All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
A new cricket season is upon us and something to take our minds off this election caper. Happily this also means it’s time for another lovely piece from Frank Keating, still the doyen of British sportswriters. This time he’s strolling down Shaftesbury Avenue, compiling an XI of playwrights who have played and loved the noblest
The drop in the Tory lead to five points in the YouGov daily tracker caused some concern in Tory circles last night. But this evening, the Tory lead is nine and the party is at the psychologically important 40 percent mark. The figures are Tories 40, Labour 31 and Lib Dems 18. On a uniform
It is difficult to fault Cameron’s idea of a national volunteer force. While the Labour Party was forced to spend today defending the National Insurance hike, the Tories were able to seize the intiative with a genuinely far-sighted proposal. All the more galling for the government that this idea has been rattling around in Labour
Labour today has tried to shift the National Insurance debate from whether you should cut waste to prevent a tax rise, to whether the Tories’ sums add up. When the Tories announced their plan to avoid the worst of Labour’s NICs rise by cutting waste they made a conscious decision not to offer details on
Standing Cat Video is Surprise Internet Hit. There’s a cat. Standing up. There’s video of the cat standing up. It is popular. This is the internet. What part of this makes it a “surprise” hit? Shame on you Yahoo! The Standing Cat @ Yahoo! Video
Is this a pledge we can count on? After the Lib Dems suggested they wouldn’t increase VAT earlier, the Labour Chief Whip has told ITV’s Lucy Manning that his party won’t either. If so, it’s quite a turnaround from when both Darling and Cable refused to rule out VAT hikes during last week’s Chancellor’s debate.
Via Andrew, I see that Gideon Rachman writes: Like many youngish politicians, Mr Cameron would dearly love to embrace President Barack Obama and to drink deeply from his aura – if such a thing is possible. But the Tory leader has to pretend that the US politicians he is closest too are the likes of
A Cameron government has the potential to change Britain – but not much else beside. A Tory loss, however, could change much more. The Cameron Tories are a bellwether for Conservative movements in a number of countries, including the US. If they succeed, they will prove a powerful model for many moderate Republicans who believe
Speaking at a Spectator debate last night, Tim Montgomerie laid out some of the reasons for thinking David Cameron more the heir to Thatcher than, as some of the old right think he may be, a squishy heir to Heath. I wouldn’t agree with all of it but it’s a good speech and a good
So much for the positive vision. Labour have spent most of the day attacking the Tories and their national insurance cut. You’d have heard Brown trying to wheel out statistics about it during his Today Programme interview. And then the PM’s press conference, alongside Peter Mandelson and Alistair Darling, reduced to a How The Tories’
The Tory press conference this morning, launching their plan for National Citizen Service, shows how they hope to run a two track campaign. On the one hand, they want to be hammering Labour over their plans to increase National Insurance — Cameron called it a ‘a recovery killer, an economy killer, a job killer’ and
Everyone agrees that public spending is going to be squeezed and journalists want to hear the pols say what items they would cut. Politicians, understandably, are reluctant to give clear answers to these questions. Hence our poor old friend Mr Efficiency Saving is wheeled into service once more and Mr Government Waste gets it in
Phil Woolas has just been confronted on Daily Politics about immigration figures which we uncovered on Coffee House yesterday, showing 99 percent of new jobs since 1997 are accounted for by immigration. His response is (unintentionally) hilarious. He is immigration minister, yet appears not to know what immigration figures mean. Here’s the transcript: Phil Woolas:
It’s a strange business this campaigning lark, isn’t it? William Hague was in these parts this morning. I learnt this from his Twitter* feed. He can’t have spent much time in Hawick**, mind you, since he was soon in Edinburgh as part of a day-long tour of nine Scottish constituencies. Tour, of course, vastly overstates
Campaigns are conducted in poetry, former New York mayor Mario Cuomo once said. This one seems to be conducted in hyperbole. Every party is doing their level best to show that there is a difference, and a big one, between them and their opponents. That’s normal. But to do so, they are stretching good arguments
Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC is reporting that senior civil servants met this morning to discuss how they would implement the Tory plans for efficiency savings. Now, it is not surprising that the civil service is discussing how to implement the opposition’s plans. But what is intriguing is who told the BBC about the meeting.
