All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Nick Clegg – who he? According to a poll this morning, that’s what two-thirds of the country will be thinking when they see the Lib Dem leader on their screens over the next few weeks. But, regardless, he and his party are worth paying attention to. Most importantly, of course, because of the possibility of
Reaganesque was the word that sprang to mind watching Cameron’s launch event. Standing on the terrace of County Hall with Parliament behind him, providing the snappers with some great images, Cameron spoke about the ‘modern Conservative alternative’ to five more years of Gordon Brown. The implicit message was youth and vigour. This was one of
Westminster today is dominated by the sound of helicopters hovering over head, waiting for Brown to set off from Downing Street to the Palace. This morning is the last time that Brown will have the full political advantage of his office, the ability to set the news agenda. The Tories are attempting to step on
Geoffrey Wheatcroft has kicked off the election campaign with possibly the most depressing article I have ever read about British politics. Jetting off to the States for an academic engagement, the old curmudgeon says he feels no regret at missing an election in which he has lost interest. This say more about the author of
If there’s anything we don’t already know about today, then I’m struggling to find it. The election will be declared for 6th May. Brown will make a pitch which bears close resemblance to his interview in the Mirror today: “We have come so far. Do we want to throw this all away?” Cameron will say
And so it begins. At last. The phoney war is over and now the grapeshot will be flying thick and fast. There will be casualties aplenty, decency, honesty and your patience amongst ’em. I’m sticking to my view, which is neither especially daring nor unconventional, that the Conservatives will win and finish with a majority
Lord knows that in these trying, perhaps even desperate, times we need some light relief. So here’s Chris Kamara cheerfully admitting that he hasn’t a clue what’s going on in the Portsmouth vs Blackburn Rovers game the other day. Now, if only political pundits and broadcasters were this honest… And no, I’m not knocking Mr
So there we have it. Brown has been to see the Queen, he’s returned to Downing Street, and now he’s announced what we all knew anyway: the election will be on 6th May. He was flanked by the entire Cabinet as he did so, like some grim school photograph. And he repeated the same lines
Is Barack Obama really a closet Tory? That’s the question Andrew Sullivan asks in the light of this passage from David Remnick’s new Obama biography. Speaking about race in America and his election, Obama says: “America evolves, and sometimes those evolutions are painful. People don’t progress in a straight line. Countries don’t progress in a
Tim Montgomerie has a nice way with understatement. His capsule-sized overview of the campaign to come, published by National Review Online, contains this passage: Cameron will not be to the liking of every U.S. Republican, but he’s much closer to American conservatism than the ruling Labour Party or the third party, the Liberal Democrats. The
Courtesy of Stephanie Flanders, the BBC’s Economics Editor: Welcome to the election. If we’re to believe Alistair Darling, the Conservatives’ ‘credibility gap’ on tax and spending has shrunk by 34% since January, or about £11bn. If they carry on like this, they might be thoroughly credible by election day. Naturally, that is not how the
Not much news came out of Washington last week which doubtless explains why my old chum Toby Harnden used his Telegraph column to chew over the Petraeus 2012 “speculation” one more time. This won’t be the last we hear of this, I assure you. Alas, as Toby laments, the good General stubbornly refuses to play
Chris Grayling’s erstwhile view that Britain’s inn-keepers can interpret anti-discrimination legislation as they see fit belongs where he originally found it: in the biggot bin. There is no place for anti-gay views in British politics, or the Conservative Party. This is not just a question of electioneering — ie currying favour with a symbolically important
The Tories have weathered Chris Grayling’s gay gaffe. The story could only gain momentum if the papers had gone to town on it. They have not. The Times gives it a couple of paragraphs at the bottom of an inner page and even the Independent and the Guardian relegate it to the interior. The news
When Alistair Daring admitted last week that there would indeed be job losses arising from the proposed National Insurance hike, it would have struck Gordon Brown and Ed Balls like root canal surgery. This blows wide open the main part of Brown’s election deceit: asking the public to look at the advantages of the borrowing,
As mentioned, one of the things we talked about during the House of Comments podcast was what, if anything, British pols can learn from the Obama campaign. The answer: much less than the press might have you think. Sure, there’s puff piece after puff piece about how both parties are snapping up Obama “advisors” in
