Gordon brown

A striking passage from Peter Mandelson's speech at Mansion House last night: "Starting in the 1980s we allowed the diversity of the British economy – or lack of it - to approach the limits of what was prudent. Sometimes there was an economic fatalism about manufacturing decline and falling British goods exports, rather than seeing them as something that policy and private enterprise should address. Our economy, and certainly our corporate tax base, became too dependent on the City. We were also carrying a huge hidden insurance liability for a sector that was taking badly understood and inadequately policed risks.

A persuasive passage (complete with a spiky, ministerial quote – highlighted) from Rachel Sylvester's column this morning: "There is growing concern among some Shadow Cabinet ministers and strategists about the increasingly aggressive tone Mr Cameron uses against Mr Brown. It is, they believe, no coincidence that the poll gap has narrowed as the Tory leader launches a series of increasingly vitriolic personal attacks on the Prime Minister. Last week, for example, by turning the bully into the victim, Mr Cameron seems to have simply solidified support for Mr Brown. There was a similar backlash to the Conservatives’ misleading 'death tax' poster campaign.

Forget the polls, the markets should be enough to give any of us a sharp dose of The Fear.  Exhibit A: Sterling, which has slumped below $1.50 today, for the first time in nine months, and on the back of what analyists are calling "deficit worries".  And Exhibit B: the UK Gilt markets, where rising interest rates suggest that investors are rapidly losing confidence in Britain's ability to pay back its debt, just as Coffee House's Mark Bathgate warned a few months back.  Check out the FT for the full story. Of course, I say "forget the the polls" – but this is all very poll-related.  The possiblity of a hung Parliament – and, with it, the possibility of political paralysis – is preying heavily on the minds of investors.

So, what did the newspapers make of Cameron's Big Speech?  A brisk stroll through this morning's coverage, and you'll come across the whole gamut of responses: from wholehearted enthusiasm in the Sun, to wholehearted scepticism in the Independent.  But the general tone is somewhere in between: the mitigated praise of, say, the Times or the Guardian.  Which is, I think, fair enough.  The speech struck me as effective, perhaps elegant, without ever quite hitting the heights. But the Tories should only be concerned by the media response insofar as it's a conduit for their own message.  What bits of that message have cut through?  Will that message resonate with voters?  And so on.

As this morning papers’ show, the Tories know that their spring conference here in Brighton offers them a chance to change the narrative of this campaign, to get back on the front foot. William Hague’s speech, the first big set-piece of the event, tried to frame the choice facing the country at the election as being between ‘change or ruin’. Hague warned that if the country doesn’t return a Conservative government at this election, ‘it will be too late...too late to reverse the decline: the debt will be too big, the bureaucracy too bloated, the small businesses too stifled, the slope Britain is sliding down will be too steep.’ Labour will try and say that this language is shrill, a sign of Tory panic. But there’s a lot of truth to it.

Both James and Tim Montgomerie felt that William Hague must be more prominent during this campaign and Cameron has reached the same conclusion. Hague opened the spring confernece with a stark, bleak message: "And I say it is that most crucial election because I believe the choice for Britain is as stark as this: it is change or ruin." He then detailed the easiest illustration of Brown's appalling economic stweardship: a 13 year statistical progress of regression for which Brown, and Brown alone, is responsible. 'When Gordon Brown took over, this, our great country, was the 4th largest economy in the world. Now it is falling behind and forecast within 5 years to be the 11th, behind not just growing giants like China, but behind our neighbours France and Italy.