Society

Friday

The Spectator

Election round up

Here is what Spectator.co.uk made of the election Peter Hoskin wrote a comprehensive live-blog of the night’s events. Fraser Nelson hears rumours of coming Tory war. James Forsyth argues that the Tories were right to put the ball in Clegg’s court. Peter Hoskin records three statesmanlike performances and the odd sales pitch from Nick Clegg, Gordon Brown and David Cameron. David Blackburn urges the Tories to remain absolutely united behind Cameron’s deal for power. Martin Bright comments on a failure to manage expectations. Alex Massie says that Cameron should talk to Alex Salmond. Melanie Phillips looks into the murk. And Cappuccino Culture calls for a retirement.                       

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Tories need to put the ball in Nick Clegg’s court

The Tories have come up short and even a deal with the DUP and Sinn Fein continuing not to take their seats would not give them a majority. So, we are now into proper hung parliament territory. So far, we haven’t heard from Cameron since his speech after being re-elected as MP for Witney. But at some point soon, he’ll have to come out and speak. I hear there are multiple meetings planned for this morning as Cameron’s inner team tries to work out what to do and how to bind the rest of the party into whatever strategy they adopt. In any statement he makes, Cameron needs to stress

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Final polls provide some cheer for the Tories

All the polls tonight are in hung parliament territory. But judging from what I’m hearing tonight, it is the Tories who have been cheered by these polls. The first hurdle for Cameron to get over is having the most seats and votes. If they achieve that, then Clegg’s previous statements mean that the Tories would almost certainly get a chance to govern. These polls suggest that the Tories will make it over that hurdle.  In Tory circles, there is a feeling that when you add in that the Tories are doing better in the marginals and how much more certain Tory supporters are to vote then there are grounds to think that

Peter Hoskin

The shape of public sentiment

Silver medal in the Graph of the Day contest (we’ll have the gold medallist up on Coffee House later) goes to this effort from YouGov.  It’s just been published, with details, over at PoliticsHome, and tracks public “buzz” about the three party leaders during the course of the campaign.  I’m not sure how much to read into it, but the peaks and troughs do follow the contours of the election – so Clegg’s support rises after the first TV debate, Brown’s plummets after the Gillian Duffy incident, and Cameron pretty much flatlines it.  One striking feature is how much ground Brown has caught up since last week: the last few

David Blackburn

EU revises British economic forecasts up

Faisal Islam has the story that the EU has revised Britain’s economic prospects up to 1.2 percent in 2010 from 0.9 percent. Next year, the EU predict to 2.1 percent, the highest of major European nations. Is this a crumb of comfort for Brown? Well yes, but the EU’s predictions are still someway off Alistair Darling’s forecasts. His growth prediction for 2010 is in the region of 1 percent to 1.5 percent, which is closer than his predictions for 2011, when he expects GDP to increase by 3 percent to 3.5 percent. In any event, the upgraded figures are probably too small to shift the polls at this stage. PS:

Tuesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Polling suggests that Tories have momentum for the first time since the first debate

I’ve been passed some rather interesting polling. It’s been done for Euro RSCG, the Tories’ lead advertising agency, and is based on a sample size of 2,000 and is, what they call in the trade, momentum polling. The idea is that you ask people which party they think is gaining ground and which is losing ground and that gives you an idea of which party is likely to put on support in the coming days. This polling has been carried out before and after every debate. But I understand that the Tories have not seen it. Interestingly, it shows the Lib Dems doing well before the first debate—at that point

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

With three days to go, Brown delivers his best speech of the campaign

We have now seen the party leaders at the same event for the last time before polling day. This afternoon, Cameron, Clegg and Brown took it in turns to address the Citizens UK Assembly, a collection of urban community and faith groups. Citizen UK had a six point manifesto they wanted to test the leaders on:  Agreeing to meet with the Citizens Assembly twice over a term, a living wage for workers, a cap on interest rates at 20 percent, an ‘earned citizenship’ scheme for illegal immigrants, an end to child detention in immigration centers and community land trusts. The audience was heavily pro-Labour, Brown got a standing ovation for

The Spectator

CoffeeHousers’ Wall, 3 May – 9 May

Welcome to the latest CoffeeHousers’ Wall. For those who haven’t come across the Wall before, it’s a post we put up each Monday, on which – providing your writing isn’t libellous, crammed with swearing, or offensive to common decency – you’ll be able to say whatever you like in the comments section. There is no topic, so there’s no need to stay ‘on topic’ – which means you’ll be able to debate with each other more freely and extensively. There’s also no constraint on the length of what you write – so, in effect, you can become Coffee House bloggers. Anything’s fair game – from political stories in your local

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Talking Balls | 3 May 2010

The parties’ education spokesmen are debating on the Daily Politics shortly and so Ed Balls will be singing his favourite tune, investment versus cuts. In a classic Balls move, he is alleging that the Tories plan to make £6 billion of efficiency savings across government would lead to 14,000 teachers losing their jobs. Balls gets to this figure by assuming that £1.1 billion of these savings would come from the schools’ budget and that £860 million of this would come from staff redundancies. This is very odd as Balls himself says there are £950 million of efficiency savings that can be made in schools and presumably these savings don’t include

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Tonight’s polls are in hung parliament territory

ICM for The Guardian and YouGov for the Sun tonight both point towards a hung parliament. ICM has the Tories on 33 down three from the last ICM poll, Labour down one to 28 and the Lib Dems up one to 28 and others up four to 12. YouGov puts the Tories on 34, the Lib Dems up one to 29 and Labour on 28. Polling on a Bank holiday weekend is particularly difficult. But these two polls will put a bit of a dent in the media narrative that a Tory majority is becoming the most likely result.   It’ll be interesting to see if some of the Tory

