Why is David Cameron inviting everyone into his kitchen? The Sun has followed the Prime Minister around with a day-in-the-life video, which starts in his kitchen and includes a recipe for sophisticated sardines on toast while the Standard has an interview with Cameron in this afternoon’s paper that starts… in the kitchen.
Though his Conservative colleagues have largely been very supportive of Grant Shapps during the latest row about his alter ego Michael Green, there is a contingent in the party who aren’t massive fans of the Tory chairman and who have pushed at previous reshuffles to have him removed. As I predicted yesterday, those opponents of Shapps certainly aren’t planning any trouble this side of an election. But that doesn’t mean they’ll leave him alone permanently. One critic whispers: ‘We’re keeping quiet as there is an election imminent. But the knives will be out after that. He lied on radio - and a Cabinet Minister who does that should be toast. And he will be.
Are the Conservatives or Labour wining the ground war in marginal seats? Lord Ashcroft has polled eight key constituencies — of which seven are currently held by Conservatives and one by Labour — that he visited six months ago to see who is winning. In these seats, Ashcroft has found there is currently a five per cent swing away from the Conservatives. According to Ashcroft, Labour is on track to take five of these Tory seats: City of Chester, Croydon Central, Halesowen & Rowley Regis, Nuneaton and Wirral West — the latter being one of the few Tory seats on Merseyside, represented by the employment minister Esther McVey.
It's the last Budget before the election tomorrow and there are just a few days left of the Coalition. Which is why it is hardly surprising that a few of the pre-Budget briefings aren't so much briefings designed to bag policies a bit more coverage but leaks by one party designed to embarrass the other. The Tories had been working on their inheritance tax policy for the Budget but will instead announce it in their election campaign because of Lib Dem opposition. But that hasn't stopped 'sources' leaking Treasury analysis of the planned cut to the tax to the Guardian, and saying 'this looks like a policy to buy more Tory votes to help the wealthy and would be highly regressive in its impact on society'. Those 'sources' don't sound very Tory, do they?
Another week, another set of polls that put Labour and the Tories on an almost level footing. In his weekly national poll, Lord Ashcroft has the Conservatives two points ahead on 31 per cent — down three points from last week — while Labour are on 29 per cent. Today’s Guardian/ICM poll also has the Conservatives slightly ahead, by one point, while Labour has jumped three points to 35 per cent. But the latest The Sun/YouGov’s poll tonight shows the opposite: this poll has Labour two points ahead of the Tories, who are down to 32 per cent. Another poll from Populus yesterday put the two main parties on 34 per cent each. Two weeks to go until the election campaign properly begins and there is still no clear frontrunner.
Labour has decreed today it won’t go into a formal coalition with the SNP, but this won’t stop the Tories from attacking Ed Miliband over the possibility. Despite Miliband's proclamation that 'Labour will not go into coalition government with the SNP' and 'there will be no SNP ministers in any government I lead', a Tory source says 'we'll continue to campaign on this'. So expect more stunts and adverts highlighting the dangers of any union between Labour and the SNP.
Ed Miliband has today ruled out a formal coalition between Labour and the SNP. Labour hope that this will draw the sting from Tory claims that if you vote Labour, you’ll get SNP and put pressure on Cameron to rule out any deal with Ukip. But, as Nicola Sturgeon has been quick to point out, the SNP weren’t keen on a formal coalition. Rather, what has been talked about is something more akin to a confidence and supply deal with the SNP agreeing to vote for Miliband’s Queen Speech and Budget in return for specific concessions. This is something that Miliband, for the obvious reason that he might need it in the event of a hung parliament, doesn’t want to rule out. So, expect the Tory attacks to keep on coming.
Can Nigel Farage survive as leader of Ukip if he doesn’t become an MP? Although he stood in South Thanet ten years ago — and gained a meagre 5 per cent of the vote — he has much bigger hopes for the impending election. But the dangers are also much higher than ever before. As I wrote in the Spectator recently, if Farage doesn't win South Thanet, his position as Ukip leader would become untenable. He admitted to me it ‘could be a car crash’ if he doesn’t become an MP. Farage has publicly admitted today that South Thanet won’t be an easy fight and there is a huge danger if he doesn’t win.
Someone once said (it may have been me) that while the left looks for traitors the right looks for converts. Only in Britain’s centre ground, however, are converts treated as traitors. Maajid Nawaz is one of the most interesting public figures I know. As a young man growing up on the Essex coast, he received an education in both varieties of modern far-right thinking: the racist and the religious. Racist gangs and Combat 18 were active in his area. He reacted against them, as any boy of spirit would. But his reaction took the form of joining Hizb-ut-Tahrir. Hizb was the marijuana or soft porn of radical Islam in the 1990s.
How damaging for the Tories is the row about Grant Shapps’ second job? While it is quite easy to write up the Conservative chairman’s business past in a way that makes him sound like a slightly murky character teaching people how to make a ‘ton of cash’, does the latest story, that Shapps was still running his web marketing business when in Parliament, despite his claims to the contrary, really cut through to voters? The details are as follows: Shapps told LBC three weeks ago that ‘I’ve never had a second job while being an MP, end of story’. But a tape from the summer of 2006 has Michael Green (Shapps) talking about people making a ‘ton of cash’ from his business techniques.
