Labour party

As regular readers will be aware, Mr S has tracked the growing hostility toward the press at Labour Party events. Today's manifesto launch was no different. The Labour leader took the extraordinary step of pre-butting jeers and boos from audience members toward journalists, by asking them to hear the media out: 'Now, we're going to take questions. I just want to say something in advance of these questions. I talked earlier about the kind of country we believe in. And what's really important in the country we believe in is that we have a press that ask difficult questions and it's really important that we hear these questions respectfully because it is who we are as a country.

Even Tory insiders admit that while they broadly had the better of the first week of the campaign, Labour had the better of the week just gone.  This makes it imperative for their hopes of re-election that the Tories wrest back the initiative this week. As I say in the Mail on Sunday, if they don’t, Tory discipline—which is already beginning to fray a bit—will crack, and Ed Miliband will have the keys to Number 10 within his grasp. The Tories have made a decent start to this task. Labour has been unsure of how to respond to the Tories’ commitment to give £8 billion more to the NHS.

Earlier this month the Sun's election website ran a story about their plans to back Labour. In the online article, they teased that the paper was backing Labour, something which would come as a shock given that their owner Rupert Murdoch has an ongoing feud with Ed Miliband. IT'S OFFICIAL: We're first out of the traps... http://t.co/nmQZX3lzAJ #SunNation pic.twitter.com/Tr4oxLI8x5 — Tim Gatt (@TimGatt) April 2, 2015 However, upon further reading of the article it became clear that instead of backing Miliband in the general election, they were simply supporting a rather dashing mutt called Labour in a greyhound race.

Ed Miliband famously forgot to mention the deficit in his 2014 conference speech, but you would have thought that at least some prospective Labour MPs consider it to be a crucial issue facing Britain. The country is, after all, spending £46bn a year on debt interest payments alone – the equivalent of the Defence, Home Office and Foreign Office budgets combined. But not so, according to new research presented at a briefing by Ipsos MORI this morning. The pollster interviewed new prospective parliamentary candidates from each of the four main parties - all standing in marginal or safe seats - and asked them to name their political priorities. Of the 29 Labour PPCs surveyed, not a single one brought up the £75bn budget deficit as a key issue facing Britain today.