Conservative party

The election of a new Labour leader means that proper politics has resumed. David Cameron now knows who he needs to beat to win the next election. As I argue in the magazine this week (subscribers), if the Tories are to secure a majority in 2015, they’ll need to do better among those in households with an income of thirty-odd thousand or so, what pollsters call the C1s. The last time the Tories won outright, they got 52 percent of the C1 vote—more than double Labour’s total. But in 1997, Labor and the Tories split this group evenly. The Tories have never fully recovered from this.  In 2010, the Tories garnered 39 percent with this group, a mere three percent swing since 2005.

I had expected Ed Miliband to do pretty well in the polls. He's unknown, and voters haven't had a chance to dislike him yet. That's not an insult – familiarity breeds contempt in politics, and the public are normally quite quick to give a new guy the benefit of the doubt. Witness the Clegg bubble. But tomorrow's Guardian shows precious little sign of a conference bounce. The two parties were level before the conferences – a remarkable achievment for a leaderless party. The Tories took three years to do the same. It was one of many reasons that inspired our cover story last week, "Labour leaps forward". The illustration, by Morten Morland, was a horse without a rider. What might Labour achieve with a jockey?

So did Liam Fox leak the letter? Only if he is suicidal. He's been around long enough (having been a frontbencher from the Major years onwards) to know how the game works. Briefing journalists is one thing, leaking a private letter is utterly counterproductive. It will make it harder for him to get the settlement he wants, and it will damage him by making him look as if he were responsible for it. I gather that the MoD is in a state of terror right now, with phone records and emails being trawled to find the guilty party. And whoever did this has such a crude understanding of media spin that they might well have been stupid enough to be caught. But in the history of Whitehall leak inquiries, the guilty party has never been discovered.

There is a feeling on the right that with the election of Ed Miliband it is back to the good old days. The thinking goes that Labour have elected a lefty as leader and it is time "to do ‘em over just like we did back in the day". But this is overly-simplistic. First of all, Ed Miliband is certainly to the left of Tony Blair but he’s nowhere near as far left, compared to the public, as Michael Foot or Tony Benn, or anyone like that. Second, the right in the ‘80s had three fronts on which to attack left-wing politicians: economics, culture and national defence. Now, it only really has one. The economic argument is, obviously, still live. But the cultural one is now gone.

David Cameron’s interview in the Telegraph this morning is striking for three reasons. First, despite the interview appearing on the day of the Labour leadership declaration, there’s no attempt to bring the hammer down on the new Labour leader. All we get is some framing on the deficit. Next, as Paul Goodman notes, it is an attempt to reassure the Tory faithful after the Lib Dem conference Vince Cable is gently put back in his box with the line ‘Vince is Vince’. Cameron also stresses that he ‘will always safeguard our nuclear deterrent’; a line that is very different from the nakedly political discussions of Trident in Liverpool, where what seemed matter to most was making life difficult for Labour.

Politics Home has published an important poll, showing the staggering level of support for Vince Cable’s conference speech. The government will be pleased that its political attack on the financial services industry’s continued excess at time of austerity is cutting through; on the other hand, this could be seen as support for Cable’s emotive rhetoric. Worse still, the poll suggests that traditional Tory voters are the only group for whom Nick Clegg is more impressive than Cable. The business secretary has to be kept in government – the coalition can't afford to have a charismatic wreaking havoc from the backbenches. Support for Vince Cable conference speech Who are the impressive Liberal Democrat politicians?

What are we to make of the fact that No.10 gave the thumbs-up to Vince Cable’s bizarre anti-capitalist rhetoric today? “Capitalism takes no prisoners and it kills competition where it can,” he fumed – and you can argue that, technically, he is paraphrasing Adam Smith. But he has been in politics long enough to know what signal his speech sent out (and the reaction it would trigger). Mood music counts for a lot in politics, and in business. And the mood music from this government sounds like a bunch of politicians happy to tax the bejesus out of the high-paid - regarding them as ATM machines to be raided, rather than wealth creators to be welcomed. It's time to ask what harm all this posturing is doing.

A striking aspect of the Liberal Democrat conference is how discussion of cooperation with Labour takes place in public while talk of any future work with their current coalition partner happens in private. Tonight, Paddy Ashdown told an Observer fringe meeting that the Liberal Democrats’ long-term goal should still be to become the dominant party of the centre-left in Britain. I must admit that I struggle to see how this is possible. The steps that the coalition needs to take to deal with what Nick Clegg calls the ‘invisible crisis’ of the deficit will alienate the party from the centre left. But then again, as one liberal Liberal Democrat said to me last night, of the party’s MPs only half a dozen are authentic liberals.