dead grandfather a

Sebastian Payne

Campaign kick-off: 48 hours to go

Polling day is nigh upon us and the campaigns are going into overdrive today as the party leaders jump on buses, trains and planes to zoom around as many marginal seats as possible. Nick Clegg is taking the Liberal Democrat battle bus 1,000 miles from Land’s End to John O’Groats. Ed Miliband is continuing to campaign on the NHS while David Cameron is visiting marginals in the London and West Country. To help guide you through the melée of stories and spin, here is a summary of today’s main election stories. 1. Clegg rebounds Will Nick Clegg hang onto his Sheffield Hallam seat? Whether the Liberal Democrat leader survives or

Mark Gettleson

Predicting the unpredictable: 12 things to expect on election night

In the ‘most unpredictable election in a generation’, it’s a fool’s errand to make specific calls. However, it is possible to outline what the political landscape might look like on Friday morning. Throughout election night, there will be an obsession with whether the Conservatives or Labour end up as the largest party, far beyond its actual importance to forming the next government. If we’re at that stage of the discussion, it is Ed Miliband who will eventually end up in Downing Street, even if a minority Conservative administration has to be be formed and fall first. Labour will take dozens of seats in England, including almost all their targets from the

Monday

4 May 2015

Sebastian Payne

New Sheffield Hallam poll raises questions about Lord Ashcroft’s methodology

If Nick Clegg loses in Sheffield Hallam, it would be the Portillo moment of the 2015 election. After several tight polls, a new survey from ICM this evening suggests that the Lib Dem leader might be safe after all. When the names of candidates are prompted, ICM puts Clegg on 42 per cent — seven points ahead of the Labour candidate Oliver Coppard on 35 per cent. Without promoting by candidate name, ICM has Labour taking the seat, narrowly ahead by two points on 34 per cent. This is a rather different outlook to the one painted by Lord Ashcroft, who reported in his most recent marginal poll that Labour was on 37 per cent and the

Sebastian Payne

Election podcast special: three days to go

In today’s election special podcast, James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I discuss whether Nick Clegg will lose his seat in Sheffield, the current state of the seat predictions and the pros and cons of Russell Brand’s endorsement for Ed Miliband. Plus, we look at the latest pronouncements on coalitions and what is set to happen in the final 48 hours of the campaign. You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer or iPhone every week, or you can use the player below:

Steerpike

The Bow Group stand divided over Ukip

Given that the Bow Group are the oldest Conservative think tank and count Michael Howard, Norman Lamont and Peter Lilley among their former chairmen, it’s safe to presume that the Tories would have thought that they could rely on their endorsement for the election. However, the Telegraph reported earlier today that the think tank, led by its colourful chairman Ben Harris-Quinney, have urged Conservatives to vote for Ukip in seats where the Tories can’t win. In fact Harris-Quinney appeared to go one step further by urging voters to opt for Ukip’s Mark Reckless in Rochester and Stroud. This is bizarre given that the Tories are hoping to win this seat back in the election. Stranger still,

Isabel Hardman

Can David Cameron square the 1922 Committee on another coalition?

As well as trying to prepare voters for what may happen after 8 May, David Cameron needs to make sure he has his party on board for the ride after the election, too. The 1922 Committee will need to approve a second coalition, but the hope in the Cameron camp is that this will be made easier by making the approval a show of hands from Tory MPs, rather than the secret ballot 1922 Committee chair Graham Brady wants. Two interesting points that loyalists advance is that the Lib Dems approved the 2010 Coalition with a show of hands and that many prominent 1922 Committee Executive members were against the

Steerpike

Coffee Shots: SNP voter trolls the Secretary of State for Scotland

Although one recent poll suggested that the SNP will win every seat in Scotland, there are still a few Liberal Democrat MPs who hope to retain their seats come Thursday. However, although Alistair Carmichael, the Secretary of State for Scotland and Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland, winning his seat in 2010 by a majority of nearly 10,000 votes, he ought to be more alert to the dangers of the SNP. On a recent train journey, one SNP voter took a photo of herself posing with her ballot paper while Carmichael dozed off in the background: Mr S suspects that Carmichael won’t be getting much sleep now until polling day.

Isabel Hardman

Which arguments about government legitimacy are legitimate?

