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How will Ed Miliband manage tomorrow if Labour does end up the second largest party but with a viable ‘anti-Tory alliance’ in the House of Commons? The Tories are trying to craft a narrative that such a government would be illegitimate, and David Cameron will give a statement early on Friday. But there is a theory developing among some Tories who rate Miliband’s strategic skills that he could be about to produce his own clever game-changer too. He could be about to offer a significant devolution of powers to the regions, a huge transfer of power to Scotland and Wales, the elected Senate of the Nations and Regions that was

It’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for Nick Clegg. He’s a decent man who took a tough decision to put his party into coalition with the Conservatives, and lost half of his support as a result. Tomorrow, his party will be hammered. His great miscalculation was imagining that in England the Lib Dems would emerge with a list of achievements voters would applaud – as they did in the 2003 Holyrood elections when, after four years of coalition, the Lib Dems overtook the Scottish Conservatives to become the third-largest party. On the radio the other day Clegg vainly paraded his boast list, his own version of Kelly Clarkson’s Because

My constituency is one of the SNP’s most coveted prizes. If they win in Midlothian they can win almost anywhere. This is Gladstone’s old seat, where the modern political campaign was born. He wrested it away from the Conservatives in 1880, after a series of stirring speeches on the government’s foreign policy failures. On Thursday the SNP are hoping to pull off a similar upset. The momentum behind the nationalists is incredible. Everything I’ve seen and heard in the last couple of weeks points to an SNP victory here. My entire family is voting for them. My mother suggested that I should do the same. ‘Give your dead grandfather a

Although one recent poll suggested that the SNP will win every seat in Scotland, there are still a few Liberal Democrat MPs who hope to retain their seats come Thursday. However, although Alistair Carmichael, the Secretary of State for Scotland and Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland, winning his seat in 2010 by a majority of nearly 10,000 votes, he ought to be more alert to the dangers of the SNP. On a recent train journey, one SNP voter took a photo of herself posing with her ballot paper while Carmichael dozed off in the background: Mr S suspects that Carmichael won’t be getting much sleep now until polling day.

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 dangerous than Russell Brand, ‘because she votes’. While Miliband’s party might well be set for an absolute hammering north of the border next Thursday, they do currently have 41 Scottish seats whereas the Tories have a single constituency. Mr S later asked the Chief Whip to back up his claim. ‘It is a reality based prediction, yes,’ Gove

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 cent with Clegg garnering 19 per cent support. Miliband’s didn’t have a great night and his most awkward moment came on the record of the last Labour government. The audience were audibly irritated by his repeated refusal to concede that the last Labour government had spent too much money. Under questioning from the audience, Miliband

Just when Scottish Labour didn’t think it could get any worse, a new poll suggests they are now facing total wipe out next Thursday. According to Ipsos MORI/STV News, the SNP is now up to 54 per cent of the vote share — up two points since their last poll in January. Punching these numbers into Electoral Calculus suggests the Nats will win all 59 seats and wipe out the other parties. Another prediction website, ScotlandVotes, suggests that this vote share would leave one Liberal Democrat MP after polling day. Unlike Lord Ashcroft’s recent polls north of the border, this survey was conducted across the whole of Scotland — not just

One constituency where the Tory attacks about a possible deal between Labour and the SNP work very well is Barrow and Furness, where Labour’s John Woodcock is standing for re-election. The seat includes shipyards where the new Trident submarines would be built, and so any suggestion that Labour might scale back its commitment to Trident is hugely potent for the local campaign. A couple of days after Michael Fallon launched his poorly-received attack on Ed Miliband, in which the Defence Secretary warned that the Labour leader had stabbed his brother in the back and could therefore quite easily stab the UK in the back by forging a deal with the