All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
One of Britain’s great traditions is the open garden afternoon: an opportunity for folk revelling in being both middle-aged and nosy (like me) to wander around other people’s plots and peer at what they’ve planted while scoffing large slices of cake. The National Gardens Scheme and Open Squares are two of the most popular, and
The Guardian/Observer website is running with this story headed ‘Britain set to face weeks of political paralysis after election poll’. That’s a safe prediction. But what’s intriguing is that the article – by Daniel Boffey, Toby Helm and Ashley Cowburn – is entirely devoted to the prospect of an extremely shaky Conservative-Lib Dem coalition, harassed or indeed
So, here we are. In 100 hours time, we’ll be half-way through election-day. But at the moment, the polls still remain deadlocked. Yet, there remains a sense that there’ll be some kind of late shift towards the Tories. Is there any grounds for this? Well, I argue in the Mail on Sunday that there are
Ed Miliband has woken up to ridicule this morning after the Guardian unveiled his latest election accessory. No longer content with his trusty lectern, the Labour leader has bizarrely commissioned an 8ft 6in stone inscription which bears Labour’s key election promises. Miliband plans to install this in the Downing Street Rose Garden if he
Ukip has four key target seats in Essex and Kent it hopes to win on Thursday. In order of likelihood of victory, Clacton, Rochester & Strood, South Thanet and Thurrock are the constituencies to watch on election night. I visited three of these seats yesterday, to find out how each of the candidates are feeling about the
From ‘Rupert Brooke’, The Spectator, 1 May 1915: TO all men there is attractiveness in the combination of the soldier and the poet, and perhaps the combination gives a more satisfying pleasure to the countrymen of Sir Philip Sidney than to any other race. This is the reason why thousands of Englishmen mourn for Rupert
Nicky Morgan’s record as Education Secretary is coming under fierce attack in the Loughborough market place where she’s campaigning. A furious man is telling activists that he will never vote for the Tory candidate because of ‘what she’s done’. The campaigners brace themselves for a diatribe about Tory education policies. Instead, it turns out that
This morning the Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to a baby girl. The girl, who is the Queen’s fifth great-grandchild, is the fourth in line to the throne. As members of the public began to celebrate, the political leaders were quick to put out their own carefully worded messages of congratulations. With the election less than a week
The respected Catholic News Agency has published an interview with Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former general in Romania’s secret police who was one of the Eastern Bloc’s highest-ranking defectors in the 1970s. In it, he says that Soviet Union – and the KGB in particular – created liberation theology, the quasi-Marxist movement that flourished in Latin America from
The Duchess of Cambridge has given birth to a baby girl. It is hardly a very exciting event. Babies are born all the time, and there are already quite enough descendants of the Queen to ensure the survival of the Windsor dynasty on the throne of the United Kingdom for a long time to come. Yet
Ed Milband used his interview with Russell Brand as a chance to bash his arch-enemy Rupert Murdoch. The Labour leader claimed that the media mogul is ‘much less powerful than he used to be’. The disrespect is mutual: Murdoch has taken to Twitter to mock Miliband for queuing up to shake his hand at his annual
The title of a poem by Anthony Brode, ‘Breakfast with Gerard Manley Hopkins’, prompted me to invite verse submissions describing a meal with a well-known poet. Sylvia Fairley tucked, somewhat reluctantly, into albatross with Coleridge, D.A. Prince shared cocoa with Wendy Cope and Rob Stuart enjoyed a curry with Dante. Honourable mentions go to John
From ‘The Khalifate’, The Spectator, 1 May 1915: It seems that the Ottoman Empire is likely to crumble away, and in that event, whether it happens soon or late, the question of the Khalifate will cause many searchings of heart to the Mohammedan world. In an intimate and most important sense Britain is concerned in
Lord Ashcroft has released his final marginal polls before the election, looking at ten marginal seats in England and Scotland. The Tories are set to hold onto four key marginals: Battersea, Croydon Central, Pudsey and Stourbridge. In Croydon Central, Ashcroft has found significant movement towards the Tories: last October, there was a six point Labour
In today’s election podcast special, Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I discuss the most significant moments during the campaign this week. Did Ed Miliband’s interview with Russell Brand make any impact? Which moments of the Question Time special will be remembered? And what might happen one week today if the Conservatives are unable to form a government? You
Tony Blair once counted Noel Gallagher as one of New Labour’s key celebrity backers. However, under Ed Miliband’s leadership, Labour can rely on no such support from the musician. In an interview on Alan Carr’s Chatty Man, which airs tonight, the former Oasis member said he was unable to endorse any politician out of the current line-up: ‘I’m not
Oh dear. Ed Miliband did not have a good run on Question Time last night. After he was grilled by the audience over Labour’s history with debt, even the most die-hard Milifan would have struggled to find any sex appeal in his trip as he hurried off the stage. However, Miliband fans are made of tough stuff and haven’t yet abandoned their leader
