Ed miliband

Tuesday

Steerpike

Another joker comes out for Labour

Eddie Izzard, Martin Freeman, Steve Coogan and Russell Brand. What is it with professional funny-men backing Labour? It's a little odd that when Miliband is trying to show the world what a serious, potential statesman he can be, he puts jokers in Labour's election broadcasts. Robert Webb, of Mitchell and Webb fame, is the latest to come out for Ed: 'I don’t need the Labour Party to have the kind of leader you’d want to put on a T-shirt and God knows they continue to oblige me. Ed Miliband’s favourite track is probably “Persuading in the Name Of” by Reform Against the Machine. It’s not my rage he needs, it’s my vote. He can’t do any of the above unless he’s prime minister. I know what to do about that. What will you do?

Steerpike

Cameron wins 81 seat majority in the (junior) General Election

At last, David Cameron has won an election. First News, a weekly newspaper for school children, organised a national Junior General Election and surprisingly the PM has romped home with 40 per cent of the vote. The Greens beat both Clegg and Farage, and Miliband managed just 22 per cent of the vote. Running these numbers through the BBC's election seat calculator, it would give Cameron 407 seats and a majority of 81. Here are the results in full: David Cameron, Conservative: 40 per cent Ed Miliband, Labour: 22 per cent Natalie Bennett, Green: 18 per cent Nick Clegg, Lib Dem: 9 per cent Nigel Farage, UKIP: 6 per cent Nicola Sturgeon, SNP: 4 per cent Leanne Wood, Plaid Cymru: 1 per cent Numbers that the Tories could only dream of polling on Thursday.

Daniel Jackson

Scotland is on the verge of becoming a one-party state

My constituency is one of the SNP’s most coveted prizes. If they win in Midlothian they can win almost anywhere. This is Gladstone’s old seat, where the modern political campaign was born. He wrested it away from the Conservatives in 1880, after a series of stirring speeches on the government’s foreign policy failures. On Thursday the SNP are hoping to pull off a similar upset. The momentum behind the nationalists is incredible. Everything I’ve seen and heard in the last couple of weeks points to an SNP victory here. My entire family is voting for them. My mother suggested that I should do the same. ‘Give your dead grandfather a vote,’ she said without irony. A straw poll of my neighbours reveals that the rest of my street have become nationalists too.

Monday

Sean Kemp

A beginner’s guide to pulling off a political stunt

It’s an important discipline when watching elections to remind yourself that political parties are staffed by smart, hardworking people and not - despite occasional impressions to the contrary - complete buffoons. One of those moments came on Sunday, as Ed Miliband stood next to a gaggle of glum-looking supporters in a Hastings car park and unveiled a huge limestone slab with his six election pledges carved onto it. You can always tell when a political stunt has gone wrong; it’s the moment when party spokespeople tell you that ‘at least it has cut through’ or ‘well, it got people talking about it’. The problem is that you don’t want people talking about the actual stunt, you want them to be talking about the issues raised.

Ed West

Three reasons why Labour might not actually want to govern

There’s an episode of The New Statesman in which geologists discover that there’s no more oil in the North Sea and the British economy is about to crash; as a result all the parties try their best to lose the election so as not to carry the can for the next five years. Alan B’Stard, put in charge of the Tory campaign because they think him a liability, appears in the election video with Page 3 girls offering free bingo to the voters. Unfortunately, this proves a huge hit with the electorate. A conspiracy theorist might think this is actually happening today, judging by the inertia of the major parties.

Fraser Nelson

Ed Miliband still isn’t being honest about debt. And yes, that matters

The Guardian’s superb live blog was even better than usual this morning when it covered Twitter’s reaction to the Ed Miliband interview: eight tweets, of which five came from Spectator staff. That’s what I call balance: opinion from the full spectrum of opinion in 22 Old Queen St. We were challenging Miliband's claim when he said the debt was "lower than what we inherited" - it was about £200bn higher. I can’t imagine these tweets went down too well with Guardian readers, because an update emerged later saying that the debt/GDP ratio fell. So was Ed speaking the truth after all? I’m rather keen on this topic.

