All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
It is rather fashionable at the moment for those involved in politics to moan about what a boring election campaign this is shaping up to be, and how the only excitement will be once polls close and the results start rolling in. But interestingly fewer voters than you might think agree with this view. YouGov
Could this photo beat Nick Clegg’s hedgehog photo call to be the strangest animal election campaign snap? Here Yvette Cooper and Labour’s candidate for Rossendale and Darwen Will Straw are posing on a pavement with a slightly flattened-looking dog under their hands. Handily, in the background, a girl carries a spare dog past, just in
One of the first tasks of a party in our time of fragmented politics is to stop their opponents making alliances. As things stand, the Tories can form a coalition with Ukip (and it tells you all you need to know about David Cameron that he would even consider such a possibility) the Democratic Unionists
Labour have continued their bizarre war on the media with aplomb. As Mr S has reported in the past, pesky journalists that have the audacity to ask awkward questions are given the full hairdryer treatment from the audience at Labour’s set piece events. Today’s speech by Tony Blair was no different: This Tony Blair event
This is supposed to be the week when people start thinking about the General Election. George Osborne certainly thinks voters are only just switching on as he used his press conference this morning to reiterate a number of claims about Labour’s economic policies that the Tories made last week, including one that the Institute for
From ‘A Possible Compromise’, The Spectator, 10 April 1915: If the Government have not the courage to adopt total prohibition, then we reluctantly suggest the following plan. Let the Cabinet adopt the policy of the suspension of the sale of all intoxicants for three months—say from April 20th till July 20th. Such suspension would cover
A GP called Malcolm Kendrick has written a book about politically correct manipulation of medical data – and has cropped up in the Independent highlighting the medical profession’s unwillingness to share research suggesting that being a bit fat makes you live longer. Here are two key paragraphs: Despite the fact that study after study has demonstrated quite
One of the trendy things to worry about these days is political disengagement among young people. A think tank called the Institute for Public Policy Research is so worried it’s suggested people be forced to vote in the first election after their 18th birthday. They say political apathy among the young is undermining democracy, but
Tonight’s Scottish leaders’ debate in Edinburgh is as important to the general election campaign as last week’s debate featuring Cameron, Miliband et al in Manchester. Both this debate and the second Scottish one tomorrow offer Labour a final opportunity to reverse the SNP advance. The polls indicate that the SNP are on course to take 28 Scottish seats
According to a recent Ashcroft poll, Nick Clegg is on course to lose his seat in the general election. If he is ousted from Sheffield Hallam, the Deputy Prime Minister will follow in the footsteps of the Liberal leaders Archibald Sinclair and Herbert Samuel, who both lost their seats while leading the party. Clegg is of course keen
One of the things the Tories need to do in order to hold on to power is to convince those considering voting Ukip in the General Election that it is safer to back the Tories instead. To that end, David Cameron yesterday told a campaign event that he hoped such voters would return to the
With the Easter break now over, the general election campaign will notch up a gear today as the political parties try to make the most of the last month of campaigning. To help guide you through the melée of stories and spin, we’ll be posting a summary every morning of the main events so you know
Medieval medicine doesn’t have a great reputation, it’s fair to say. But one of its recipes may help us tackle the great curse of 21st-century disease control – the growing ineffectiveness of antibiotics. In April 2014, the World Health Organisation warned that we were entering a ‘post-antibiotic era’, an age in which drug resistance could render
In a close campaign, you would normally expect the smaller parties to get squeezed as voters decided that is really a choice between Labour and the Tories. But this time, thing might be different. Why, because the general expectation is that there will be another hung parliament and the coverage of the campaign is being
From school places to behaviour to teacher training, the teaching unions have excelled themselves with their doom and gloom pronouncements at their conferences this weekend about the state of our schools. We shouldn’t be surprised, there is, afterall, an election coming up and we all know where the union leaderships’ loyalty lies. But these conferences have
Nigel Farage has had a torrid few days – exactly as he’d planned. He had all six of his fellow contestants in the TV debate ganging up on him over immigration, just as he’d hoped. He’s provoked the Liberal Metropolitan Elite into attacking him over his comments about health tourism and HIV, just as he’d
The three main parties are having a fight about tax today. It’s the day the rise in the personal allowance comes into effect, and David Cameron will give a speech describing what is to most people the Easter Bank Holiday as ‘Money-Back Monday’ (which sounds a bit like a gameshow in a pound shop) and
