Isabel Hardman

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.

Ed Miliband has clearly decided that a lectern is the way to help voters imagine him as a Prime Minister, and the Tories have clearly decided that it’s something worth mocking. Here, in case you ever need it, is a graph setting out how often Miliband has used a lectern, and how often David Cameron has. [datawrapper chart="http://static.spectator.co.uk/Jl2hJ/index.html"] It certainly seems a bit odd that the Labour leader needed a lectern in a back garden, or indeed a field, though the official line is that the only reason he has it is that he needs something to hold his notes. However, the party has been trying to play catch up on the question of who would make the best Prime Minister, which Miliband does not do well on. [datawrapper chart="http://static.spectator.co.

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.

There’s nothing wrong with negative campaigning in an election. If you think your opponents would damage the country, then you should point it out. What’s wrong with negative campaigning is when it’s the only sort of campaigning you’re doing, or when the balance appears to be tipping in its favour in terms of your key messages and big attention-seeking posters. The Tories are currently facing accusations that they are doing too much negative campaigning, and so today David Cameron tried to defend that campaign when he appeared on Sky's Murnaghan programme.

A friend of mine was notorious at university for photoshopping every single photo of her that went onto Facebook. Every snap in a nightclub or lounging on the beach went through the same changes in RGB levels so that her tan appeared better. And she did look good, at first glance. To those who knew and loved her, though, she seemed rather sad and brittle, so uncomfortable in her own skin that she thought a warmer glow to her pictures might make people respect or like her more. Four weeks into the official election campaign, and the main parties are behaving in the same brittle manner. They hope that the photo opportunities that they craft will make voters think they’re popular and happy.

I've just witnessed an extraordinary moment on the campaign trail in Edinburgh. No, it's not this, but a political party leader talking to a real voter. This is Ruth Davidson, Tory leader, talking to a random voter in Edinburgh. I know he was a random voter because I ran after him to check. You never know, after all. He wanted to ask Davidson some questions about migrants drowning in the Mediterranean. So he wandered up to her and asked them. And she answered. What's more, the answer seemed natural, he said. Well, this is strange. Strange, at least, for this campaign.

Are the Tories having a bad campaign? It certainly doesn’t seem to be as slick and upbeat as some had expected. Many Tories had expected the polls to stay right where they are until polling day, but others had assumed that there would at least be some signs of a public panic about Ed Miliband by now. Instead, normally gloomy Labour types say their leader is becoming less of a problem on the doorstep. That’s damning with faint praise, still, but the Tories had assumed things would be getting worse for Labour now, not better. The Tories I’ve spoken to over the past couple of days talk of the need to ‘hold our nerve’, which suggests a risk of getting nervous but certainly not outright panic.

Complain all you like about the way the Tories are campaigning at the moment, but it's getting the message across. The party has hit on the SNP, which is fascinating the media anyway, as the best line of attack to undermine Labour. Tory candidates report being pleasantly surprised by how much cut-through the Labour-SNP message is getting, while pollsters now say members of their focus groups are raising the issue unprompted. Focusing on the SNP may well have a number of serious side effects for the Tory party. It may reinforce the perception that they are a nasty, negative party. It may mean they do not give voters sufficient reason to back them, even if they succeed in putting them off Labour.

So all the manifestos are now out for voters to pore over. Given the amount of fuss the parties have made about these documents, you’d think they might outsell Fifty Shades of Grey. Sadly the reality is that these verbose tomes are less bonkbuster and more borebuster: they’re not written for voters to read, only for sad politicos who are paid to pore over them for fine details. They are getting longer and longer as the years go on, yet politicians don’t seem to be doing a better job at impressing voters, or indeed winning elections. The Tory 2015 manifesto has 82 pages and 34,000 words, up from 28,000 in 2010. Nick Clegg may end up with only 30 MPs after the election, but he inflicted 157 pages of promises and 36,000 words on the electorate.