Fraser Nelson

A Labour-SNP alliance will be a political remake of Stephen King’s ‘Misery’

On the radio this morning, Ed Miliband spoke as if he could get a Queen’s Speech passed without speaking to the SNP. This struck some as implausible, but it sounds right to me. Here's the transcript:- Q: Well let’s just be absolutely clear... neither you nor any of your colleagues will have any conversations with anybody from the SNP at any point after the election. A: We’re not going to negotiate about a Queen’s Speech, no. We’re not going to negotiate with the Scottish National…(Interrupted) Q: Well you’re refining my question a little bit aren’t you. A: I don’t think I am John.

Sebastian Payne

Ed Miliband: the stone ‘got people talking’ — and refuses to apologise for borrowing too much (again)

Ed Miliband began the first 15 minutes of his NHS day talking about trust and the deficit. In a feisty interview on the Today programme, the Labour leader again did not apologise for borrowing too much when his party was in government. Instead, he argued it was a failure of banking regulation that lead to Britain’s financial problems: 'Yesterday George Osborne’s permanent secretary at the Treasury Nicholas Macpherson published an article, in which he said that 2008 was a banking crisis pure and simple. And he reflected my judgment which is what happened in the country is that we had a dramatic crisis in banks which lead to high deficit.

Sunday

Steerpike

Labour stays silent over gender segregation at party rally

With polling day less than a week away, it was a case of no rest for the wicked this weekend as politicians took part in some last minute campaigning. While Ed Miliband dreamt about erecting an 8ft 6in stone in Number 10, other members of the Labour party attended a campaign event. Organised by councillor Ansar Ali Khan, Labour members including Tom Watson, Liam Byrne and Jack Dromey joined supporters in Birmingham for a rally: https://twitter.com/JackDromeyMP/status/594177392979083264 However, at the event women in the audience were segregated from men. This issue did not go unnoticed by the party's critics, with many taking to Twitter to ask why Labour, which claims to be a party for equality, would support segregated audiences.

Sebastian Payne

Election podcast special: four days to go

In today's election special podcast, James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I attempt to explain why Ed Miliband unveiled a stone engraved with Labour's six pledges today. Will anyone notice what the pledges are or just discuss the fact they are appearing on a giant stone? We also look at how the stage is set for a last minute Tory surge and why a deal between Labour and the Liberal Democrats is looking increasingly unlikely.

Isabel Hardman

Ed Miliband turns garden designer with scary new sculpture for Downing Street garden

One of Britain’s great traditions is the open garden afternoon: an opportunity for folk revelling in being both middle-aged and nosy (like me) to wander around other people’s plots and peer at what they’ve planted while scoffing large slices of cake. The National Gardens Scheme and Open Squares are two of the most popular, and while they do allow people to see the true beauty of someone else’s well-maintained dahlia bed or snowdrop collection, they also help us indulge in that also very British tradition of pointing at the strange things people put in their back yards.

Damian Thompson

Has the Guardian just called it for Cameron?

The Guardian/Observer website is running with this story headed 'Britain set to face weeks of political paralysis after election poll'. That's a safe prediction. But what's intriguing is that the article – by Daniel Boffey, Toby Helm and Ashley Cowburn – is entirely devoted to the prospect of an extremely shaky Conservative-Lib Dem coalition, harassed or indeed blocked by Vince Cable and right-wing Tories. There's no discussion of a Miliband-led government. Interesting. The Labour-supporting Guardian and Observer give the impression that they're very tentatively calling it for Dave (despite insisting that's it's 'too close to call').

James Forsyth

Will there be a late surge to the Tories?

So, here we are. In 100 hours time, we’ll be half-way through election-day. But at the moment, the polls still remain deadlocked. Yet, there remains a sense that there’ll be some kind of late shift towards the Tories. Is there any grounds for this? Well, I argue in the Mail on Sunday that there are a few things that point towards this. David Cameron has finally hit his stride. His performances have improved markedly and the public appear to have concluded that he clearly won last Thursday’s Question Time, YouGov have the public giving it to him 42% to Miliband’s 26%. As Tim Shipman points out, Cameron’s lead as preferred Prime Minister has risen from 7% two weeks ago to 14% today. Ed Miliband had one on his weakest outings of the campaign on Thursday night.

