David cameron

Ed Miliband has long been considered the Conservatives' main electoral asset. Certainly, Simon Danczuk touched a nerve when he described his party leader as a liability only a fortnight ago. But as the election nears, is the Labour leader beginning to turn his personal fortunes around? Polling from YouGov shows a fascinating trend. Voter approval of Miliband’s performance as Labour leader has improved from a dire state in late-November last year, at net -56%, to the most recent level of -26% last week. With the election campaign underway, a significant chunk of the electorate appear to have given the Labour leader a second look. Indeed, his net approval rating improved by 10 points after the "hell, yes!

On Thursday night, David Cameron didn’t eviscerate the competition. But nor did he suffer any damage and that, to Tory high command, meant that it was job done. The Tory leadership didn’t want any debates at all, they’d rather not have taken the risk. So, to get through this one debate with the dynamics of the campaign unchanged was, to their mind, a result. As Cameron enjoyed a late night drink with Samantha Cameron, George Osborne and his key aides on Thursday, he reflected on how much better he felt than he did after the first debate five years ago when he knew that he had not only underperformed but that he had two more to get through. This time round he’d done fine and was done with debates.

So who does Nicola Sturgeon really want as Prime Minister? Her official line is that she’d put in anyone but the wicked Tories – indeed, Alex Salmond told me last week that “the SNP approach to a Cameron minority government will be to bring it down”. But that’s not what Strugeon has been saying in private. The Daily Telegraph has just released a leaked diplomatic memo revealing that Ms Sturgeon has confessed to the French ambassador that she would prefer that David Cameron "remains"  Prime Minister - and that she thinks Ed Miliband is too incompetent. The leaked memo - a UK government memo - goes as follows:- "Just had a telephone conversation with Pierre-Alain Coffinier, the French CG [consul-general].

David Cameron has written a rather interesting piece for Premier Christianity magazine on his faith and the meaning of Easter. I use the word ‘interesting’ advisedly and in the sense that an aged relative might deploy it when regarding some new fangled Christmas present that has a touch screen. The final two paragraphs are particularly interesting: ‘So I end my argument with this: I hope everyone can share in the belief of trying to lift people up rather than count people out. Those values and principles are not the exclusive preserve of one faith or religion. They are something I hope everyone in our country believes. ‘That after all is the heart of the Christian message. It’s the principle around which the Easter celebration is built.

Scottish Labour is having no luck in denting the SNP’s support. ComRes/ITV News have released a new poll this evening, which shows a 19 per cent swing to the SNP across the 40 Labour held seats in Scotland. Based on this, the SNP would take 28 of these seats in the upcoming general election. North of the border, ComRes puts the SNP on 43 per cent, Labour on 37, the Tories on 13 and Ukip, the Lib Dems and Greens on two per cent each. The ComRes findings fall in line with the other polls taken in Scotland from Lord Ashcroft and ICM — the latter recently suggested that the SNP would take 29 seats from Labour with a 20 per cent swing.