Ukip

If social media is going to play a deciding role in the general election, the brains at Conservative HQ ought to take a closer look at who they promote on their Twitter account. The official Conservative Twitter feed has a Tweetminster list of Tory MPs on it which allows their 131,000 followers to catch up with the ramblings of all of their MPs at once. However, a quick inspection of the Tweetsminster list shows that Ukip defectors Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless remain on it despite abandoning the party: This means the Tory Twitter account is letting Ukip reach their audience, as these tweets show...   If the Conservatives plan to unsubscribe from the list, they may want to reconsider this image while they're at it.

At last, an actual dividing line. Ed has used his first proper speech of the 2015 campaign to declare that his party would never, ever leave the EU: 'We must demand reform from Europe—a European Union that works better for Britain. But make no mistake: exit from the EU would be a dramatic mistake for our country and our economy. So, whatever the politics, I will not join those who cynically offer exit as a realistic plan for our future or the future of Britain’s working families.' That should really help Labour shore up their northern heartlands against increasing working-class Euroscepticism and the rise of Ukip. Mr S suspects the Labour leader's position is closer to Cameron's than either would care to admit this side of May.

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.

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.

How much of a threat is Ukip to Labour? The tanks of the people’s army have been on the Conservatives’ lawn for some time but we now have an idea why Labour has been preparing to fight the kippers on the doorstep. Lord Ashcroft has carried out his final round of marginal seats polling this year, focusing on eight seats where the Conservative majority is between 7.1 and 8.1 per cent — plus another four seats where Ukip are threatening Labour. The results aren’t too bad for the Conservatives: out of the seven seats polled on Labour’s target list, they are ahead in just two of them (Ealing Central & Acton and Stevenage).

Ukip's commonwealth spokesperson Winston McKenzie - he of Carnival of Colour fame - is never far from controversy. It was only a matter of time before a devout Ukipper compared their hero Nigel Farage to a deity and we should have all guessed it would be Winston: ‘Jesus was one man. We are his army. Nigel Farage is one man and we are his army and that’s what it’s all about’ Happy Faragemas, everybody.

Today’s Guardian long-read on the Scottish referendum is a great piece of journalism. Both Alistair Darling and Danny Alexander argue in it that when David Cameron stepped out of Downing Street and announced his support for English votes for English laws he allowed the SNP to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, to argue that Scottish voters had been hoodwinked.   Now, to be sure, Alex Salmond make much of Cameron’s announcement. In his Spectator interview he says that it showed that Cameron thinks Scots ‘heads zipped up the back’ and that he didn’t get the enormity of what had just happened.

Would you invite Nigel Farage around for drinks and dinner? Steph and Dom Meet…Nigel Farage shows what happened when the ‘posh couple’ from Gogglebox did just that. The Ukip leader comes across as a pretty ordinary bloke — or at least his projection of one. This Gogglebox special could be seen as either a Ukip party political broadcast or the makings of a political satire — with some great throw away lines. ‘He looks like a frog that’s sat on a nail,’ said Dom in anticipation of his guest’s arrival. ‘Was it the politics that screwed up the first marriage?’ he went on. [caption id="attachment_8947922" align="alignright" width="520"] Steph Parker, Nigel Farage and Nigel Farage.