Conservative party

For the first forty-five minutes it was rather like the first debate. Brown attacked Cameron, Cameron hit back and all the while Clegg soared above it. But then immigration, Clegg’s Achilles heel, was thrown into the mix. Cameron went hard for Clegg over his amnesty policy, and Clegg had no clear answer—initially backing away from the policy, before coming back to it. Throughout this exchange, Cameron had covering fire from Brown. Clegg appeared knocked back as he came under the most sustained attack of the campaign and didn’t get back into his groove until his closing statement. In the meantime, Cameron capitalised; delivering some of his strongest answers of the whole debate series.

Well, Cameron saved the best till last. His aides are even joking that they could do with a fourth debate because their man is really getting in the swing of it. He looked more confident, assured – and spoke convincingly about immigration at last, a subject he fluffed last time. I’d place Clegg second. Brown was worse than awful: third in this debate, and will probably be third next week’s election too. Clegg was his usual telegenic self – in thespian terms, an accomplished performance. But he ran away from his own asylum policy, and was comically inept with the facts. He screamed at Cameron: “Will you admit that 80 percent of immigrants come from the EU?” Cameron did not: because the real figure is a third.

The New Statesman has interviewed Douglas Alexander, who appeals, as Andrew Adonis has, to Liberal Democrat voters to back Labour to inaugurate what he terms a ‘New Dawn for Labour and progressive politics.’ Progressive is a vague term, but the best definition for it is reform to encourage social mobility. In this morning’s Times, former Fabian Stephen Pollard argued that only the Tories can guarantee this. For the time, Pollard says, he will vote Conservative and all because of Michael Gove’s schools reform.   ‘Mr Gove has promised that within four years of a Tory government, all parents will have the option of sending their child to an independent school offering to educate the child free.

Clegg won’t join without proportional representation; Cameron says he won’t countenance such a ‘con’. Indeed, it runs deeper than that. Iain Martin has canvassed Tories from across the party and found that Cameron will get short shrift if he tries to reform the voting system at all. There is another consideration. This election has the potential to blow traditional party structure out of the water. Labour’s right will be marginalised by the unions’ grip over the party and Liberal Democrats like David Laws and Clegg (up to a point) have more in common with the One Nation Tories than they do with out and out left wingers like Kennedy and Cable.

Given that Labour has put out a hilarious plea to discuss “issues” rather than personality (or lack thereof), I would like to rise to this challenge to discuss an excellent point raised by David Cameron on Friday: that the state spending/GDP ratio is far too high in many parts of the UK and needs to be lowered. Stating this utterly uncontroversial fact landed him in a bit of trouble, I suspect because of lack of understanding of the issues. So, in the spirit of Labour’s plea, here are some facts. Cameron told Paxo that: “In Northern Ireland, it is quite clear – and almost every party accepts this – that the size of the state has got too big. We need a bigger private sector.

Let's not forget that the Labour Party should not have been able to lose this election. I am still convinced that Cameron came to the Tory leadership with a two-election strategy. The swing needed to win a clear majority was always huge. Part of the reason that the party leadership has found it so difficult to retain the lead in the polls is that they could never quite belive their luck at the collapse of Labour support.  Likewise, the Lib Dem surge has happened partly because no one is quite convinced that the Tories are ready for government. But the real story of the next week and a half will be how Gordon Brown deals with the draining away of Labour support.