Uk politics

Well, Labour has started on its own mission of framing the post-election legitimacy debate. Responding to the Tory operation to prepare the public for what might happen from 8 May onwards, Ed Miliband’s party is now claiming that David Cameron is determined to stay in Downing Street even if his coalition loses its majority. A senior Labour official has told the Guardian: ‘All the noise coming out of the mouths of David Cameron and Nick Clegg is about how they can cling on to power even if their coalition loses its majority.’ Labour needs to set up a narrative of a desperate David Cameron holed up in Downing Street, refusing to relinquish the trappings of office.

One of Britain’s great traditions is the open garden afternoon: an opportunity for folk revelling in being both middle-aged and nosy (like me) to wander around other people’s plots and peer at what they’ve planted while scoffing large slices of cake. The National Gardens Scheme and Open Squares are two of the most popular, and while they do allow people to see the true beauty of someone else’s well-maintained dahlia bed or snowdrop collection, they also help us indulge in that also very British tradition of pointing at the strange things people put in their back yards.

Nicky Morgan’s record as Education Secretary is coming under fierce attack in the Loughborough market place where she’s campaigning. A furious man is telling activists that he will never vote for the Tory candidate because of ‘what she’s done’. The campaigners brace themselves for a diatribe about Tory education policies. Instead, it turns out that his complaint is that ‘she’s kept all the kids in school for longer’. This has had a devastating effect, not on the kids themselves, but on the fish and chip shops in Yarmouth and Skegness, where this particular voter cannot now buy a delicious feast as he’d wish. ‘Rubbish!’ he bellows, as one Tory member tries to tell him that a better education is a good thing for children.

Tonight’s Question Time special with Cameron, Miliband and Clegg provided the best television of this campaign so far. A well-informed audience relentlessly pressed the three leaders on their weakest points. At the end of the evening, an ICM poll for the Guardian gave the evening to Cameron by 44 per cent to Miliband’s 38 per cent with Clegg garnering 19 per cent support. Miliband’s didn’t have a great night and his most awkward moment came on the record of the last Labour government. The audience were audibly irritated by his repeated refusal to concede that the last Labour government had spent too much money. Under questioning from the audience, Miliband also went further than he previously has in ruling out a deal with the SNP.

If some polls are to be believed, Labour won’t exist in Scotland after next week. All suggest it will be a considerably pruned branch of the party. Whatever happens, the campaign Scottish Labour has had to fight since the referendum shows a party coming to terms with the shocking realisation that safe seats cannot stay safe if you don’t bother to talk to voters in them. One Labour MP is notorious among colleagues for boasting in the years before this election that his canvassing involved walking around in the high street of his constituency and marking down people who greeted him as Labour voters. What a shock this election, where the party is having to go to those voters’ homes, knock on their doors and make an effort with them, must be.

David Cameron continues his anti-SNP campaign today, launching what the Times calls his ‘strongest attack so far’ on a Labour-SNP government. The Prime Minister tells the paper that there are ‘ten days to save the United Kingdom’, which is an echo of Tony Blair’s ‘24 hours to save the NHS’ and William Hague’s less successful ‘last chance to save the pound’. The Conservatives are increasingly talking about the SNP and spending money on billboards featuring a thieving Alex Salmond because they say this message is cutting through in marginal constituencies. But the SNP’s retort is that even if people are bringing the SNP up on the doorstep, it may make little difference to how they vote.

David Cameron is known as the ‘essay crisis’ Prime Minister, and today he did little to dispel that impression. With just 10 days to go until the election, Cameron produced a passionate, excited speech in which he insisted that he was ‘pumped’ about the election and about fighting Labour. Afterwards, when asked what he’d had for breakfast, he roared ‘PORRIDGE!’ with alarming fervour. This is the second furiously enthusiastic speech the Prime Minister has given in as many days, and it represents a significant shift in his tone after accusations of a boring and lacklustre campaign. Boring is, of course, the way Lynton Crosby would rather have it.

David Cameron has been bugged in this campaign by the question of whether he’s passionate enough, of whether he really wants it. When Fraser and I asked him about why so many people aren’t sure of whether he has the passion for it a few days back, he replied, ‘I don’t know. There is something about me—I always manage to portray a calm smoothness or something.’ He then went on to explain why as a Conservative he wants to know what the plan is, not just what the passion is. As he quipped, ‘plan plus carrying out a plan equals dream. Dream plus rhetoric equals chaos.’ But in a speech in Yeovil today, Cameron gave his best answer yet to this passion question. listen to ‘'We can do it!

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.