Well, now we know. Charlie Whelan enjoys the liberty of Westminster at the invitation of the parliamentary Labour party. Guido points out that it’s highly unlikely Whelan isn’t officially connected to Labour’s campaign. Labour tried to keep all this quiet, attempting to avert an ‘affluence for influence’ story that might undermine Brown’s attempt to turn
Labour’s press conference this morning was a classic example of a party struggling to both have its cake and eat it. Not only did we get Gordon Brown, as expected – but he was introduced, and joined, by Alistair Darling and Peter Mandelson. Three heavy hitters to bash out one message: that the Tories’ national
In last week’s Chancellor’s debate, Vince Cable refused to rule out raising VAT to help fix the public finances. Now, only a few days later, the Lib Dems are pledging not to do that. What’s more, they’re saying that the Tories’ plans require a raise in VAT. And they’ve even got a ‘VAT bombshell‘ poster
Woah. I doubt Brown will endure many tougher twenty-minute spells during this election campaign than his interview with on the Today Programme this morning. You could practically hear the crunching of his teeth, as John Humphrys took him on over Labour’s economic record; practically smell the sweat and fear dripping down his brow. It was
It’s always gratifying to see Coffee House posts followed up in the newspapers, and I almost admire the way the Daily Mail has just splashed the newspaper on one of our posts without mentioning the source. CoffeeHousers will recognise the story on the Mail’s front page (left) – some 99 percent of jobs created since
Jason Beattie has an intriguing tale on his blog. He reports that Nick Clegg’s wife has taken to texting friends to complain about the ways in which Vince Cable upstages her husband. This adds to my suspicion that the Clegg Cable relationship might come to be one of the stories of the campaign. On top
I really enjoyed Anne McElvoy’s Standard column today. She is absolutely right to identify the false notes of day one of the election campaign. Gordon Brown really was talking nonsense about his ordinary middle-class background and David Cameron should certainly drop the glottal stop. She is right to say that neither has any clarity of
The polls are coming thick and fast in this campaign and there’s another one just out with the YouGov tracker to come later on. Populus’s latest for The Times has the Tories on 39, Labour on 32 and the Lib Dems on 21.Populus last poll, taken in February, had the Tories on 40, Labour on
Mark the date: the first major heckle of the election campaign happened today, and Gordon Brown was the victim. The perp was one Ben Butterworth, and he was angry at how his children can’t get into their choice of state school – a frustration which will be shared by thousands of parents across the country.
Unsurprisingly the lads at the Daily Mash are enjoying themselves: GORDON Brown’s claim to be an ordinary, middle class Briton backfired last night as millions of ordinary middle class Britons stressed just how much they hate themselves. The prime minister kicked-off Labour’s campaign by contrasting his spite-filled ordinariness with the rich and happy background of
Well, the manifesto pledges sure are spilling out of Brown today. After his proposals for cleaning up politics earlier, he’s now told Channel 4’s Gary Gibbon that Labour will pledge to keep the main rate of income tax at 20 pence in the forthcoming Parliament. Whether that will satisfy those who would see their national
Fresh from a turbulent plane journey, David Cameron is stalking around Bolton. As Pete notes, Warburtons is Bolton’s family owned bakery and its endorsement may prove significant in a region of marginals. The party that wins Bolton North East wins the election – that has been the case in every election since 1950 except in
Over the past couple of years, Big Business (as in, “being in hock with…”) has been deployed almost as an insult against the Tories. But they’ve now used their campaign on national insurance to turn their business associations into an advantage. Exhibit A: the above picture (via PoliticsHome) of Cameron’s visit to the Warbutons HQ
Gordon Brown’s visit to the Innocent smoothie HQ in London today is the subject of a great post from Paul Waugh, who reveals how close the PM came to a photo-opp nightmare. But it also reminded me of this insight from Jonathan Freedland a few months ago, which I blogged at the time: “[The Labour
So, mending our broken politics has been shoved to the forefront of the election campaign – at least for the time being. Brown has just given a speech on the issue, which – if you divorce it from all context – was actually fairly effective. Sure, things like reducing the voting age to 16, or
Give Gordon Brown credit for chutzpah at least. Then again, what else if left to the poor man? It’s tough to be the incumbent and run a campaign based on the promise of Change. But this seems to be what El Gordo is attempting. Good luck with that. Labour appear to have accepted that they’ve
The choppers, and the whoppers, were flying at Westminster today. David Cameron invited the prime minister to try a spot of accountability at PMQs. Would he admit that he scrimped on transport aircraft in Helmand? Brown, with breathtaking cheek and not a little rhetorical dexterity, flipped the question upside down. ‘I do not accept that
As I said earlier, today’s PMQs was all about giving the various parties’ campaign messages a walk around the block. Cameron’s questions reduced down to “They’ve failed – give us a go”. Clegg pushed the Lib Dem’s Labservative prospectus. And Brown droned on about “£6bn being taken out of the economy,” as well as about