Well, Labour has started on its own mission of framing the post-election legitimacy debate. Responding to the Tory operation to prepare the public for what might happen from 8 May onwards, Ed Miliband’s party is now claiming that David Cameron is determined to stay in Downing Street even if his coalition loses its majority. A senior Labour official has told the Guardian: ‘All the noise coming out of the mouths of David Cameron and Nick Clegg is about how they can cling on to power even if their coalition loses its majority.’ Labour needs to set up a narrative of a desperate David Cameron holed up in Downing Street, refusing

Sean Kemp

A beginner’s guide to pulling off a political stunt

It’s an important discipline when watching elections to remind yourself that political parties are staffed by smart, hardworking people and not – despite occasional impressions to the contrary – complete buffoons. One of those moments came on Sunday, as Ed Miliband stood next to a gaggle of glum-looking supporters in a Hastings car park and unveiled a huge limestone slab with his six election pledges carved onto it. You can always tell when a political stunt has gone wrong; it’s the moment when party spokespeople tell you that ‘at least it has cut through’ or ‘well, it got people talking about it’. The problem is that you don’t want people

Steerpike

It’s a Tory! Girls called ‘Charlotte’ are the most likely to vote Conservative

Ed Miliband may have Russell Brand’s endorsement today, but David Cameron has got the royal baby’s. Okay, she’s a little young to vote – but we can read the signs. YouGov research drew a list of 130 names and voting habits and the conclusion? Girls called Charlotte are most likely to vote Tory: There were all sorts of conspiracy theories circulating online when the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were dressed in yellow and blue on Saturday when they introduced their new child to the world’s media. Mr S is sure the coalition colour scheme was purely coincidental, but this? Perhaps a bit more subtle than simply naming her Princess Tori… And mothers who

Ed West

Three reasons why Labour might not actually want to govern

There’s an episode of The New Statesman in which geologists discover that there’s no more oil in the North Sea and the British economy is about to crash; as a result all the parties try their best to lose the election so as not to carry the can for the next five years. Alan B’Stard, put in charge of the Tory campaign because they think him a liability, appears in the election video with Page 3 girls offering free bingo to the voters. Unfortunately, this proves a huge hit with the electorate. A conspiracy theorist might think this is actually happening today, judging by the inertia of the major parties.

James Forsyth

Comedian Brand u-turns and urges people to vote

There’ll be satisfaction in the Labour leader’s office today as Russell Brand has done a reverse-ferret and urged his voters to vote and vote Labour. Or, to be more precise, to vote Labour in England—with the exception of Brighton where he wants them to vote Green. He seems to be implicitly urging a vote for the SNP in Scotland. To win Brand over, Miliband channelled his former US grassroots adviser Arnie Graf and talked about community politics and how the idea of a living wage came not from a policy seminar but activists in the US talking to low-paid workers. But Brand’s endorsement is of limited value given that it

Fraser Nelson

Ed Miliband still isn’t being honest about debt. And yes, that matters

The Guardian’s superb live blog was even better than usual this morning when it covered Twitter’s reaction to the Ed Miliband interview: eight tweets, of which five came from Spectator staff. That’s what I call balance: opinion from the full spectrum of opinion in 22 Old Queen St. We were challenging Miliband’s claim when he said the debt was “lower than what we inherited” – it was about £200bn higher. I can’t imagine these tweets went down too well with Guardian readers, because an update emerged later saying that the debt/GDP ratio fell. So was Ed speaking the truth after all? I’m rather keen on this topic. We journalists do the public a great disservice if we

Isabel Hardman

Parties turn attention to crafting post-election narrative

Ed Miliband spent a lot of his Today programme interview refusing to answer questions about how a minority Labour government would work because he is focusing both on the ‘big issues’ and on ‘winning a majority’. Both are good things to focus on when the polling stations haven’t yet opened, though of course how a government would pass laws is generally a big issue too. But what’s interesting is that behind the scenes some Labour figures do still sincerely think they could win a majority. One senior Labour MP told me in the past few days to remember that in 1992 the polls didn’t move until the very last minute

Fraser Nelson

A Labour-SNP alliance will be a political remake of Stephen King’s ‘Misery’

On the radio this morning, Ed Miliband spoke as if he could get a Queen’s Speech passed without speaking to the SNP. This struck some as implausible, but it sounds right to me. Here’s the transcript:- Q: Well let’s just be absolutely clear… neither you nor any of your colleagues will have any conversations with anybody from the SNP at any point after the election. A: We’re not going to negotiate about a Queen’s Speech, no. We’re not going to negotiate with the Scottish National…(Interrupted) Q: Well you’re refining my question a little bit aren’t you. A: I don’t think I am John. You’re asking me whether we’re going to negotiate about