Welcome to The Spectator's live coverage of the Q&A session with David Cameron and Ed Miliband on Channel 4 and Sky News. We'll be providing the latest developments and analysis on the programme, starting at 9pm this evening. This page will automatically reload.
Tonight Ed Miliband and David Cameron will be interviewed by Jeremy Paxman in two separate interviews, after Cameron declined to do a head-to-head interview with the Labour leader. Now, Mr S hears that the prospect of a Paxman grilling has been keeping Miliband up at night. Word reaches Steerpike that Miliband has hired the help of American public relations guru Michael Sheehan to prepare him for the interview. Sheehan - who has worked closely with Barack Obama - has been trying to help Miliband improve his public speaking ahead of tonight's event. This is not the first time Ed has tried to emulate Obama, he previously enlisted the help of David Axelrod, one of the president's most senior advisers, for his election campaign.
‘Would you like a glass of pink champagne?’ asks Alex Salmond at 3.30 p.m., sounding very much like a man settling down for the afternoon. It’s Monday and Scotland’s former first minister has cause to celebrate. He spent the previous day musing on television about the price he’d demand for the SNP supporting Ed Miliband in the Commons, and his thoughts dominate the front pages. There’s plenty of outrage at the idea of the SNP toying with England, and outrage is just what he wanted. So champagne it is. He has found himself an unlikely star of the Tory election campaign; the party this week released a cartoon showing him playing a whistle while Miliband dances.
Ed Miliband had a disastrous PMQs today after the Labour leader claimed the Tories would raise VAT, only to have David Cameron deny that he would increase the tax. Besides leaving Miliband lost for words, Cameron's pledge has also left a massive hole in Labour's election campaign. It was only yesterday that Ed Balls unveiled a snazzy new poster, which contained a big ‘VAT’ swinging into a warning about the Tories’ plans. With their key line now discredited, will someone find a landfill stuffed with Labour posters in a few days time?
Cameron expected to walk into a firestorm of mockery at PMQs following his retirement bombshell. Quitter. Lame duck. Get yer pipe-‘n’-slippers. But barely an audible jibe was flung from the Labour benches. The Tories on the other hand greeted Ed Miliband with a roar that scared the pigeons in Parliament Square. Miliband and his superwonks had conceived a brilliant plan. Well, brilliant if you’re a superwonk. All available questions would be used to amass a Great Pyramid of Betrayals out of the PM’s broken promises over five years. Pointless really. Strictly for the bubble. No hope of making ‘the Six’. And Cameron wrong-footed Miliband. Asked to promise not to hike VAT, the PM assented, ‘Yes’.
The most remarkable poll of the week was the one which suggested the British public find Ed Miliband more of a toff than David Cameron. It takes something to out-toff an Old Etonian with a patrician air and liking for green wellies. But is it so very surprising? Ed has, after all, just shown himself to be on the friend of wealthy idlers, by hinting that the brunt of tax rises in a Labour government would fall instead on those who work for a living. Ed Miliband began well in the last Prime Minister's Questions before the election. He noted David Cameron's direct answer to James Landale’s direction question on his future as prime minister and then posed the Prime Minister a direct question of his own: could he rule out a rise in VAT?
In the final PMQs of this session, David Cameron scored his most comprehensive victory. Challenged by Ed Miliband to rule out raising VAT, Cameron got to his feet and simply said ‘yes’. At that point, Miliband’s fox was shot. Cameron then moved from defence to attack, repeatedly challenging Miliband to rule out an increase in National Insurance contributions something that Miliband was not prepared to do. By the end of the exchanges, the Labour benches looked glum and the Tory ones jubilant. In truth, the Labour leader had been set up. The Tories had been planning to rule out raising VAT for some time and had been busy calculating when doing so would have the maximum political impact.
Never one to miss a dig, hats off to the PM at the final PMQs of this parliament for managing to shoehorn a gag about Ed Miliband into a spurious point about the Battle of Bosworth. Responding to a question regarding Richard III from self-noted historian Chris Skidmore, Cameron couldn't help himself: 'Of course, this is the last time someone did in one of their relatives to take the top job and the country ended up in chaos.' The old ones are the best...
“Would you like a glass of pink champagne?” asks Alex Salmond at 3.30pm, sounding very much like a man settling down for the afternoon. It’s Monday and Scotland’s former First Minister has cause to celebrate. He spent the previous day musing on television about the price he’d demand for the SNP supporting Ed Miliband in the House of Commons, and his thoughts dominate the front pages of the newspapers. There’s plenty of outrage at the idea of the SNP toying with England, and outrage is exactly what Salmond wanted. So champagne it is. Salmond has found himself an unlikely star of the Tory election campaign; the party this week released a cartoon showing his playing the whistle while Miliband dances.
PMQs at midday today essentially marks the end of this Parliament. Although Parliament won't formally dissolve until Monday, very little of consequence will happen in the next few days.The main topics for debate at today's PMQs not hard to predict: the PM's gaffe about not serving a third term, the booming economy under this government, the NHS and, if we are lucky, 'two kitchens' all are going to come up. For the first time in recent weeks, Miliband has the opportunity to put Cameron on the back foot. As one Labour insider told me yesterday, the talk of a Tory leadership contest has presented Labour with the opportunity to show that the Prime Minister is 'seriously frit'.
Faragephobia reached dizzy new heights on Sunday afternoon, when a bunch of thespians and circus freaks invaded Nigel Farage’s local pub and hounded him and his family out. Behaving with grating and probably knowing irony like small-minded Little Englanders, though dolled up as punkish outsiders, the protesters were basically saying to Nige: ‘Your sort aren’t welcome here — you're barred!’ And so was a public figure humiliated while doing that utterly non-public thing of lunching with his wife and young daughters — turfed out of his own local hangout by people who don’t like his policies on immigration, the NHS, and other stuff.
