Isabel Hardman

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?

William Hague has to be one of the most charming men in the Cabinet. Today, rather than attacking his Lib Dem colleagues for being 'woolly', as Philip Hammond did, the Foreign Secretary made the case for a majority Conservative government by saying quite politely, at the end of a long list of British foreign policy achievements, 'And all that in a Coalition: just think what we could accomplish on our own'. Delegates loved that.

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.

Is Ed Miliband a lefty, or isn't he? That's the big question occupying anyone who isn't trying to sleep off Labour conference before the next political brouhaha begins in Manchester on Sunday. But since the Labour leader appeared to abandon the centre ground and back his own instincts, little has been written about the effect this will have on the Tories' electoral positioning. James argued yesterday that Ed Miliband had done politics a favour by making the 2015 election about competing philosophies. Does this mean the Tories can move to the right too? The answer to that question, is, I'm told by Number 10 sources, very much no.

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.

When Margaret Thatcher passed away and the broadcasters, newspapers, and casual drinkers in pubs picked over what her legacy really was, one of the key policies mentioned - and praised - time and time again by those from all sides of the political spectrum was the Right to Buy. It was an iconic housing policy that helped people who would never have had a chance of making it onto the housing ladder realise the dream of owning their own property. It was an empowering policy (the detail, of course, is slightly more complicated: the way the policy was designed led to a reduction in the overall size of the social rented sector, but as an iconic gesture to a group of people who were not traditional shire Tories, it's hard to beat this one).

So far the tensions in the Labour party over Ed Miliband's plan to reform the link with the trade unions have stayed below the surface at this conference. The closest it came was, unsurprisingly, when Len McCluskey took to the stage. The Unite leader made another plea for the unions to 'set our vision of how we will build our country in government', and told the leadership (Ed Miliband had strangely disappeared from the stage at this point) that 'if OUR party is to have a future it must speak for ordinary workers and it must represent the voice of organised labour'. He also made his customary attack on the Blairite 'Them' that he likes to talk about whenever he defends the role of trade unions, saying: 'Zero hours in another age.