Conservative party

Friday

David Blackburn

Darling in cloud cuckoo land

From our UK edition

Labour can’t lay a finger on the Tories over national insurance. And desperation has morphed into hysteria. Alistair Darling has just told Sky News that David Cameron contradicted George Osborne and that the Tory plan is “unravelling”. "He is going to have to find deeper cuts, some experts are saying tens of thousands of jobs will go," he said. "He's had to go on to say that he's going to have to cut which will mean job losses." Now, Cameron said: "Even after our plans for public sector pay and pensions, benefits, ID cards - yes, it's still not enough. I accept that.” But that does not contradict George Osborne, who is clear that pay freezes and low level efficiencies will make only a small impression on Brown and Darling’s mess.

Peter Hoskin

Cameron is Mr Reasonable on Today

From our UK edition

Another day, another party leader on the Today Programme.  This time it was David Cameron, and his interrogator was Evan Davis.  My quick capsule review would be that the Tory leader did quite well, sounding measured and reasonable for most of the twenty minutes - which is certainly better than Brown managed yesterday.  But for more, read on... Unsurprisingly, Davis led on this morning's FT interview with Peter Gershon, the Tories' efficiency advisor, who has fleshed out some of the party's spending plans.  This was the most aggressive segment of the interview, with Davis asking how many job losses would be incurred by a "£2 billion saving on public sector pay rolls.

Thursday

Martin Bright

Why Labour Needs To Be Much Fleeter of Foot

From our UK edition

It is difficult to fault Cameron's idea of a national volunteer force. While the Labour Party was forced to spend today defending the National Insurance hike, the Tories were able to seize the intiative with a genuinely far-sighted proposal. All the more galling for the government that this idea has been rattling around in Labour circles for at least a year. Cameron has stolen Labour's clothes on this just as he did on co-operatives. David Lammy will be seething. His ideas for compulsory civic service were promoted in the pages of Prospect a year ago. He has been lobbying within the Labour Party for the policy for considerably longer.

James Forsyth

Labour’s high risk, high reward strategy on national insurance

From our UK edition

Labour today has tried to shift the National Insurance debate from whether you should cut waste to prevent a tax rise, to whether the Tories’ sums add up. When the Tories announced their plan to avoid the worst of Labour’s NICs rise by cutting waste they made a conscious decision not to offer details on how they would make these efficiency savings. As one shadow Cabinet minister explained to me, they had no desire to repeat the experience of the James Review when they were going on Newsnight to argue the toss over individual savings. The Tories think that the argument that government can save one pound in every hundred that it spends is credible and that combined with the endorsement of two men who have advised the government on efficiency so recently is enough.

Peter Hoskin

The VAT dividing line is growing deeper

From our UK edition

Is this a pledge we can count on?  After the Lib Dems suggested they wouldn't increase VAT earlier, the Labour Chief Whip has told ITV's Lucy Manning that his party won't either.  If so, it's quite a turnaround from when both Darling and Cable refused to rule out VAT hikes during last week's Chancellor's debate. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a LibLab pincer movement against the Tories now: the two parties who seem to have ruled out VAT hikes against the one which is being being slightly more equivocal about it.  As I said earlier, it would hardly be edifying politics.  But the real worry is if it dissuades politicians from talking sensibly about how to fill our country's fiscal black hole.

Daniel Korski

Win one for the Gipper

From our UK edition

A Cameron government has the potential to change Britain - but not much else beside.  A Tory loss, however, could change much more. The Cameron Tories are a bellwether for Conservative movements in a number of countries, including the US. If they succeed, they will prove a powerful model for many moderate Republicans who believe their party is in an earlier post-Major phase - angry, divided and negative. If David Cameron fails to defeat Gordon Brown, few Republicans will look across to their British cousins for inspiration. The party will eschew any modernising project for a while longer and stick to their equivalent of IDS. In this scenario, the Republicans will pick up some congressional seats and governorships.

Peter Hoskin

Your guide to Labour’s latest attack

From our UK edition

So much for the positive vision.  Labour have spent most of the day attacking the Tories and their national insurance cut.  You'd have heard Brown trying to wheel out statistics about it during his Today Programme interview. And then the PM's press conference, alongside Peter Mandelson and Alistair Darling, reduced to a How The Tories' Sums Don't Add Up session. One thing that's striking about the latest attacks is how Labour are slipping, with calculated ease, between different figures to represent the efficiency savings that the Tories hope will fund their NI policy.  Here's a quick guide to the numbers, so you know what's what: £6 billion: This is roughly how much the Tories think the Exchequer will lose from their national insurance plan.

