Uk politics

How can the Conservatives deal with Labour's attack on the cost of living? As I explained last week, the party believes that the best way to address the opposition's focus on living standards is to talk about the bigger picture rather than the 'footling little things'. Senior Tories I've spoken to in the past week are very confident indeed that because they enjoy the trust of voters on the economy, while voters still blame Labour for the mess, they don't need to worry about the strategy that Ed Miliband has adopted. One senior figure remarked to me this weekend that 'Labour has mis-fired: when we've got such a poll lead on the economy, why should voters think anything Labour has to say about cost of living is credible?

Will any Tories except Cameron and Osborne applaud the Help to Buy mortgage scheme? At an IEA fringe event this evening, discussing lessons to be learnt from the recession, all the members present of the Free Enterprise Group of Tory MPs all conveyed their concern at the plans the Prime Minister has accelerated this weekend. Former banker Andrea Leadsom said she was 'exceedingly concerned' and suggested the property cap should be lowered from £650,000 to £350,000. Chris Skidmore agreed the cap is too large while Kwasi Kwarteng (leader of the group) said he was 'uneasy about governments propping up credit markets in such a direct way'. The Free Enterprise Group have been heralded as the future of the Conservative party, but the present party is listening to them too.

In Manchester this week, there’ll be much talk from the Tories about how they are gunning for a majority. But in private, many senior Tories will admit that being the largest party in another hung parliament is a more realistic aim. As Matthew d’Ancona reveals in the Telegraph this morning, there has been talk—albeit brief-- between the principals about a second coalition. Matt also reminds us how, if it had not been for Cameron’s intervention, a mansion tax would have been imposed by the coalition. I suspect that if there is to be another coalition, the Liberal Democrats would insist on some kind of mansion tax. It has come for them a proxy for wider questions about how much influence they would wield inside a second Tory-Lib Dem coalition.

That the Conservatives were going to announce a marriage tax allowance at their party conference had to be one of the worst kept secrets in Westminster since the date of the last general election. So they've managed to go one better than the £750 allowance proposed by their 2010 manifesto with David Cameron announcing in the Daily Mail tomorrow that people will be able to transfer £1,000 of their personal tax allowance to their spouse or civil partner.

One of the most important things about British politics right now is that the left is united and the right is divided. The combination of the Liberal Democrats going into coalition with the Tories and Ed Miliband’s leadership of the Labour party has seen left-wingers who moved from Labour to the Liberal Democrats during the Blair years go back to Labour. At the same time, Ukip has started eating into the Tory core vote. Combine this with constituency boundaries that hugely favour Labour and it becomes evident that Labour can win with nowhere near 40 percent of the vote. If the Tories are to stop this happening, they need to reunite the right: to win back the vast majority of those voters who have moved to Ukip. Doing this is going to take a combination of carrot and stick.

If you're looking for two phrases to summarise this year's Labour conference, they'd be 'Britain can do better than this' (in case you missed its fleeting reference in Ed Miliband's speech) and 'bring it on'. Ed Miliband has decided that even though he doesn't poll above his party like Cameron, or have a history of impressing in broadcast and question-and-answer performances like Nick Clegg, he can still enter a presidential-style 2015 election without fear.