James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
There are polls out tonight from the two firms polling for the Tories, Populus and YouGov, and they have pretty different results. Populus has the Tories on 36, down three from last week, Labour on 33 and the Lib Dems on 21. In the YouGov tracker, the Tories are on 39, Labour are down two to 31 and the Lib Dems are on 20.
From our UK edition
This week of the election campaign is going to be dominated by the first leaders’ debate. The debate format means that these might well turn out to be stilted encounters that don’t sway many voters either way. But given how many people will tune in—the broadcasters are confidently predicting an audience of ten million plus—the party leaders are taking no chances. As I mention in the Mail on Sunday, Brown has had a light campaign schedule since the election was called because he’s keen to maximise the amount of time he has to prepare while Cameron has spent every spare moment on the road immersed in his briefing books for the debate.
From our UK edition
I expect that the Labour machine will be absolutely delighted with Gordon Brown’s interview in The Times magazine today. The interviewer concludes that Brown has more of a common touch than Blair or Cameron and that Brown’s press team are more relaxed than Cameron’s. The interview even goes into what Brown’s favourite love poetry is. But what struck me in the interview is something Blair says in the course of expressing his support for Brown: “One of the reasons why I would never go out and criticise the person who is Prime Minister is that I know how damn tough the job is, and I also know enough about the way the modern media works to know that things can get extraordinarily exaggerated and your motives are completely traduced.
From our UK edition
James Forsyth reviews the week in politics When a party loses an election, recriminations follow. But when it wins, an argument that is often as vicious breaks out over why it triumphed. This debate matters because, as Winston Smith knew, he who controls the past controls the future. The Tory party is preparing for such an argument right now. Those on the right are gearing up to say that it was the tax cut wot won it; while the so-called modernisers counter that the tax cut was illusory — and that the victory is a result of abandoning the old Tory tunes. That the Tories are preparing for this argument shows that they now expect to win. The jitters of a fortnight ago have been replaced by a quiet confidence that the party will gain an overall majority.
From our UK edition
Tonight's YouGov poll has the Tories on 40, Labour on 30 and the Lib Dems on 20, rounding off a good week for the Tories, The Tory marriage tax proposal has also just been unveiled. It will allow people who are in a marriage or a civil partnership who don't use all of their personal allowance--currently set at £6,475--to transfer it to their spouse as long as they do not earn more than £44,000. The policy would cost £550 million and will be paid for by the Tories' planned banking levy.
From our UK edition
This week The Spectator endorsed the Tories and David Cameron. Our cover headline read, ‘Give Cameron the keys.’ Now, I doubt that Gordon Brown was too surprised to miss out on The Spectator endorsement. But I must admit to being rather amused to hear that a copy of The Spectator was provided in every seat back pocket on the flight that the PM took up to Scotland.
From our UK edition
So much for Jim Murphy's words of support two hours ago, the Labour candidate for Moray Stuart MacLennan has now been sacked. As soon as one saw what MacLennan had tweeted--the desire for a 'slave-grown' banana, the remarks about pensioners and the like--it was clear that MacLennan was going to have to go if this was not to become a major embarrassment for Labour.
From our UK edition
Gordon Brown is heading to Scotland today and it is hard to see how he can avoid the story of the Labour candidate for Moray and his Tweets. Forget Stuart MacLennan’s foul language, it’s the mindset that his messages reveal that is truly shocking. Take this one from July 8th:“God this fairtrade, organic banana is shit. Can I have a slave-grown, chemically enhanced, genetically modified one please?” If Labour leave this candidate in place, then they’ll be saying that they think talking about wanting a ‘slave-grown’ banana is acceptable. This scandal is embarrassing for Labour.
From our UK edition
The drop in the Tory lead to five points in the YouGov daily tracker caused some concern in Tory circles last night. But this evening, the Tory lead is nine and the party is at the psychologically important 40 percent mark. The figures are Tories 40, Labour 31 and Lib Dems 18. On a uniform national swing, this would leave the Tories six short of an overall majority. But in reality, it would lead to a working Tory majority. Another piece of good news for the Tories in the poll is that there is strong support for their proposed National Citizens Service with 77 percent of those surveyed endorsing the idea.
From our UK edition
Labour today has tried to shift the National Insurance debate from whether you should cut waste to prevent a tax rise, to whether the Tories’ sums add up. When the Tories announced their plan to avoid the worst of Labour’s NICs rise by cutting waste they made a conscious decision not to offer details on how they would make these efficiency savings. As one shadow Cabinet minister explained to me, they had no desire to repeat the experience of the James Review when they were going on Newsnight to argue the toss over individual savings. The Tories think that the argument that government can save one pound in every hundred that it spends is credible and that combined with the endorsement of two men who have advised the government on efficiency so recently is enough.
From our UK edition
The Tory press conference this morning, launching their plan for National Citizen Service, shows how they hope to run a two track campaign. On the one hand, they want to be hammering Labour over their plans to increase National Insurance — Cameron called it a ‘a recovery killer, an economy killer, a job killer’ and said that Labour wanted people to pay ‘taxes for government waste’. On the other, they want to be presenting hopeful, optimistic ideas like a National Citizen Service. This fusion campaigning enables the Tories both to be attacking Labour and presenting themselves as the party that is offering a positive alternative. National Citizen Service is very Cameron. He’s been toying with the idea since 2005.
