Isabel Hardman

Lord Mandelson likes to think he knows a thing or two about Labour winning elections. So it’s odd that the man so keen on message discipline should start sticking his oar into the debate about Labour’s policies with just weeks to go before the General Election. Is it that the Labour peer doesn’t think Labour will win and so was throwing caution to the wind by popping up on Newsnight to call the Mansion Tax crude and say the Lib Dems had a better-designed policy? To make matters more bizarre, he found himself being congratulated by Diane Abbott of all people, with the leftwing hopeful for Labour’s mayoral candidacy saying ‘Lord Mandelson is on to something: it will be problematic in London’.

Who are the latest contenders in the Tory leadership battle and how much support do they have? That’s the question that Tory MPs and pundits love to chew over, even though there is no contest. The latest fixation is whether George Osborne has rowed behind the Boris campaign. James looked at this yesterday, revealing that Boris might quite fancy taking over from David Cameron after an EU referendum in 2017. Of course, the funny thing is that there isn’t a leadership contest because David Cameron is currently secure as Prime Minister.

Nick Clegg always seems oddly upbeat when he’s doing interviews about just how badly his party could do in the General Election. Today when Andrew Marr asked him about Iain Dale’s prediction the Lib Dems will lose at least half their seats, Clegg said ‘I really don’t think thats going to happen’ and that ‘we will do so much better than the pundits are predicting’. The Lib Dems currently have 56 seats (the 57th, Mike Hancock, had the whip withdrawn last year), and this election forecast suggests they’ll end up with 27. The sense in the party is that this will be just about OK, but go much lower than 25 and Clegg’s in real trouble.

David Cameron and Barack Obama have just finished giving a rather cutesy and extremely verbose press conference following the reinvigorating of their bromance/serious talks on the economy and counter-terrorism. The pair structured their opening statements to mirror one another, with each opening with a little tribute to the other. Obama said Cameron was a ‘great friend’ and ‘one of my closest and trusted partners in the world, while Cameron said Obama was a ‘great friend to Britain and to me personally’. A good friend indeed: Obama is basically doing everything he can to help Cameron be re-elected in this country. One of the most useful quotes is the one from the President that the US and the UK economies are the ones that stand out in the world.

There is considerable frustration in the Tory ranks about the way the Prime Minister is handling the TV debates. Both those who think David Cameron should be doing the debates and those who think he should be doing everything in his power to avoid them are frustrated that the issue is beginning to take up the time that the Tories should be using to talk endlessly about the economy. They point out that they’ve been told not to talk about immigration or Europe - or indeed the NHS, if they fancy it - and focus relentlessly on the economy but are ending up having to contort themselves into strange positions that involve them talking about the value of the Green party or the importance of the SNP in order to defend their leader's reluctance to sign up to the debates.

David Cameron did, as James says, manage to avoid debating the rather more electorally damaging issue of the A&E crisis at Prime Minister’s Questions today because Ed Miliband chose to talk about the TV debates instead. But he still had a good opportunity to raise the Labour leader’s refusal to confirm or deny that he had said he wanted to ‘weaponise’ the NHS as an issue. When Labour’s Toby Perkins asked him whether he was ashamed of what happens when the Tories run the NHS, Cameron replied: ‘Now he quite rightly says it’s very important that we conduct this debate in a very good and civilised way. Now at the weekend, the leader of the Opposition was asked seven times whether he had used the phrase that he wanted to weaponise the NHS.

Even though they ended up walking through the lobbies together (though not hand in hand, skipping, sadly), Ed Balls and George Osborne still managed to have the sort of Commons showdown that would fit right in to the script of Bridget Jones. On and on their furious fighting went, over whether the long-term economic plan was working, over whether Labour had a long-term economic plan, over whether Britain would get its AAA credit rating back, over whether Balls would borrow more and whether Osborne was cutting the deficit slower than he’d intended. On and on and on. Both looked as though they were enjoying tearing chunks out of one another before agreeing with each other on paper.