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[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_Oct_2014_v4.mp3" title="Lord Pearson and Damian Green discuss Ukip and the Tories" startat=81] Listen [/audioplayer]I think I’ve cracked it. If you want to springboard your minor political party into the mainstream and take British politics by storm, then all you need to do is go on and on about helping the poor. You don’t need to do much else. You certainly don’t need to modify your policies so that they actually help the poor. This would be overkill. Nor, frankly, do you even need to be 100 per cent up to speed on who the poor are. Feel free to conflate them with the elderly or the skilled working class or people who aren’t from London, or pretty much anybody, really.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_9_Oct_2014_v4.mp3" title="James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss Lib Dem tactics" startat=782] Listen [/audioplayer]The last Liberal Democrat conference before the general election has been dominated by denunciations of the ‘nasty’ Tories. Lib Dems claim they are shocked to find George Osborne proposing a freeze in working age benefits. But can they really be so very surprised? Given that they themselves blocked the Tories from implementing this policy in the current parliament, they must have suspected that Osborne would want to do it in the next. But through all the platform rhetoric, the outlines of a second Tory/Lib Dem coalition have become clear in the past fortnight.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_2_Oct_2014_v4.mp3" title="James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman review the conference season" startat=604] Listen [/audioplayer]Two things have been puzzling Tory high-ups in Birmingham this week: does Nigel Farage have another defector in his back pocket, and why is the Tory party in such a good mood? Many expected that a second MP defecting to Ukip would have plunged the party into the slough of despond. One influential Tory, though, has an explanation for what’s going on. ‘The mood here is so upbeat because people think we’ve got Labour beat.’ He is, however, quick to add, ‘It is Ukip that is the problem.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_25_Sept_2014_v4.mp3" title="Freddy Gray, Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth on Cameron's radicalism" startat=70] Listen [/audioplayer]No one goes to Birmingham to revive a marriage. But that is what David Cameron and the Conservative party must do next week at conference. They must find a way to put the passion back into their relationship, to learn to trust each other again ahead of the general election. For neither can win without the other next May. That election is there to be won. The Labour gathering in Manchester this week was not one of a party convinced that it is going to surge to victory in a few months. The atmosphere was subdued, bordering on depressed.

Journalistically speaking, it’s been a good year to be Scottish and Jewish. Had I been a Welsh Zoroastrian, say, I doubt I’d have had nearly so much to say. In recent months, obviously, it’s been the Scottish thing that has really taken off. I used to be marginally Scottish, irrelevantly Scottish; never realising that a period of being helpfully Scottish was just around the corner. I suppose it’s a bit like the presumptions that some bilingual people have, that other people must, must be able to speak other languages really. I think I just assumed that the rest of London’s media knew plenty about Scotland, but tended not to talk about it. But no. They didn’t. At all. Imagine you’d been wearing the same jacket for a decade, and then saw it in Vogue. It’s been like that.