Conservative party

It looks like the May's election for Mayor of London will be a close run thing. A new poll today from YouGov has Ken Livingstone two points ahead of Boris Johnson – a big turnaround from the eight point lead Boris had in June: Ken shouldn't be popping any champagne corks yet, of course. His lead is well within the poll's margin of error, and there's three and a half months to go before election day. But he's certainly looking more likely to topple Boris than he did seven months ago. So why the change? YouGov's Peter Kellner has a good article on the poll's details here, but two key points jump out from the numbers: 1. Labour voters are getting behind Ken.

Boris Johnson was very well behaved this evening when he appeared before the 1922 Committee of Tory MPs. He stayed off the topics of Europe and tax and instead confined his remarks to London, saying that he wanted the capital to be an example of ‘cost-cutting, one nation Conservatism’. Those MPs inside the room say the performance was classic Boris, as one put it ‘he left no erogenous zone unstroked’.   Afterwards, Mark Reckless, a north Kent MP, asked the Mayor a sceptical question about his plan for a new airport in Kent. In the questions, I understand that Boris also took the chance to express his support for Rebecca Harris’s daylight saving times bill.   Interestingly, the turn-out for Boris was decent but not massive.

As revealed in Rachel Sylvester's Times column (£) today: “Richard Reeves, Mr Clegg’s political adviser, draws a graph that plots ‘Government unity and strength’ against ‘Lib Dem identity’ as two lines, one going down and the other up, between 2010 and 2015. The lines cross in 2012. ‘Every minute of every day between now and the election we will turn up the dial on differentiation,’ says a strategist.” So I've pasted my own version of the Reeves graph above to, erm, get it on paper, as it were. Of course, it's not surprising that the Lib Dems — or, indeed, the Tories — would do more to distinguish themselves as the election approaches.

This morning’s Guardian scoop about Michael Gove’s suggestion that the nation should present the Queen with a new Royal yacht for the Jubilee is the talk of Westminster. But the full correspondence indicates that Gove was not proposing any taxpayer funding for a new Britannia.   Gove refers to ‘David Willetts’s excellent suggestion for a Royal Yacht’. This proposal was made in a letter from Willetts to the Prime Minister on the 5th September, which was copied to various colleagues. Willetts writes that Rear Admiral Bawtree sees The Future Ship Project for the 21st Century ‘as a potential replacement for the Royal Yacht Britannia’.

With Scottish independence very much the issue of the week, we thought you might enjoy this Spectator leader from 1979, arguing for a 'No' vote in that year's referendum on Scottish devolution: To preserve the Union, 24 February 1979 ‘So, Sir, you laugh at schemes of political improvement?’ ‘Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.’ The Scotland Act, which comes before the judgement of the Scottish people on Thursday, is certainly laughable. Would that it were no more than that.

Political cultures differ. In Iran, for example, hyperbole is expected in all political conversations. So slogans always call for ‘Death to the US’, and nothing less. In Britain, of course, the use of language is more even-tempered, but other rules apply. Blaming the civil service for failure is considered OK, but charging an individual official, even a Permanent Secretary, for the same is considered off-limits. If a minister were to try it, then he'd be accused of trying to pass the buck on towards defenceless officials. But, as Camilla Cavendish points out in today's Times (£), failure is often also the fault of senior officials who, despite problems in the past, move seamlessly from job to job and from Department to Department.

Miliband survives! That news should steady Labour nerves. For today at least. Their leader has the knack of turning near-certain defeat into absolutely-certain catastrophe, but he bumbled through PMQs this afternoon without suffering a serious setback. He has so little ground from which to attack the government that he had to lead on a niche issue. Rail fares. He asked the prime minister why the operating companies have managed to hike prices by 11 per cent on the busiest routes. Cameron: ‘Because of a power given to them by the last Labour government.’   With that lethally terse response the PM sat down. To his credit, Miliband wasn’t rattled.