Gordon Brown has walked straight into George Osborne’s trap. After bleating that the national insurance tax cut is unaffordable, he has decided to make this a massive election dividing line – claiming that this teeny (1 percent of state spending) tax cut somehow poses a mortal danger to an economic recovery. Please, God, let him
The final pre-campaign YouGov poll has just been released and it shows the Tories over forty percent and ahead by ten percent, numbers that I suspect the party would have taken back in January and would be delighted to have repeated on election day. Even on a uniform national swing these results–Tories 41, Labour 31,
YouGov’s first poll of the year had the Tories on 40 and nine points ahead of Labour. Its latest one has the Tories on 39 and Labour on 29. So despite the two Tory wobbles, in terms of the battle between the big two, little has changed over the past 90 odd days. The Tories,
Regular posting to return later today. Meanwhile I was a guest on the latest House of Comments podcast hosted by Mark Thompson and Stuart Sharpe. Labour List’s Alex Smith and I chatted about the Chancellor’s debate, Tony Blair’s (brief) return to Britain, lessons that might or might not be learnt from the Obama campaign and
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
A few more points about the PCC adjudication; apologies if you’re getting bored. The first is indisputable: if I had blogged on a website of my own, rather than here, then they would have not got involved. So the upshot is that blogs associated with newspapers will end up not being like blogs at all
In lighter moments, Gordon Brown is alleged to imagine that he is John Major and David Cameron is Neil Kinnock. Now, I think the Tories will win outright, but would Cameron resign if Brown’s daydreams became reality? ‘No,’ Cameron tells the Mail on Sunday. Despite the bravado, Cameron must fear a challenge hot on the
Last week, the Tories strengthened their tax-cutting credentials with a smart policy on national insurance. I’m sure you didn’t miss it. But one part of the recent Tory resurgence is, to my mind, being underplayed: they now have a much stronger message on government waste. After all, the NI policy is being funded by cutting
I recently sat down with a European foreign minister to discuss the EU’s enlargement strategy and how it would deal with those applicant countries, like in the Western Balkans, who want to join the Union but whose chances of integration in the next ten years or so are limited. We tried to write down those
There was a time when Peter Mandelson would let out a few notes and the media would dance to his tune. But this weekend there’s been a Mandelson interview in The Times, a Mandelson interview in The Sunday Times, a Mandelson appearance on Sky News and an Obama campaign-style memo from Mandelson and none have
With the Tories back up to a ten-point lead in the YouGov/Sunday Times poll, it seems that – as James put it yesterday – the ‘big mo’ is with them. David Cameron is about to survive his third political near-death experience: the first being his leadership campaign and the second the election-that-never-was in 2007. This
The Sunday Times has a story today that gives you a sense of the personal animosities bubbling just below the surface of Labour’s election campaign: “The Sunday Times has learnt that Charlie Whelan, the political director of Unite, the super-union, has been barred from entering Labour headquarters during the campaign. Mandelson is understood to have
Euroscepticism is David Cameron and Gene Hunt’s sole shared attribute. But, bequeathed a poisoned chalice at home, the EU is not a future Tory government’s immediate priority. Set-piece battles over rebates, defence procurement and the CAP can be avoided for a time, but skirmishes will be a regular occurrence. And some of these will be bloodbaths. The first
There’s a revolt growing in the Surrey East Conservative Association about the candidate imposed upon them by David Cameron – a black businessman called Sam Gyimah. Some locals insist that Sam’s business ventures have been rather, you know, iffy and they were not terribly happy to have “selected” him from a shortlist which contained no
There’s me thinking that Labour wouldn’t go negative with their latest poster, created via an online competition among their supporters. I mean, surely they wouldn’t want to undermine their whizzy, positive, digital energy by picking a design which didn’t present an equally positive Labour vision. But, oh, how they did. Here’s the winning design: Now,
David Cameron said as much in his Today Programme interview, but now we know for sure: we’ve heard everything we’re going to about Tory spending cuts this year. George Osborne confirms the news in an interview with the Guardian today: “In the interview, the shadow chancellor also disclosed, for the first time, that he would
The sense that things are moving the Tories way will be further bolstered by YouGov for the Sunday Times which has the Tories ahead by ten points, 39 to 29. As Conservative Home points out, this is the first time this year that Labour have been below 30 with YouGov. It is also the biggest
In a campaign, momentum matters. It is, for good or ill, the prism through which the media report things. Reading the papers and listening to the news this weekend, it is evident that it is the Tories who have it. Just contrast, the way in which the Osborne and Mandelson interviews are written up in