The Liberal Democrats sense an opportunity in all this speculation about who the Tories and Labour would do deals with in the event of a hung parliament. They believe that they can position themselves as the responsible party that will keep the country in the centre ground in contrast to the other smaller parties. Today, in his speech to the party’s spring conference, Clegg ruled out joining any coalition that involved the SNP or Ukip. He also tried to use the moment to reinforce voters’ worries about either main party governing on their own. He argued that the Tories would cut needlessly—‘Cows moo. Dogs bark. And Tories cut.
It seems Tim Farron has rather annoyed his senior Lib Dem colleagues with his quite naked desire to become party leader. After the ambitious MP said that the Lib Dems got 2/10 for the way they'd handled the Coalition, he received a pretty hefty slap down from Lord Ashdown on this morning's Pienaar's Politics on Radio 5Live. The Lib Dem General Election campaign chair didn't bother sending veiled messages to Farron about criticising the party leadership and saying that the Lib Dems are 'dead'. Instead, he just verbally roughed up Farron in the way Farron has been roughing up his own party leadership. 'His well-known ambition would be better served with a little more patience and a little more judgement,' said Ashdown, adding later that 'judgement is not his strong suit'.
George Osborne and Ed Balls have just done their pre-Budget interviews with Andrew Marr. The show, though, was dominated by talks of post-election deals rather than the contents of the Budget. Ed Balls said that Labour had ‘no need, no plan, no desire’ to do any kind of deal with the SNP. But, as Andrew Marr kept pointing out to him, he wouldn’t rule it out. While when George Osborne was asked about any kind of arrangement with Ukip, he simply took the opportunity to repeat the claim that ‘voting for Nigel Farage makes Ed Miliband the likely Prime Minister’. It was a pity, though, that more time wasn’t spent on the Budget as I suspect it will be more substantive than expected. One Downing Street source described it to me as ‘interesting’.
Later today, Vince Cable will launch his traditional conference attack on the Tories. He’ll denounce them for their positions on Europe and immigration. But his pre-conference interview in The Guardian will have, for once, delighted the Tories. For in it, Cable rules out a deal with the SNP. Now, this is a turn-around from Cable. Just last month, he said "We're perfectly happy to work with the SNP. There's no taboo on the SNP.
If general elections were won on how swanky a campaign office is, the Greens would beat the Lib Dems hands down in Bristol West. Their candidate Darren Hall works out of a smart, airy office overlooking the harbour in one of the most expensive commercial parts of the city. It’s all thanks to Vivienne Westwood, who has funded the office as part of her support for the Greens, and given Hall was until recently keeping most of his campaign materials in a garage, it’s quite a step up. Indeed, it puts him in far more glamorous quarters than the Lib Dems, who are working in a garage, albeit a converted one with windows and heaters, in much cheaper Bishopston.
Is Jacob Rees-Mogg confident about reelection in North East Somerset? For the latest Mini Election video, I visited the West Country to speak to Jacob (and his son Peter) about his efforts to hold onto his marginal seat in the upcoming election. Although he was victorious in 2010 with a comfortable majority of 4,91, the constituency was held by Labour — albeit under different boundaries — so he has been campaigning almost non-stop for the last few years. Does he think that British elections are generally becoming too American? We also discussed his long-held belief that the Conservative Party needs to have an electoral pact with Ukip and whether it is too late to unite the right. Rees-Mogg is also concerned about political bias from the BBC over the TV debates.
It’s not just on the Health Select Committee that election fever is starting to take hold. The Public Accounts Committee had a party-political row this week too, with accusations that Tory members had blocked plans to question Lord Green over HSBC. There is now a leak inquiry underway about who from the committee told the Guardian that Tory MPs blocked a bid for Green, while those Conservatives insist that they are happy for him to give evidence if he is needed for the inquiry. This sort of jostling on a committee isn’t particularly surprising given the proximity of an election, but while the PAC by tradition doesn’t have the sorts of stormy votes that other select committees have, it has seen some political tensions.
If mainstream politicians are a bit confused and downbeat at the moment, Scottish Labour MPs are the most miserable of the lot, facing a savaging in constituencies they never thought would slip out of their party’s hands. But last night Ed Miliband gave them reason to be a bit less miserable, just for a little while anyway. On Free Speech, the Labour leader came much closer to ruling out a Labour-SNP coalition than he has before, saying ‘I am saying it’s nonsense. I absolutely am saying it’s nonsense. It’ not gonna… you know… you just said it’. He also pointed out that the SNP had ruled out a coalition with Labour. Of course, the real chances of a coalition were pretty low, given it would seriously damage both parties involved.
Is there a future for compassionate conservatism in Britain? Michael Gove outlined why there are reasons to feel optimistic at a speech at the Legatum Institute last night. The Tory Chief Whip said that many of the ideas promoted by The Good Right project are a core part of the Conservative Party’s mission — but there remains a need to ‘rebalance the debate about what’s best for Britain’. Here are five things you need to know about what Gove said. 1. The Tories need to remember people don’t like them In 2002, Theresa May infamously said that the Conservative Party is viewed by many as the ‘nasty party’.
When Ed Miliband ran for the Labour leadership in 2010, his supporters boasted that he spoke human. Tonight, in a question time session with a group of young people broadcast on BBC3, Miliband showed flashes of his ability to connect with an audience. But, overall, it was a patchy performance. Miliband was very good on some subjects and dealt neatly with some left-field questions. However, he still doesn’t have the right answer to the question of whether he would do a deal with the SNP after the election in the event of a hung parliament. He dismissed the ideas as ‘a piece of nonsense from the Tories’. But, in contrast to a grand coalition with the Tories, he didn’t actually rule it out. Predictably, Miliband got asked about drugs.