Michael Gove was out and about with fifty odd Tory activists dressed as Nicola Sturgeon in Westminster today, when he made an extraordinarily bold prediction about next week’s election results. The top Tory claimed that his party would end up with more seats in Scotland than the Labour Party. He also suggested that Sturgeon was more
Ukip is becoming a two-faced party. One side is made up of credible political challengers, while the other side comprises LibLabCon conspiracy theorists. Since the last election, the party has made progress by promoting this serious side, while sidelining the fruitcakes. But over the last few days, the more loony side of the party has reappeared, thanks to
Tory MPs will plot their party’s response to the election result and any likely coalition partnerships in a meeting next Friday, 8 May at 4pm, Coffee House has learned. The powerful executive of the 1922 Committee will meet that afternoon in order to prepare their demands for the Prime Minister and discuss any initial outlines
Given that David Cameron will not see out another election campaign if he sticks to his bizarre pledge not to run for a third term, Cameron is nearing the end of his prime ministerial career regardless of the outcome of this election. Still, Mr S suspects that he did not mean to call the election a
At a recent screening of his new capitalism documentary the Emperor’s New Clothes, Russell Brand, the revolutionary who refuses to vote, said he was too angry to say nice things about today’s politicians: ‘When I watch it [the Emperor’s New Clothes], I sort of think come on Russell people really want to hear you say something
By this time next week, the election will all be over and it will be a question of seats, leaderships and coalitions. With six days of campaigning left, today will be dominated by the fallout from last night’s Question Time special. David Cameron put in a good turn, Ed Miliband did not and Nick Clegg
From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 1 May 1915: The accounts from the Dardanelles are distinctly encouraging. On Tuesday the British portion of the Expeditionary Force landed on the point of the Gallipoli Peninsula—i.e., on the European side—while the French landed an the Asian side, and have fought a battle on the plain of
Ed Miliband’s worst moment in the Question Time debate came when he refused to accept that Labour had spent too much before the crash. The audience reacted with fury: how could he be trusted if he has yet to work out what he did wrong? This is toxic for him because his denial is completely
According to the snap poll, David Cameron has won the final TV ‘debate’ of the short campaign. In this View from 22 podcast special, Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and I discussed the Question Time special this evening and how each of the party leaders performed. Was the audience more receptive to Ed Miliband or Cameron? Were there
Tonight’s Question Time special with Cameron, Miliband and Clegg provided the best television of this campaign so far. A well-informed audience relentlessly pressed the three leaders on their weakest points. At the end of the evening, an ICM poll for the Guardian gave the evening to Cameron by 44 per cent to Miliband’s 38 per
Welcome to the Spectator’s live coverage of the special edition of Question Time with David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg. We’ll be providing live analysis of the final TV programme with each of the party leaders from 8pm. This page will automatically reload.
As election day nears, the number of polls appearing is rapidly increasing. But it still remains very tight and the movements are generally within the margin of error. But there is one trend emerging from the handful of polls released in the last few days: the Tories are stable on 35 per cent and ahead of
I’m mildly posh – nowhere near David Cameron posh, for example, let alone the Olympian heights of Brian Sewell, but I’m unlikely to ever play a football hooligan or an East End gangster in a Guy Ritchie film. And I’m better spoken than I was as a teenager, when I used to affect a slight Mockney
The Liberal Democrat resilience in countless marginal seats has confounded many commentators. While perhaps winning half the number of votes as Ukip nationwide, it is far from inconceivable that they will win five to ten times the number of seats. Take Sutton & Cheam, for instance, where despite having a majority of just 1,608 votes, Paul Berstow
Tonight’s ‘Question Time’-style TV debates will be followed by what has become probably the most hated aspect of this rather uninspiring general election campaign: the spin room. This spectacle of journalists interviewing journalists as they listen to frontbenchers from all the parties parroting lines about how their leader was the best (or, in the Tory
Ed Miliband wants the youth vote enough to have spent an evening with Russell Brand earlier this week. My generation could decide the election next Thursday, and politicians seem to think there are two ways to win young voters’ hearts: celebrity endorsement and self-interest. The battle for the youth vote has hinged around promising to
Tonight’s Question Time is, probably, the most important TV event of the campaign. The fact that it is on BBC1 in prime time means that it is likely to attract a bigger audience than the previous debates. That it is on the BBC also means that any newsworthy moments will be pumped out across the