James Forsyth

With another poll showing the Tories short of the lead they need to be sure of a majority—ICM for the Sunday Telegraph has the Tories on 38, Labour on 31 and the Lib Dems on 21—we are going to hear even more about a hung parliament and the role of the Lib Dems; I can’t remember any Lib Dem leader getting as much media attention as Nick Clegg has had these past four days. But if the Lib Dems are a potential party of government, then they should be a subject to a whole another level of scrutiny. For example, in the Newsnight education debate, David Laws implied that the Lib Dems would ringfence spending on the NHS when Vince Cable has explicitly ruled that out.

The winner of the education debate on Newsnight was a woman called Lesley from Yorkshire. Her local school is being closed and so she, along with other parents, want to set one up themselves. Her case for why she should be allowed to do this left Ed Balls floundering, wittering on about he sympathised but she needed to get agreement from various bureaucracies. If parents like Lesley get more time on TV, people will begin to understand how transformative the Tory policy of letting parents and teachers set up their own state funded schools will be. Newsnight’s format for the debate wasn’t great, there was an awful lot of people talking over one another and Paxman is too much of a performer to be an effective chair. But there were a few noteworthy moments.

PMQ’s today bolstered my view that David Cameron will outperform Gordon Brown in the three TV debates. Cameron is simply more confident about thinking on his feet than Brown. When Ronnie Campbell and chums started suggesting that the generals who had criticised Brown’s record on defence were doing so because they were Tories, Cameron changed tack and demanded that the Prime Minister disassociate himself from the heckles of his colleagues. He was happy to move away from his planned six questions and go with something else. By contrast, Brown is much more determined to stick to his pre-prepared lines. The news that Gordon Brown wants every possible moment to prepare for the TV debates is, oddly enough, good news for the Conservatives.

After April 6th senior bankers and top hedge funder workers who are based in London will pay a greater proportion of their earnings in income tax and national insurance than their counterparts in any other major financial centre, reports The Wall Street Journal Europe today. This research shows just how damaging Labour’s various soak the rich taxes will be to London’s competitiveness as a global financial centre. Once the 50p rate and the increased national insurance rate kick in, a banker earning more than half a million pounds a year would be paying less in personal taxes in any other major financial venue.  Now, the bankers might be the subject of largely justified public ire at the moment.

An ICM poll for the News of the World has the Tories above the psychologically important forty percent mark. After a week that has been dominated by the controversy over Lord Ashcroft’s tax status, the Tories will be delighted to see a poll showing their lead growing; they are nine points ahead in this poll compared to the seven point lead they had in the last ICM poll. On a uniform national swing, this would leave the Tories six short of a majority, presuming that John Bercow continues as the speaker. But given the Tory advantage in the marginals, one would expect this result on election day to produce a working Tory majority.