James Forsyth

Hope springs eternal

From our UK edition

The Tory press conference this morning, launching their plan for National Citizen Service, shows how they hope to run a two track campaign. On the one hand, they want to be hammering Labour over their plans to increase National Insurance — Cameron called it a ‘a recovery killer, an economy killer, a job killer’ and said that Labour wanted people to pay ‘taxes for government waste’. On the other, they want to be presenting hopeful, optimistic ideas like a National Citizen Service. This fusion campaigning enables the Tories both to be attacking Labour and presenting themselves as the party that is offering a positive alternative. National Citizen Service is very Cameron. He’s been toying with the idea since 2005.

Daniel Korski

The hyperbole of Westminster

From our UK edition

Campaigns are conducted in poetry, former New York mayor Mario Cuomo once said. This one seems to be conducted in hyperbole. Every party is doing their level best to show that there is a difference, and a big one, between them and their opponents. That's normal. But to do so, they are stretching good arguments beyond what is sustainable. "Brownies" may be a particular mendacious form of hyporbolic campaigning (and governing),  but there are bound to be a few Tory and Lib Dem exaggerations on display during the campaign. Exhibit A. The Tories say a hung parliament will doom Britain as the markets will react badly to a potentially unstable government - with ruinous consequences. Exhibit B. Labour is at it too.

James Forsyth

Civil service discussing Tory efficiency savings

From our UK edition

Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC is reporting that senior civil servants met this morning to discuss how they would implement the Tory plans for efficiency savings. Now, it is not surprising that the civil service is discussing how to implement the opposition’s plans. But what is intriguing is who told the BBC about the meeting. If it was the Tories, then no surprise. But if it was the civil service who told the BBC about it, then that would indicate that they want it to be known that they think these efficiencies are possible. My hunch, and it is no more than that, is that it was civil servants who told the BBC. I can’t imagine that the BBC news channel at noon would be treating it as breaking news if they had heard it from the Tories.

Peter Hoskin

Labour firing blanks

From our UK edition

Labour's press conference this morning was a classic example of a party struggling to both have its cake and eat it.  Not only did we get Gordon Brown, as expected - but he was introduced, and joined, by Alistair Darling and Peter Mandelson.  Three heavy hitters to bash out one message: that the Tories' national insurance plans are a "threat to the recovery".  Or make that one-and-a-half messages, if you include the claim that the Tories couldn't realistically expect to make the efficiency savings to fund their NI cut this year.  There is, claimed the Labour triumverate, a "black hole" where the Tories' tax and spending proposals should be.     And this was where the cake-eating came into play – with a vengeance.

Peter Hoskin

What a difference the start of a campaign makes

From our UK edition

In last week's Chancellor's debate, Vince Cable refused to rule out raising VAT to help fix the public finances.  Now, only a few days later, the Lib Dems are pledging not to do that.  What's more, they're saying that the Tories' plans require a raise in VAT.  And they've even got a 'VAT bombshell' poster to drive the message home. There's more than a dash of Brownite politics about this - the same seasoning I detected in the Tories' Death Tax poster.  Sure, there have been rumblings that the Tories will raise VAT.  But Osborne & Co. have denied that this is necessarily the case in recent days, and it's certainly not current Tory policy.  So the Lib Dems are effectively spinning a lie, and attacking that lie.

Peter Hoskin

Brown comes under heavy fire on Today

From our UK edition

Woah. I doubt Brown will endure many tougher twenty-minute spells during this election campaign than his interview with on the Today Programme this morning. You could practically hear the crunching of his teeth, as John Humphrys took him on over Labour's economic record; practically smell the sweat and fear dripping down his brow. It was compulsive, and compelling, stuff. Humphrys started by putting a grim story to Brown: that his "handling of the economy was not prudent ... your record suggests that the economy is not safe in your hands."  The PM's mission was to deny all this, and he did so with his usual stubborness and disingenuity.  His pitch here was all about inflation: about how we'd avoided the high inflation of recessions past, and how we should be grateful for that.

