Labour party

When trying to understand George Osborne Budgets, you need to bear in mind the mantra that he and his team live by: in opposition you move to the centre, in government you move the centre. It is this desire to move the centre ground that lies behind Osborne’s keenness to merge income tax and national insurance. As I say in the Mail on Sunday, the thinking behind it is that if people were more aware of how much tax they really paid, they’d be more inclined to vote for low-tax parties. At the moment, National Insurance is one of the taxes people are least aware of as it is simply deducted from their pay cheque. It is no coincidence that the most unpopular taxes—council tax, inheritance tax—are the ones that voters are most aware of paying.

Much excitement, today, about the fact that Ed Miliband is just as unpopular as Nick Clegg. A pre-Budget package by Ispos-MORI contains the finding that both party leaders are actively disliked by 51 per cent of the public. It's a striking result, particularly after the tuition fee furore — yet, sadly, it isn't new. It actually comes from the political monitor that Ipsos MORI released in January. They didn't ask the question for their March political monitor. So far as the Clegg-Miliband divide goes, the latest Ipsos MORI figures actually have this to offer us: net satisfaction with Miliband's performance as party leader is at -5 per cent, whereas it's at -22 per cent for Nick Clegg. So, not great for either leader, but considerably better for MiliE.

Ken Livingstone was out on the stump in Croydon yesterday. So far, Livingstone has not made any election pledges; his entire campaign has been founded on his past record as London Mayor. So, when can Londoners expect to hear what Red Ken plans to do, and how he intends to fund it? 6:30 into this interview with the Mayor Watch website, he said: “On the morning after the election, I’ll let you know.” Thirty seconds later, he repeated himself for clarity's sake.

I do feel for Nick Clegg. He’s taken an oppositionalist party into government, and they hate it. He is politically and psychologically prepared for what goes with power; grassroots LibDems less so. And this brings problems. Yesterday, he was complaining that his party is “too male and too pale”; but his main problem is that there are too few of any. At the peak of Cleggmania, the Lib Dem had 30 per cent of the the vote. Now it’s 10 per cent in the polls. If things continue at this rate, he won’t need a ‘ring of steel’ for his next conference: a phone box will suffice. So, what can he do? His speech tries to define a new word: ‘liberal’. He has this to say: 'For the left, an obsession with the state.

Curiouser and curiouser. We in Coffee House have been saying for some time now that – whatever Mervyn King thinks – Britain has the worst inflation in the Western World apart from Greece. An OECD report out today shows we’ve got it worse than most eastern countries too. Korea, Turkey and Estonia are the only eastern nations with higher inflation: But what strikes me most about today is that food prices are soaring here, to an extent far worse than the rest of the world. This is what voters notice most: putting food on the table is very expensive. As Micawber might put it: annual food price inflation 6.3 per cent, annual wage inflation 2.5 per cent, result: misery. And plenty of it.