James Forsyth

The Tories are in mild shock following PMQs, they never expected Cameron to get clunked like that. Brown is clearly going to try and use Tory inheritance tax policy to ram home the message that a Cameron government will be a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich. But the Tories are taking comfort from their belief that Brown’s ugly class war politics won’t work, pointing to how they failed in Crewe and Nantwich. But the attacks on Edward Timpson backfired, at least in part, because Timpson was a bad target. It is hard to portray someone as an out of touch, uncaring toff when their family have fostered 80 odd children and have a long history of local philanthropy.

The opinion polls are continuing to feed the story that the Tories are in trouble. Tonight’s Politics Home data which shows Cameron’s personal ratings dropping 15 points in the last 10 weeks follows a string of polls where the Tories have failed to break through the forty percent mark. Tory morale has been a bit shaken by these polls; Cameron could do with a decisive win at PMQs tomorrow to gee up the Parliamentary party. But turning these numbers around is, I suspect, going to require some policies that show us what David Cameron’s irreducible core is. Oddly enough, I don’t think these policies have to be particularly popular but they have to show the electorate that Cameron stands for something, that he isn’t just another say anything to win politician.

The Lib Dem’s policy to make everyone’s first 10 thousand pounds of income tax free is, whatever its imperfections, a significant doorstep offer. By that, I mean it is something that those canvassing for the Lib Dems can say in an attmept to get the voters to listen to them rather than shut the door in their face. This is something the Tories are short of. At the moment, the Tories have a bunch of smaller policies — abolishing HIPS, freezing council tax, only millionaires paying inheritance tax — that by all acounts go down well on the doorstep. But they lack a big policy that defines the party to voters. When I talk to Tory candidates I always ask them what their message on the stump is.

That Zac Goldsmith has non-dom status is an embarrassment to the Tories. Given the anti-politics mood in the country, the whiff of hypocrisy is extremely dangerous to any political party and for the Tories anything that helps Labour’s effort to portray them as a party dominated by a wealthy clique is damaging. I suspect, though, that this story will only get bigger if it turns out that there are other Tory candidates who have non-dom status. Given the way candidate selection has been handled in recent years, there is no guarantee that CCHQ has established that all candidates are both resident in the UK for tax purposes and do not have non dom status.

The national YouGov poll and the one of northern marginals out today give us a sense of the electoral lay of the land. The national poll result which has the Tories below 40 percent and failing to win an overall majority shows that the Tories remain quite a way from sealing the deal. However, the poll of northern marginals which has the Tories on 42 percent suggests that the Tory marginal seats strategy is working. Indeed, whenever you talk to Tory candidates in Labour held marginals you are struck by just how confident they are; something that is particularly striking given how jumpy candidates normally are. I suspect that the Tory strategic response to these disappointing national poll results will be three-fold.

In the politics column this week, I write about how the Tories plan to hand over many of the traditional policy making powers of the Cabinet to a seven man policy board. The Cameroons are going to do this partly because it is a model that has worked well for them in oppoistion and that they are comfortable with but also because the Cabinet is just too large for effective, detailed discussions about policy. The shadow Cabinet currently has 34 members in it. In government, this number will have to drop by at least ten. But still, a 24 person group is, probably, too large to foster constructive and detailed debate. However, if the Cabinet was smaller, then it would be easier to restore it to its traditional role without sacrificing effectiveness.

When the Tories first got interested in nudge theory in the summer of 2008 there was some sneering and questioning of what practical policy applications it had. But Grant Shapps' speech today on the Tories' Green Deal shows how nudging can be applied in government. Shapps proposes that consumers be reminded of the Green Deal offer - your house retrofitted to cut its energy usage at no immediate cost to you - every time they use the stores of one of the firms involved in the scheme. This should, in theory, boost take up of the scheme. The Green Deal, the brainchild of Greg Clark, is one of the Tories' neatest policies.

The Observer’s Ipsos-Mori poll has dominated political discussion since its publication on Sunday. But two things that I have heard tonight have increased my scepticism that it marks a dramatic shift in public opinion. First, I hear that another of the big pollsters had a survey in the field at the same time and it showed a fourteen point Tory lead. Second, a new poll for Political Betting has Labour down on 22, only a point ahead of the Lib Dems. With polls it is the ones that are surprising that make waves; I’m sure we’ll all run down a few more rabbit holes before election day. The odd surprsingly tight poll is not all bad for the Tories. It helps, as one candidate in a marginal seat said to me yesterday, get the activists out and deals with any sense of complacency.