Wednesday

Martin Bright

What the Party Leaders Are Saying

From our UK edition

I really enjoyed Anne McElvoy's Standard column today. She is absolutely right to identify the false notes of day one of the election campaign. Gordon Brown really was talking nonsense about his ordinary middle-class background and David Cameron should certainly drop the glottal stop. She is right to say that neither has any clarity of vision yet. For what it's worth I agree with Kevin Maguire agreeing me that Labour looked more confident on day one and that the Tories seemed nervous. On day two, Cameron was beginning to get into his stride and Brown's interview with NIck Robinson was awful. The wall-to-wall media coverage is almost all completely absorbing, generally well-executed and sometimes even informative. But i've already had several sneaking "so what" moments.

Peter Hoskin

A heckle which might reverberate across the campaign

From our UK edition

Mark the date: the first major heckle of the election campaign happened today, and Gordon Brown was the victim.  The perp was one Ben Butterworth, and he was angry at how his children can't get into their choice of state school – a frustration which will be shared by thousands of parents across the country.  I wonder what they'll think when they see that Brown ignored the man. The Tories will seize on this with considerable joy.  Their plans for widening school choice are – as the leader says in tomorrow's magazine – the best reason for voting Conservative.  Mr Butterworth might just have made himself the poster boy for that argument.

Peter Hoskin

Is this how Brown hopes to defuse the Tories’ national insurance cut?

From our UK edition

Well, the manifesto pledges sure are spilling out of Brown today.  After his proposals for cleaning up politics earlier, he's now told Channel 4's Gary Gibbon that Labour will pledge to keep the main rate of income tax at 20 pence in the forthcoming Parliament.  Whether that will satisfy those who would see their national insurance contributions rise over the same period, or placate those who were moved from a 10p tax rate to the 20p rate as a result of Brown's politicking a few years ago, remains to be seen.

David Blackburn

Bolton’s nobody’s backyard

From our UK edition

Fresh from a turbulent plane journey, David Cameron is stalking around Bolton. As Pete notes, Warburtons is Bolton's family owned bakery and its endorsement may prove significant in a region of marginals. The party that wins Bolton North East wins the election – that has been the case in every election since 1950 except in 1979. Ruth Kelly’s old haunt, Bolton West, is no Labour stronghold either: her replacement, Julie Hilling, is defending a nominal majority of 2,064. These two seats come 115 and 114 respectively on the Tories’ target list. To the north lies Rossendale and Darwen, where boundary changes have benefitted the Tories for once; it is 77th on the list.

Peter Hoskin

How the Tories are decontaminating their associations with Big Business

From our UK edition

Over the past couple of years, Big Business (as in, "being in hock with...") has been deployed almost as an insult against the Tories.  But they've now used their campaign on national insurance to turn their business associations into an advantage.  Exhibit A: the above picture (via PoliticsHome) of Cameron's visit to the Warbutons HQ in Bolton, where the company owner has come out in support of Tory proposals.  It sends the message that Big Business doesn't just mean the financial services, and a lot of people, in a lot of regions, rely heavily upon it for their livelihoods.  And too right, too.  Expect plenty more like this from the Tories over the next few weeks.

Peter Hoskin

The context defeats Brown

From our UK edition

So, mending our broken politics has been shoved to the forefront of the election campaign - at least for the time being. Brown has just given a speech on the issue, which - if you divorce it from all context - was actually fairly effective. Sure, things like reducing the voting age to 16, or a referendum on the alternative voting system, may not be your - or many people's - cup of chai. But there were several proposals which, taken in isolation, will probably be as popular as they are sensible: banning MPs from working for lobbying comapanies, for instance. Or giving the voters the ability to recall MPs who are guilty of gross financial misconduct. But Brown's problem is that his offer isn't divorced from all context.

Peter Hoskin

Europe as a campaign message … for Labour

From our UK edition

As I said earlier, today's PMQs was all about giving the various parties' campaign messages a walk around the block.  Cameron's questions reduced down to "They've failed – give us a go".  Clegg pushed the Lib Dem's Labservative prospectus.  And Brown droned on about "£6bn being taken out of the economy," as well as about Lord Ashcroft and "securing the recovery". In which case, it's striking that Denis MacShane used a question to denounce the Tories' alliances in Europe.  Indeed, Peter Mandelson did exactly the same in a speech this morning.  Here's how he put it: "David Cameron chooses to sit alongside the xenophobes and homophobes in the European Parliament.