Steerpike

Thick of It writer ridicules Ed Miliband’s 8ft ‘policy cenotaph’

Ed Miliband has woken up to ridicule this morning after the Guardian unveiled his latest election accessory. No longer content with his trusty lectern, the Labour leader has bizarrely commissioned an 8ft 6in stone inscription which bears Labour's key election promises.   Miliband plans to install this in the Downing Street Rose Garden if he succeeds in getting in to Number 10. Given that the Tories' pledge to protect their tax cuts promise with a law was seen as a 'last minute gimmick', Labour have managed to take the phrase to new heights. In fact, Mr S thinks it all sounds a bit like a plot line from the BBC's The Thick of It. It turns out that the show's writer Simon Blackwell agrees:  Ed Miliband builds a policy cenotaph.

Saturday

Steerpike

Politicians deliver careful messages of congratulations for the royal baby

This morning the Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to a baby girl. The girl, who is the Queen’s fifth great-grandchild, is the fourth in line to the throne. As members of the public began to celebrate, the political leaders were quick to put out their own carefully worded messages of congratulations. With the election less than a week away, each leader must work out how to toe the party line on the monarchy, while not coming across as cold-hearted or too politically-minded. First out of the starting blocks was Nick Clegg who managed to mention both his constituency and his better half Miriam in his messages: https://twitter.com/nick_clegg/status/594444543220654080 https://twitter.

Steerpike

Rupert Murdoch jets into London to see off Miliband

Ed Milband used his interview with Russell Brand as a chance to bash his arch-enemy Rupert Murdoch. The Labour leader claimed that the media mogul is 'much less powerful than he used to be'. The disrespect is mutual: Murdoch has taken to Twitter to mock Miliband for queuing up to shake his hand at his annual summer party only days before he decided to play the Murdoch-slaying hard man. Well, Mr S sees that Miliband will soon have a chance to feel the full weight of Murdoch's power as he has jetted into London ahead of next week's election. https://twitter.com/nravitz/status/593818373844238337 While over here, Murdoch is expected to run a tight ship across all News UK titles as polling day gets closer.

Friday

Sebastian Payne

Election podcast special: six days to go

In today's election podcast special, Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I discuss the most significant moments during the campaign this week. Did Ed Miliband's interview with Russell Brand make any impact? Which moments of the Question Time special will be remembered? And what might happen one week today if the Conservatives are unable to form a government?

Steerpike

Noel Gallagher: Ed Miliband is a f–king communist

Tony Blair once counted Noel Gallagher as one of New Labour's key celebrity backers. However, under Ed Miliband's leadership, Labour can rely on no such support from the musician. In an interview on Alan Carr's Chatty Man, which airs tonight, the former Oasis member said he was unable to endorse any politician out of the current line-up: 'I'm not sure I can get behind any of them at the minute. I dunno. The fact that Cameron didn't turn up for the debate is a disgrace. I think that Miliband, if he gets in, is just going to fail us.' And why would Miliband fail? 'Because he is a f**king communist.' Mr S suspects it's time for Blair to show off his highly prized diplomatic skills and have a word. That's if Labour can afford his services.

Steerpike

Who are the precocious producers of Milibae: The Movie?

Oh dear. Ed Miliband did not have a good run on Question Time last night. After he was grilled by the audience over Labour's history with debt, even the most die-hard Milifan would have struggled to find any sex appeal in his trip as he hurried off the stage. However, Miliband fans are made of tough stuff and haven't yet abandoned their leader in his hour of need. Instead, they have made an entire movie about him, which brings together highlights from the Milifan movement. Warning: contains disturbing images It's unknown whether Milibae: The Movie will be rolled out for nationwide release. However, Mr S was most impressed by the video, which showed a rather precocious knowledge of politics.