Tories

It’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for Nick Clegg. He’s a decent man who took a tough decision to put his party into coalition with the Conservatives, and lost half of his support as a result. Tomorrow, his party will be hammered. His great miscalculation was imagining that in England the Lib Dems would emerge with a list of achievements voters would applaud – as they did in the 2003 Holyrood elections when, after four years of coalition, the Lib Dems overtook the Scottish Conservatives to become the third-largest party. On the radio the other day Clegg vainly paraded his boast list, his own version of Kelly Clarkson’s Because of You. 'It’s because of us that 27 million people have received huge tax cuts.

Mr S reported over the weekend that Rupert Murdoch has jetted in to Britain ahead of the election. Now in the UK, the media mogul, and arch rival of Ed Miliband, is expected to be running a tight ship across all News UK titles as polling day approaches. So Mr S couldn't help but wonder which bright spark thought it was a good idea to place an advert from the Sun with a press agency offering money in return for a 'good-news story' about the Conservatives: https://twitter.com/montie/status/595597162030956545 The advert, which conveniently expired at 4.00pm today, offered Tory voters £100 for such stories but also required them to be available to be photographed within the next two hours.

The Tories were less than pleased last week when Danny Alexander revealed confidential communications between the coalition partners regarding child benefit to a paper, as part of an election campaign ambush. The disclosure brought back up old tensions in the coalition, with Michael Gove claiming that it simply served as a reminder of the party's true colours. 'I don’t think it took the leak from Danny Alexander to make us aware of what the Liberal Democrats are really like,' he told Mr S. Still, with no majority in sight for the Tories ahead of polling day, the party are in a forgiving mood with regards to working with the party in the future .

When election day dawns, it’s worth bearing in mind that two million more people will be going to work than when David Cameron came to power. On an average day in Britain, there are 1,500 fewer reported crimes than there were before Theresa May was made Home Secretary. Some 2.2 million pupils now attend independent schools within the state system — schools given freedom through Michael Gove’s reforms. There is nothing theoretical about the advantages of Conservatism: they can be seen in classrooms, workplaces and streets all over Britain. But all this progress could be brought to a halt within the next week. If Ed Miliband is elected, it will not be the richest who suffer most. They may pay more in tax — but, on the whole, they can afford to.

Post Blair’s government, Alastair Campbell has billed himself as a pious, ethical commentator on the state of the media and politics. If there’s one thing he can’t stand, it’s the negative campaigning from the Tories, and especially from his old foe Lynton Crosby: ‘Meanwhile lest anyone dare to say the Tories are only fighting a negative campaign against Labour, perish the thought... I have seen some dire campaigns in my time. Crosby’s Michael Howard 2005 vintage springs to mind. But this one is taking all the awards for the direst. They are not so much making it up as they go along as going along not sure what they just made up. It is squalid and pathetic. It is not even worth calling it a campaign.

In 1997, Labour could assert with a straight face that it was ‘the party of the countryside’, because it genuinely competed with the Tories for rural votes. Today, an electoral map of England is a sea of blue rural constituencies dotted with clusters of urban red. Looking forward to May, the latest polls have the two main parties neck and neck, with the Tories on 34 per cent and Labour one point behind. This reflects an unhealthy urban-rural political divide that has rarely been more extreme. Labour is as unlikely to make in-roads into rural Conservative heartlands as the Tories are to win large numbers of seats in northern urban seats, making a clear victory for either party almost impossible.

A Lib Dem West Country MP told me at the start of the year that he thought his party would keep his seat if the Tories were broadly ahead in the national polls on polling day but lose it if they were level or behind. His thinking was that if it looked like Cameron was going to continue as Prime Minister his constituents would both feel it was safe to vote for a local champion and would want some protection against the Tories cutting public services too far. But if the Tories were behind, he feared that these swing voters would feel that they had to vote Tory to try and stop Labour. This is what makes the current polls particularly concerning for the Lib Dems. If they don’t move, then they could face a bigger squeeze than expected in their Tory facing seats.

Jonathan Freedland has written a compelling column on the challenge that Ed Miliband will face to establish his legitimacy if he becomes Prime Minister despite Labour not having won the most seats or votes. But I suspect that whoever becomes the government after May the 8th will have difficulty in persuading everyone that they have a right to govern. The Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition could claim that 59 per cent of voters had backed its constituent parts. It also had a comfortable majority in the House of Commons with 364 out of 650 seats. Now, unless something dramatic happens, no governing combination is likely to have anything like that kind of support this time round.

Earlier this year Mr S revealed how plans for a set of campaign posters for the Conservative candidate Flick Drummond had to be revised after the Tories realised that from a distance the poster could be misread as another word starting with F. Now Matthew Hancock has fallen victim to an unforeseeable error in his own campaign literature. A Lib Dem supporter has noticed an unfortunate fault that occurs on folding the Tory MP's campaign leaflet: Mr S hopes no one gets the wrong idea.

This week David Cameron invited Ukip voters to 'come home' to the Conservative party. 'Come with us, come back home to us rather than risk all of this good work being undone by Labour,' he pleaded at a campaign event. However for all of Cameron's talk, Labour sources claim that the Tories would be quite happy to form a coalition with Ukip after the election. Now, Jonathan Reynolds, the Labour MP for Stalybridge and Hyde, says that a pact has been made in Tameside, the Greater Manchester borough, between Ukip and the Tories. It's claimed that the parties have agreed not to stand against each other in a number of wards for the local election in order to increase their chances of beating Labour.

To form a coalition, David Cameron had to give up the Prime Ministerial prerogative to determine when the election was called. But it is hard to imagine that, given the choice, he would have gone to the Palace any earlier than Monday. The Tories have merely drawn level with Labour in recent weeks and there hasn’t been a poll yet which points to him winning a majority. This will be the most polled campaign in British history. On the day it started, depending on your choice of pollster, the Tories were four points ahead of Labour, four points behind or dead level. But one clear theme is emerging from this cacophony of data: a hung parliament is the most likely election result. The polls suggested a hung parliament for most of the 2010 campaign. But they were not taken seriously.

Perhaps, the biggest question of this campaign is whether the Tories will gain support in the next five and a bit weeks. If they don't, Cameron will almost certainly lose and Ed Miliband will become Prime Minister. In his column today, Danny Finkelstein looks at polling data produced by Andrew Cooper of Populus to see what the chances are of a late surge. Cooper looked at those who prefer Cameron to Miliband as Prime Minister and also think that the Tories would manage the economy better than Labour but are currently not saying they’ll vote Tory. In Cooper’s poll of 10,000 voters, conducted in five waves, this group made up 18% of those likely to vote.

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.