From our UK edition
Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC is reporting that senior civil servants met this morning to discuss how they would implement the Tory plans for efficiency savings. Now, it is not surprising that the civil service is discussing how to implement the opposition’s plans. But what is intriguing is who told the BBC about the meeting. If it was the Tories, then no surprise. But if it was the civil service who told the BBC about it, then that would indicate that they want it to be known that they think these efficiencies are possible. My hunch, and it is no more than that, is that it was civil servants who told the BBC. I can’t imagine that the BBC news channel at noon would be treating it as breaking news if they had heard it from the Tories.
From our UK edition
Jason Beattie has an intriguing tale on his blog. He reports that Nick Clegg’s wife has taken to texting friends to complain about the ways in which Vince Cable upstages her husband. This adds to my suspicion that the Clegg Cable relationship might come to be one of the stories of the campaign. On top of the tensions that inevitably arise when a deputy has a tendency to upstage his boss, there’s also a misalignment of Clegg and Cbale’s interests in the event of a hung parliament. For Cable, who will be 67 when the new parliament convenes, a hung parliament is probably his last chance of being a minister. Cable seems keen on the idea.
From our UK edition
The polls are coming thick and fast in this campaign and there’s another one just out with the YouGov tracker to come later on. Populus’s latest for The Times has the Tories on 39, Labour on 32 and the Lib Dems on 21.Populus last poll, taken in February, had the Tories on 40, Labour on 30 and the Lib Dems on 20. Peter Riddell’s analysis is that the narrowing is largely due to increased economic optimism among voters. But I suspect what will cause the most concern at CCHQ is that Labour is more trusted to cut public spending without harming frontline services than the Tories.
From our UK edition
What was probably Brown’s last PMQs performance as Prime Minister was classic Brown. He answered questions that hadn’t been asked, dodged ones that had, rattled off list after list of tractor production figures and mentioned Lord Ashcroft at every opportunity. But, as he has in recent months, he had some one liners to get off including the jab that Cameron ‘was the future once’, an echo of Cameron’s put down of Blair. But that line couldn’t disguise the fact that Cameron got the better of Brown. Cameron’s speed on his feet just makes him better in this setting. His response to the heckle that the business leader he was quoting was a Tory will look great on the news tonight: ‘Not a Tory but one of his [the PM’s] advisors.
From our UK edition
PMQs today is going to be the last time that Gordon Brown and David Cameron face-off against each other before the debates. Both men will be keen to score pyschological points against the other and to send their troops off in good heart. This means that PMQs will be an even noisier affair than usual. But both leaders will have to remember that if they behave in the debates as they do in PMQs it would be a disaster for them. The aggressive, shouty nature of PMQs would not translate well to the debates. One thing to watch today is what Nick Clegg does. He’s racheting up the rhetoric again, repeating his claim that the other two parties are corrupt.
From our UK edition
This campaign is going to be a bit like three dimensional chess. There’ll be the Labour Tory contest but there will also be the Tory effort to win Lib Dem seats, 24 of the 120 top Tory target seats are Lib Dem held. A good example of this 3d chess came in the washup, the negotiation about which bits of its programme the government can get passed into law before this session of parliament ends. In the West Country, where the Tories need to win a bunch of Lib Dem seats, Labour’s plan to increase by 10p the duty on cider has gone down very badly. So the Tories forcing Labour to drop this rise in duty to get the Budget through should help the Tories down there.
From our UK edition
Well, well Gordon Brown has started his election campaign in a constituency that is notionally a Tory seat. Rochester and Strood is being fought for the first time at this election but the invaluable UK Polling Report tells us that the Tories would have just won this seat in 2005. I suspect that Brown has headed to Kent on the first day of the campaign in an attempt to show that Labour haven’t written off the south east despite coming fifth there in the European elections and that Labour is still a national party. David Cameron is off to Birmingham and Yorkshire and the shadow Cabinbet are fanning out across the country in an attempt to hit every TV region in Great Britain, evidence that for all the talk of this being the first internet election TV remains the dominant medium.
From our UK edition
Reaganesque was the word that sprang to mind watching Cameron’s launch event. Standing on the terrace of County Hall with Parliament behind him, providing the snappers with some great images, Cameron spoke about the ‘modern Conservative alternative’ to five more years of Gordon Brown. The implicit message was youth and vigour. This was one of those occasions where the visuals matter more than what was actually said. The no-notes speech contained a string of attacks on Labour’s waste and the prospect of five more years of Brown. But Cameron was careful to sandwich this with some optimism. At the start he said that a vote for the Tories was a vote for hope, optimism, change and a fresh start.
From our UK edition
Westminster today is dominated by the sound of helicopters hovering over head, waiting for Brown to set off from Downing Street to the Palace. This morning is the last time that Brown will have the full political advantage of his office, the ability to set the news agenda. The Tories are attempting to step on this by scheduling their campaign launch for bang in the middle of the time when Brown is expected to be at the Palace requesting a dissolution of parliament. I suspect that we are in for a game of media chicken with Brown trying to rush back to Downing Street and announce that the election is called so that the broadcasters cut away from the Cameron event. One surprise today is that Labour put up Lord Kinnock for the 8.10 slot on the Today Programme.