David cameron

Will the Tories really dock benefits from obese people and those with drug or alcohol addictions if they refuse treatment? Even though David Cameron reaffirmed his commitment to the policy in his speech in Hove yesterday, anyone who is getting rather over-excited about it could probably expend their energy on something else as this looks suspiciously like one of those policy kites that gets flown from time to time. In the Times today, I point out that the idea cropped up several times under Labour as well as the Tories. The reason that this latest incarnation of the ‘sick people, get treatment or lose benefits’ policy might not ever become a proper policy is that it’s just one of the proposals in the review that Dame Carol Black is conducting.

"There's a lot we need to do in this party of ours. Our base is too narrow and so, occasionally, are our sympathies. You know what some people call us - the nasty party." Theresa May, October 8th 2002. February 17th 2015, David Cameron announces plans to make 50,000 youths spend 30 hours a week on community service schemes to keep their "Youth Allowance" benefits. The Youth Allowance, by the way, is £57 a week. And today's announcement follows suggestions that fat people should lose access to benefits unless they lose weight. Look, it's not the goal that's the problem here. When Cameron says there is a moral quality to reducing the benefits bill he is not wrong. When he says there are people who could work  - and with the right assistance can work - he is not wrong.

Ed Miliband appears to have found some safe ground for his party this week, attacking the Tories whenever he can over tax avoidance claims. If he plans to continue on this note, Mr S suggests that he picks his words with more care in the future. Speaking at the Welsh Labour conference on Saturday about his plan to launch an HMRC review, Miliband went off message rather badly. The Labour leader promised to ‘stand up for all those who stand in the way of the success of working families'. That couldn't be what he means, could it?

Last week was Labour’s best of the campaign so far and the Tories’ worst. The row over tax avoidance and Lord Fink’s comments reinforced the damaging perception that the Tories are the party of the rich. It also raised Labour morale, frontbenchers who used to be pessimistic about the party’s electoral prospects are now bullish. But there is a danger that this tactical victory could turn into a strategic defeat. For Miliband by denouncing tax avoidance—which is legal—and setting himself up as a moral arbiter on the issue, has made his tax affairs and those of his shadow Cabinet, MPs and donors a legitimate subject of public interest. They no longer just have to be legal and fully declared, they also have to pass the higher Miliband bar.

The great historian of the Soviet Union Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics reads: 'The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.' I have tested Conquest’s law on every bureaucracy I have covered, and it has always held up: nowhere more so than in the case of the British Conservative Party. The only way to explain it is to assume that agents of the Left, determined to lead it to destruction, have seized its leadership. The Conservatives are entering a tight election with one heavy burden. The public see them as the party of the plutocracy. On its own this would not be such a handicap. Very few people just hate the rich for being rich.

In some respects David Cameron has been a lucky politician. Lucky that his predecessors had failed so completely that his initial brand of so-called modernisation seemed a punt worth taking. Lucky that he faced Gordon Brown, not Tony Blair. Lucky that he could pivot from 'sharing the proceeds of growth' to 'we're all in it together' without too many people noticing (or caring too much). Lucky, above all, that he now faces Ed Miliband. Because however you dress it up, this has not been a happy government. In economic terms - the defining issue of the age - his party has missed many of its most important targets. Functionally-speaking, George Osborne's record in office has followed Alistair Darling's 2010 plans more than it resembles Osborne's own projections from five years ago.

Entering ‘Politicians are…’ into the Google search bar brings predictable results. Well, mostly. In amongst ‘liars’, ‘scum’ and ‘all the same’, Google suggests ‘lizards’: David Icke’s reptilian illuminati are still in the spotlight. Number five on the list is predictable: politicians are ‘out of touch’. Minding the gap has been central to British politics for years. Politicians, the line goes, are out of touch with reality, and, to make things worse, spend their whole time in Westminster, only visiting their constituencies to try to hang onto the seat. Yet some canny MPs are beginning to change this impression. This is the first general election where social media will be truly pervasive.