There’s something Ed Miliband isn’t telling us. He’d spend more, he says, and tackle the deficit. But how? Almost every tax rise he has announced is intended to raise cash for still more spending – so how would he cope with the fact that the government still needs to borrow 12p for every £1 that it
On Thursday night, David Cameron didn’t eviscerate the competition. But nor did he suffer any damage and that, to Tory high command, meant that it was job done. The Tory leadership didn’t want any debates at all, they’d rather not have taken the risk. So, to get through this one debate with the dynamics of
So who is talking more nonsense about the housing market: George Osborne or Ed Miliband? From today’s newspapers, it’s hard to tell. The problem: the era of low interest rates has fuelled an asset boom. Perhaps an asset bubble. Property prices are soaring to ridiculous levels, unaffordable for anyone without money in their family. This
Nigel Farage’s career is on the brink. Aside from his solid performance in the TV debate last week, the Ukip leader isn’t focusing on the party’s national standing. All that matters to Farage now is South Thanet and making sure he is elected as the constituency’s first Ukip MP. But the seat is not a
BBC Scotland’s James Cook caught up with Nicola Sturgeon today and asked her about the Telegraph‘s leaked memo. But he also told her that the story chimes with what he has been told by senior SNP figures – that it suits their wider purpose to have a Tory Prime Minister because it rallies support for independence. His
I’m intrigued by this recent study suggesting that intellectual gifts and learning disabilities, far from lying on opposite ends of a spectrum of intelligence, sometimes go hand in hand. Intrigued, but not surprised. Very bright people can be odd – we all know that. The eccentric genius is one of the clichés of history and fiction.
If elections are job interviews, as party leaders like to say, then this interview has so far failed to assess applicants on the one part of the job description that most have no experience in – foreign policy and security. This absence was at its most conspicuous this week when the TV debate didn’t spare
With just five weeks to go till polling day, one happy voter in Bedford has had enough. Mr S suspects that it’s for the best if Patrick Hall, the Labour candidate for Bedford and Kempston, doesn’t pay a personal visit to this address.
After 15 hours of fascinating and – let’s face it – fairly exciting developments in l’affaire Sturgeon, here’s where I think we are, and I’ll try to stick as much as possible to incontrovertible facts, not political bluster: If this was all a grand misunderstanding, I think the various parties would have come together by
I have never been impressed by round robin letters, so if Ed Miliband had shrugged off the letter to the Daily Telegraph this week signed by 103 businessmen with the words: ‘if they have got something to say why can’t they speak for themselves rather than bleating like a flock of sheep’ he would have
I’ve been away, in the north, free from Wifi and mobile phone reception, mercifully. I watched Thursday’s debate in a noisy pub so heard none of it and was forced to rely on ITV’s subtitles. I was greatly attracted to the Ukip cause by Nigel Farage’s bold assertion that “Britain needs plain-speaking partridges.” Yes indeed. I
The more I think about the debate on Thursday night, the more I think it was a disgrace that there was no question on either defence or Britain’s role in the world. This country might want a holiday from history. But, sadly, we don’t look like getting one on. On Europe’s Eastern border, the Russians
As the election season finally gets its boots on, office-seeking motor-mouths of every creed and colour would do well to remember the tale of William Henry Harrison, ninth president of the United States of America, who died on this day in 1841, exactly one month after taking office. The ‘pneumonia of the lower lobe of
So who does Nicola Sturgeon really want as Prime Minister? Her official line is that she’d put in anyone but the wicked Tories – indeed, Alex Salmond told me last week that “the SNP approach to a Cameron minority government will be to bring it down”. But that’s not what Strugeon has been saying in
They won’t do that again. Seven leaders lined up like skittles all nervously fingering their plastic lecterns. In charge was Julie Etchingham who’d spent many hours in wardrobe creating a fetishistic look. Severe blonde hair. A spotless high-necked tunic as white as sharks fangs. Heavy black-rimmed specs. She looked like the gorgeous physics genius who
So who won? That’s the question, isn’t it? Well, not really. This debate, like most such affairs, is not a horserace in which the winner is easily determined. Because not everyone was racing to be across the line “first”. That’s not actually the nature of the game. The question is not who was crowned the
The Sun’s front page today has a picture of Ed Miliband saying: “Oops, I just lost my election”. That’s an exaggeration: I’d say the election is still 50/50, pretty much where it was last week. And realistically, that’s the best David Cameron could have hoped for. Miliband emerged best from the Paxman interviews, and had he triumphed
