Uk politics

Has one Ukip defection become less likely? Before Christmas, top Tories were falling over themselves to tell Basildon and Billericay MP John Baron how much they valued him and how seriously they were taking his demands for proper compensation for nuclear test veterans. Baron was very high on the list of MPs likely to defect to Ukip, and did little to assuage the fears of his colleagues by saying things like ‘never say never’ when asked if he might leave the Tories. But this week Ukip selected a candidate in his constituency, which suggests that the party has given up on the Tory MP moving over to join the People’s Army.

Ed Miliband today promised that Labour will offer ‘hope, not falsehood’ in its General Election campaign. It’s a bold pledge given the party is making so much of the claim that the Tories want to reduce public spending to levels not seen since the 1930s - a claim that has foundations made of something oddly similar to sand. Similarly the Tories have today produced an interesting dossier that Miliband’s party has interestingly called ‘dodgy’ because it contains a number of ‘assumptions’. As James explains, that’s part of the plan, as Labour now has to say which cuts it wouldn’t reverse and which it would.

In 2010, David Cameron stumbled in his first New Year broadcast interview over the Tory plans for a married couple’s tax allowance. This slip-up knocked him and his party off course and was a harbinger of the disastrous Tory campaign to come. Today, there were no such mistakes from Cameron as he appeared on Andrew Marr. Instead, he stuck to his competence versus chaos message and tried, fairly successfully, to avoid making any other news. In this campaign, we will see a more disciplined Cameron than the one who fought the 2010 election. The Tories are this time, in contrast to 2010, certain of what their message should be. One challenge for Tory and Labour alike in the next few months is to avoid getting drawn into hung parliament speculation.

There’s an irony about Ukip’s rise. Nigel Farage party’s popularity is driven by a widespread sense that the main parties are all the same. Yet in the past four years, the differences between the Labour party and the Conservatives have grown substantially, on issues from the size of the state to an EU referendum. In an election year you might expect parties to converge in the centre ground as they chased swing voters. It won’t happen this time. Labour is determined to stop left-wingers defecting to the SNP and the Greens, while the Tories, who have long had their own issue on the right because of Ukip, believe that their best chance of victory comes from heightening the contrast between them and the other parties.

Politicians really are quite unfortunate people, aren’t they? Always being misinterpreted. It’s almost as though they speak another language (some Commons debates suggest they do, anyway) and journalists wilfully translate them wrongly. Today Tony Blair has claimed that his remarks about a lefty Labour party losing to a right-wing party have been ‘misinterpreted’. This is what he told the Economist: - There could be an election ‘in which a traditional left-wing party competes with a traditional right-wing party, with the traditional result’ and when asked if that means a Tory win, ‘Yes, that is what happens’. - ‘I am convinced the Labour Party succeeds best when it is in the centre ground.

Why on earth are the Tories using the quiet news period between Christmas and New Year to talk about fox hunting? It’s a question many Conservative MPs are asking, worrying that it will only make their party look more posh and out-of-touch to most voters. Other than that Boxing Day is good day to place a story about hunting (check out Camilla’s festive mount in the Telegraph today), placing the story at all seems like an odd idea. Even Labour are quite chuffed with the story, as it’s not exactly an offensive against the Opposition. They haven’t just used it to bash the Conservatives, but also to needle Ukip on whether the party supports a ban or not. But why have the Conservatives given the Opposition a bit of a gift?

There’s little sign of a Christmas truce in the Conservative party this morning. Instead, the row between Theresa May’s camp followers and the rest of the Conservative hierarchy is still being played out in the newspapers. This might be a particularly public episode of it but this row has been going on in private for quite some time. The cause is really quite simple, Number 10, other Cabinet Ministers and CCHQ believe that May’s followers regularly put promoting her future leadership ambitions above the interests of the party. Harry Cole’s recent profile of May for Spectator Life which claimed that she had given up on Cameron and no longer rated him infuriated both Downing Street and CCHQ. May herself can’t plead ignorance in all this.

The proverbial visitor from Mars would assume that the Scottish Nationalists had won—not lost—September’s referendum. Alex Salmond has given another crowing interview today, you can read mine with him from The Spectator’s Christmas issue here, in which he offers advice to England on how to rediscover itself. While the crisis in Scottish Labour continues. In an interview with The Guardian, Labour’s new Scottish leader Jim Murphy drives home how big a challenge the party faces there, ‘We’re 20% behind. Just to get even we have to close the gap by 1% a week.’ Murphy is also remarkably frank about the quality of the leaders that preceded him.

How has Labour managed to make such a mess of its response to the leak of a document on dealing with Ukip that came out on Monday that it's still having to talk about it on Friday? I've been baffled by the poor crisis comms this week - until I heard Lucy Powell, vice-chair of the party's General Election campaign, trying to field questions on it today on the Daily Politics. Her tactics were to tell the interviewer that the origins of the report were 'irrelevant', an old but useless tactic of spinners that generally encourages the journalist to think the story even more relevant than they did when they started the interview.

More fallout from the Labour Ukip leak reaches me. Some sources in the party remain amazed that it apparently never crossed the desk of Yvette Cooper, given her role in the Ukip strategy group. But there is also considerable amusement about an email, passed to Coffee House, that Lucy Powell sent out describing the briefing pack as 'quick and dirty'. Some might be wishing material produced by HQ wouldn't fit such a racy description. The row over the report is fading, but it seems to have increased some tensions between party frontbenchers. And those who produced the report itself aren't in the best of moods either...