Miliband finally got some good media coverage this weekend. Alas, it was David rather than Ed who was on the receiving end. The Labour leader's brother was branded 'Celebrity Big Brother' in a glowing profile in the Sunday Times. According to well sourced 'friends', the former Foreign Secretary turned Labour leadership loser has conquered America and is ready to ride back as a white knight. 'David wants Ed to be prime minister. End of story', says a spokesman. Yet reading between the lines, things are obviously still a little bit tense. On Budget Day, David failed to mention his sibling once despite tweeting all the way through his brother's scatty response to Osborne's budget.
After Sarah Vine took Ed Miliband to task in an acerbic Daily Mail column for having a bare kitchen, the wife of Michael Gove received a grilling on the BBC's This Week from both Alan Johnson and Michael Portillo. Now, Mr S's colleague Tanya Gold has joined in. Writing in this week's edition of the Spectator, Gold takes time out of her review of the restaurant Kitty Fisher's - which is a favourite of David Cameron's - to call Vine both 'an idiot' and 'a pox': 'Here I address Sarah Vine, or Mrs Michael Gove, the Daily Mail columnist who analysed the smaller of the so-far-discovered Miliband kitchens and decided that Labour is, on the basis of its contents alone, moribund. Sarah, you’re an idiot, an anti-journalist, a pox.
With just over six weeks to go to polling day, the mood of the parties is now largely determined by the opinion polls. This morning’s crop are a mixed bunch. Survation for the Mail on Sunday has a 4 point Labour lead, YouGov has Labour two ahead but Opinium has the Tories on 36% and ahead by three. What seems clear is that the Budget hasn’t had a decisive impact on the polls. Yet most Tory MPs, including those who’ve been highly critical of Osborne in the past, are happy with it. One senior backbencher told me, ‘Burnishing a reputation for responsibility is more valuable than anything else. Glitzy giveaways wouldn’t have worked.
After months of negotiations, a final deal on debates has now been reached. There will be no head to head debate between Cameron and Miliband. Instead, there will be one seven way debate on April 2nd broadcast on ITV. There will also be an opposition leaders’ debate on the 16th of April on the BBC featuring Labour, the SNP, UKIP, the Greens and Plaid Cymru. On top of these debates, David Cameron and Ed Miliband will both do separate interviews, taking questions from a studio audience on Thursday for a Channel 4 / Sky programme. Then, on 3oth of April, Cameron, Miliband and Nick Clegg will appear separately on a special edition of Question Time.
Cooking statistics Ed Miliband was photographed in a miserable kitchen, but it turned out to be only a snack preparation room which he has in addition to a large kitchen downstairs. What is the state of the nation’s kitchens? — The average size in England, according to official data, is 11 square metres. Five per cent of homes have a kitchen smaller than five square metres and 17 per cent have kitchens large than 15 square metres. Some 13 per cent have, like Ed’s, a separate utility room or second kitchen. — 955,000 English homes are estimated to have a hygiene problem, and in 4 per cent of these the cleanability of the kitchen is deemed to be an issue.
David Cameron is too cowardly, or too cynical, to debate with Ed ‘Two or Possibly Three Kitchens’ Miliband — which depends entirely on the breath of your own cynicism — or is he perhaps just too busy eating? (Here I address Sarah Vine, or Mrs Michael Gove, the Daily Mail columnist who analysed the smaller of the so-far-discovered Miliband kitchens and decided that Labour is, on the basis of its contents alone, moribund. Sarah, you’re an idiot, an anti-journalist, a pox.
I suppose we’re going to have to suffer these confections until the first week of May. But it’s beginning to get my goat. First we had Ed Miliband trying to pretend he was a normal human being. Inviting a camera crew into his house. Ed posing in one of his many kitchens, looking about as comfortable as a man with an enraged porcupine sellotaped to his scrotal sac. Now the Prime Minister is doing the same thing. David Cameron in a scruffy T-shirt preparing sardines on toast for his missus. Yep, just like he does every day. All for the benefit of the media and to convince us, ahead of the election, that they live a bit like we do. Please give it a rest. We know you’re politicians and hail from a strange, distant, planet characterised by affluence and a kind of sociopathy.
What a load of mendacious balls everybody talks about Scotland. It’s like a disease. It’s like, you know how they say Ebola probably started in some festering bat cave in Guinea? Well, the referendum campaign was that cave. We had secret oilfields and fantasies about the NHS and endless guff about austerity being done for evil Tory fun, and the VOW the VOW and, dear God, the relief when it ended. Only it didn’t end. Instead it spread. And it set the tone. People talk now, for example, about an SNP/Labour coalition. As though this would make sense, when they must know it wouldn’t at all. As though Ed Miliband would even fit in Alex Salmond’s pocket, and Salmond (or Nicola Sturgeon, but only Scottish people talk about her) would want him there.
That was a motto-blaster of a budget. George Osborne deployed half a dozen chewy new Tory slogans during this afternoon’s statement. ‘Britain walking tall again. … a country built on savings not debt … ten pounds off a tank under the Tories … Britain – the comeback country …’ It’s unclear whether: a) Lynton Crosby feeds him these soundbites b) Osborne auditions them on a freelance basis hoping to catch the great auteur’s ear. He repeatedly called the country ‘one United Kingdom’ as well, bolstering Conservative claims that Labour is ready to sell Great Britain for dog-meat in a traitor’s deal with the SNP. He doled out good news on every side.