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The next test for Nick Clegg

Whatever one thinks of his polices, Nick Clegg has played his hand very well in this campaign. Few would have expected Clegg to make as much use of the leaders’ debates as he has. But now the debates are over, Clegg has to find another way of making an impact if his party is to hold onto second place. In the final days of the campaign, there’s going to be a tendency among the media to concentrate on the outgoing PM and the prospective PM. This is going to be heightened by a sense that the Tories might, in the end, get a majority. To an extent, Clegg is protected

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The morning after the election before

Before the final leaders’ debate, the studio audience was kept entertained by the screening of an episode of Yes Minister. It was an appropriate choice given that an indecisive result will give the mandarins huge power as they advise the parties on how to make a deal and the palace on who to invite to form a government once Brown has failed to do so. If David Cameron does not win an overall majority, I expect he’ll move straight onto the attack: demanding that Gordon Brown recognises he has no mandate to govern and that Nick Clegg rules out any deal with Labour. As I write in the Mail on

Saturday

Melissa Kite

Fessing up

I have done something so utterly heinous that I cannot keep it to myself. Even though writing it down is going to get me into all sorts of trouble, for the sake of my sanity I have to confess. It’s something I’ve been doing for years but only just realised. I must have been in denial, because it is just so shameful. It was a terrible shock when I finally rumbled myself. I was sitting at the kitchen table ploughing through the latest election leaflets pushed through my door, searching in vain for a grain of policy that might apply to an insignificant little single girl like me — nothing,

Jeremy Clarke

Dismal scenario

Here is a middle-aged man lying in bed in his black and green striped pyjamas. The bed is a single bed and he is reading a book. On the bedside cupboard is a 1970s Grundig Elite Boy portable radio tuned to The World Tonight. Next to that is a photograph of his 17-year-old son in a cheap frame. His son is looking annoyed with the person holding the camera. Slippers, much stained, rest east–west in parallel alignment beside the bed. On the wall above the man’s head is a framed colonial map of the Nyasaland Protectorate. On the floor, but within easy reach, a pile of books nearly two-feet high.

Taki

Nature trail

New York It’s up early every day, before 8 a.m., and a brisk walk through the park before breakfast on the way to judo practice. A pale green washes the fields, daffodils pushing through the crusty earth. The joggers are out in force, young Jewish princesses struggling while getting in shape for serious Bloomingdale’s shopping in the afternoon. The US Nationals are this weekend and I’ve been behaving myself. I now get hammered only twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. The walk through Central Park is the calm before the storm, the respite before the hell I know I will have to go though on arrival. And that’s when

Robin Oakley

Twelve for the Flat

During elections, said H.L. Mencken, all the parties rush around the country insisting that the others are unfit to govern — and in the end they are all proved right. I don’t bet on politics because as a part-time political commentator I don’t want to be accused of letting wagers colour my judgment, but I did advise my friends last autumn to back a hung Parliament when you could still get 4–1 against. The Twelve to Follow over the jumps I named then have not stood the test of time quite so well. Two never made it to the track, but five managed to win and we had half a

Henrietta Bredin

The great communicator

Conductor Marin Alsop talks to Henrietta Bredin about sharing a concert platform with Bernstein Last September there was a Mass Rally at the Southbank Centre in London. For an entire day the concert halls and foyers overflowed with shoals of people — children lugging instruments, parents rushing after them, singers clutching scores — all gathered to help launch the Bernstein Project, a year-long celebration of the extraordinary genius of Leonard Bernstein. Beginning with fanfares from Bernstein’s Mass, it will culminate in July with a complete performance of that work, involving community choirs, a marching band and a rock group, alongside dancers and professional soloists. This joyful eruption of an event

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 1 May 2010

Q. Further to your correspondence with ‘name withheld’ of Yokohama, I have a recurring problem with my beautiful Japanese wife of many years and I was wondering if you could help. Here in Australia, when meeting people for the first time, they often ask, ‘Where did you meet your wife?’ I then usually explain that we met here in Australia. But if they do not ask, therein lies the problem because I know they may be silently coming to the wrong conclusion. It is common here for desperate, lonely farmers to purchase ‘mail order’ brides from the Philippines and other poor countries. My worry is that I don’t want people

Toby Young Toby Young

On the eve of the election, the future of our proposed school hangs in the balance

As the leader of a group of parents trying to set up Britain’s first free school, I’ve been spending the past week or so frantically mugging up on the Liberal Democrats’ education policy. In the event of a hung parliament, would the Lib Dems support the Conservatives’ educational reforms? On the face of it, the answer’s no. One of the ways in which the Tories are proposing to make life easier for groups like mine is to take away the veto that local authorities have over the creation of new academies. My local council is Conservative-controlled and will probably remain so after 6 May, but as we saw from the

The Spectator

Letters | 1 May 2010

Making it work Sir: Your leading article (24 April) tells us that: ‘A hung parliament would be a disaster. Coalitions do not work in Westminster’s adversarial system.’ Can’t you see that the adversarial system, with its focus on doing down the opposition rather than on working collegially to decide what might be best for the nation, is exactly what we are sick of? If our voting preferences result in a coalition then we’ll expect our elected representatives to damn well make it work. If they let it become a disaster we may choose not to vote for any of them ever again. Derek Rowntree Banbury Dividing lines Sir: James Forsyth’s