Isabel Hardman

David Cameron's local election kick-off speech today notably contained no reference to UKIP, but 12 mentions of Labour. The Conservative leader and his colleagues concerned with campaigns are on a damage-limitation exercise about the party's chances in the local elections, and as well as taking the attack to Labour on the policy front - arguing that the Tories have freed councils from Labour's restrictions, kept council tax down and reduced local government waste - a plank of their strategy involves attacking Labour's prowess in southern council seats. The key phrase which you can expect to hear whenever there is evidence that the Labour campaign is faltering in the south is 'Labour's Southern Discomfort'.

Today's Ipsos MORI finding that voters can't see Ed Miliband as Prime Minister underlines how much hard work the Labour leader really has to do. The poll for the Evening Standard found 66 per cent of those asked didn't believe he was ready to rule the country, against 24 per cent who did. He is also polling behind his party, with 58 per cent disagreeing that Labour is ready to form the next government against 29 per cent who do. As the general election draws closer, voters will find their minds focus more on this question of whether they can imagine the party governing rather than simply on Labour as what Tony Blair described as a 'repository for people's anger'. And as they do that, they'll want to know what it is that Labour stands for rather than simply what it is that Labour opposes.

Cometh the Gove, cometh the angry trade union representative. It was inevitable that the Education Secretary would have at least one exchange with someone from one of the two largest teaching unions when he took questions from the floor at today's Spectator education conference. Gove spoke powerfully without notes on his vision for education, and then in conversation with Andrew Neil, attacked those he believed had low expectations for certain pupils. He said: 'There are wonderful people in teaching and I want to empower them. This is, I think, a tremendous opportunity for teachers. But there are some in the teaching profession, I'm afraid, who won't take yes for an answer. They say we'd like more freedom - and we'd give them more freedom with academies and free schools.

When I arrived at St Paul's at 6 o'clock this morning, a line of people, around 40-strong, had already set up camp with union flags (and one Canadian flag, too) opposite the church courtyard. The police officer drawing to the end of his night shift told me they had been there all night. Later, as the hearse left the Palace of Westminster, the pavements opposite were packed. Yes, there were some people who turned their backs, and others who held placards decrying Thatcher's legacy. This video from the Guardian shows some of them chanting 'waste of money!' as the procession approached. As Thatcher's friend Conor Burns has been repeatedly saying for the past week and a half, the late Prime Minister would have seen that as a tribute in kind as well.

David Cameron is giving a reading at Margaret Thatcher's funeral later today, but this morning he gave his eulogy on the Today programme. He made the quite striking observation that 'we're all Thatcherites now'. In one sense this is quite an obvious comment: as countless commentators have observed over the past week and a half, Margaret Thatcher didn't just change the way the Conservative party viewed economics and the state, she also changed the way Labour sold itself as a party. Cameron said: 'I think in a way we're all Thatcherites now because - I mean - I think one of the things about her legacy is some of those big arguments that she had had, you know, everyone now accepts.

When dolphins hunt fish, they gang up on them as a school, chasing them into the shallows. So it happens at the daily lobby briefing: when a morsel of a story appears and someone lets down their guard, the whole pack of journalists jumps in. Today the Prime Minister's official spokesman was chased into the shallows on the plan, which appears rather dead in the water, to publish ministers' tax affairs. The plan had been for the most senior members of the Cabinet to do this, and David Cameron, George Osborne, Nick Clegg and Vince Cable had agreed on it last spring. But nothing has happened.

We're only a few weeks away from the Queen's Speech, yet there's one significant piece of legislation from this session which has yet to be resolved. It has already caused one big row, and will certainly cause another one when it is published. The Snooper's Charter, better known to the ministers as the Communications Data Bill, was supposed to be published before this session ended, but it's looking like the government is going to have to re-announce it in the Queen's Speech instead.

The Tories have released a local election broadcast, to be shown on the TV tonight. Unlike previous ones, it doesn't have any awkward confusion between debt and deficit, preferring instead to focus on people looking a bit confused as they try to remember what the government has or hasn't done on council tax, income tax and the cost of living, accompanied by some cheesy guitar music. It's actually quite a snappy piece of work as it sells the party's key achievements at a national level to voters in a rather understated way, partly by admitting that not all of them have noticed what's going on, then driving home the key messages in capital letters across the screen. It also features David Cameron at the start and finish, underlining how important he is to the Tory brand.