Uk politics

There’s nothing wrong with negative campaigning in an election. If you think your opponents would damage the country, then you should point it out. What’s wrong with negative campaigning is when it’s the only sort of campaigning you’re doing, or when the balance appears to be tipping in its favour in terms of your key messages and big attention-seeking posters. The Tories are currently facing accusations that they are doing too much negative campaigning, and so today David Cameron tried to defend that campaign when he appeared on Sky's Murnaghan programme.

Amidst the hullabaloo of the general election campaign, one thing that has generally gone unnoticed in Britain’s political discourse is the worsening Greek situation. You now have European finance ministers openly talking about the possibility of a Greek default. What has changed is that there is now no goodwill and very little trust between Greece and the rest of the Eurozone. The rest of the Eurozone think that the Greeks are obfuscating and not providing the details needed. While the Syriza-led Greek government feel that the rest of the Eurozone is not providing them with the political cover they need to make a deal. They feel that the Eurozone’s insistence that Athens runs a Budget surplus even before debt repayments have been taken into account is unreasonable.

With less than two weeks until polling day, it’s nice to see that Ed Miliband has discovered foreign policy as an important issue worth discussing. The Labour leader will attack the Tories today on a failure of post-conflict planning for Libya which has contributed to the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean. The Conservatives have decided to get very cross about this, claiming that the overnight briefing on this included Labour spinners saying the Tory party was responsible for the deaths. They have decided to make this about Miliband’s fitness to be Prime Minister.

Jim Murphy held a street rally in Edinburgh today. Given many of the election events from the main parties have been behind closed doors, the Scottish Labour leader deserves credit for pitching up right outside the Scottish National Gallery and standing for about an hour in a space where real genuine members of the public were walking.  He was, of course, protected by a rubber ring of activists wearing T-shirts with key Scottish Labour pledges on it, such as ending exploitative zero hours contracts and lowering tuition fees. They had placards with #toriesout splashed across them. And given the rally was secret and only advertised to the media before it happened, there wasn’t much of an opportunity for real genuine members of the public to plan to pop by and ask questions.

The Ukip fox may have entered the Westminster henhouse but how many more chickens will it kill? ComRes has released a new poll revealing that Ukip is trailing in third place in ‘ten Conservative-held seats which Ukip have targeted’. Across the polled seats, the Tories are on 39 per cent, Labour on 28 and Ukip trailing on 21. While the latter party's vote share has increased by 15 per cent since 2010, ComRes's findings suggests they will struggle to win thanks to the collapse in the Liberal Democrat vote. According to the poll, a quarter of Lib Dem voters in these seats say they will now back Labour and 21 per cent will back the Tories. But Ukip is not happy at all with this poll, with party source describing it as a 'terrible way of doing the poll'.

So both the BBC and Andrew Marr have admitted to misquoting David Cameron as having said that foxhunting was his favourite sport. But what did Cameron himself think of Marr’s self-described ‘cock up’? Well, The Spectator caught up with the Tory leader earlier today and asked him about it – and here’s his answer: ‘The old mental filing system, you’re going ‘drrrrrr’ through, and thinking… but I knew the article because I wrote it myself… I just thought maybe there’s something else. You never know, something might have been written by someone else. So I thought it was bollocks. And it was bollocks.’ Was there perhaps a spot of truth in it?

Labour is proposing to balance the current not the overall budget. This is presumably because they think that borrowing to spend money on capital projects is a sensible policy. But you wouldn’t have known that from watching Ed Miliband on BBC1 just now. In response to questions from Evan Davis, Miliband was determined not to say that Labour would borrow to invest. In a highly disciplined performance, Miliband would also not engage with Davis’ questions about inequality and whether it was a good thing if everyone got richer even if the gap between rich and poor widened. Indeed, Miliband was so cautious that you began to wonder if he’s started to think that this is now his election to lose.

David Cameron’s inner circle are always keen to talk up the parallels between this campaign and 1992. This week, the winner of that election will enter the fray on their behalf. As I report in the Mail on Sunday, John Major will give a speech warning of the dangers to the Union itself if the United Kingdom ends up with a Labour government propped up by the SNP. The Tories hope that Major’s intervention will elevate this point above the usual party political knockabout. They also believe that a former Prime Minister speaking out will make voters pay attention; they were much struck by how much coverage Tony Blair’s speech on the dangers of an EU referendum received a few weeks back. That the Tories have asked Major to get involved is telling.

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.

An hour and a half watching Ed Miliband debate four people who are not going to be Prime Minister. That is the ordeal you had to go through in order to be qualified to answer Survation’s post-debate poll, which included the ‘sensational’ result that respondents preferred Ed Miliband to David Cameron by 45% to 40%. The figure set some even seasoned commentators agog at Ed’s miraculous turnaround on the preferred Prime Minister stakes, following years of languishing twenty or so points behind the Conservative leader. Everyone should hold their horses. People who watch debates are, at the best of times, the electorally aware and highly partisan, largely tuning in to have their prejudices confirmed.