May 2015 UK General Election Campaign.

[Monoriu]

I am quite sure that I am not eligible to vote and even if I am, I won't.  But I am mentally rooting for the conservatives.  Long live austerity. 

[Agelastus]

I feel Labour and Miliband are running better than I expected and, the last few days, the Tories seem really useless.

Maybe the past five years of relentless negativity about Miliband is his secret weapon.

My opinion of the last few days is that both main parties have been utterly useless.

[Sheilbh]

After everyone's debate boost back to normal:


Except for Ed Miliband whose approval rating of +3 is his highest in five years

And also the first time he's been ahead of Cameron (+2).

[Admiral Yi]

Also Ms. Flounder is still riding high.

[Sheilbh]

My opinion of the last few days is that both main parties have been utterly useless.

I think Ed Miliband does have an advantage that because opinions about him are so low, any media appearance that doesn't involve him having a public meltdown are now a win and Ed 'looking reasonably normal'.

Also I think the Tories attack today on him as a backstabber were a mistake. It reminds me of the GOP with Obama in 2008 when he was simultaneously so inexperienced as to be unable to achieve anything and a dangerous radical who would transform America into a socialist/redistributionist hellhole.

After spending a long time attacking Ed for being useless they've now reminded voters of the one time he won something and that he was pretty ruthless to do it. I think you can say he's useless and a potential liability on the global stage or you can say he's an unprincipled, ruthless opportunist who doesn't even care for his family. I don't think you can easily say both.

Also Ms. Flounder is still riding high.

Yeah, doesn't matter though

[Sheilbh]

My flatmates have cooked for some colleagues and there is a Tory in my house

I don't know why I'm shocked that the same Tory party that couldn't beat Gordon Brown leading a thirteen year old Labour after the worst recession in 80 years are struggling to put away Ed Miliband....and yet, here we are.

I'm genuinely totally baffled by the Tory campaign. This week they've attacked Miliband over Trident, which he supports, on the basis that he 'backstabbed his brother' so you can't trust him. Then they announced a five year freeze on commuter rail fares - having spent much of the last five years attacking Labour's policy of a temporary energy price freeze while a new regulator's introduced. Today their major policy announcement was mandating employers to provide employees with three days annual paid leave to do voluntary work

Until last week I thought the Tories were edging ahead. I'm beginning to wonder if this is less an election than a month-long traumatic national adjustment to the concept of Ed Miliband as Prime Minister.

I'm also intrigued by two little UKIP factors. One is that Nigel Farage is mildly behind in his constituency, apparently. If he loses he goes as leading. Second is that UKIP's goal is to come second in the North and then, like the SNP in Scotland, emerge when Labour fall apart. Both of which suggest UKIP may be very interesting to watch in their on-going transformation from a Thatcherite, libertarian anti-EU party to a properly purely populist working class party.

Two pieces agreeing with what I said yesterday

The Tories' wobble shows they don't know how to fight Ed Miliband
Jonathan Freedland
Is the Labour leader Ed Miliband a useless dweeb or a power-hungry cad? The confusion shows the extent of panic in the Conservative ranks


'The reaction [to Fallon's attack on Miliband], even from fellow Conservatives, was akin to that of the little girl who let her head fall to the desk during a photo-op with David Cameron.' Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
Friday 10 April 2015 19.54 BST Last modified on Friday 10 April 2015 22.26 BST

Why do they always wobble on a Thursday? In 1987, the Conservative campaign was rocked by a poll, published on a Thursday, that showed the Tory lead over Labour down to a meagre four points. For the first time, Margaret Thatcher thought she might actually lose. Watching was an aide, Michael Dobbs, who would later write the television drama House of Cards. "She was more than furious. She was almost frothing," he recalled, describing the day that is forever carved into the Tory annals as Wobbly Thursday.

The memoirs of the future may describe 9 April 2015 the same way. Thursday was the worst day so far in what has been a shaky start to the Conservative general election campaign. The morning brought an attack on Ed Miliband by the defence secretary, Michael Fallon, over Trident, suggesting that just as the Labour leader had stabbed his brother David in the back, so he would betray Britain, bartering away the country's nuclear deterrent in return for enough Scottish National Party support to put him into Downing Street.

The reaction, even from Fallon's fellow Conservatives, was akin to that of the little girl who let her head fall to the desk during a storytime photo-op with David Cameron. Tories despaired at a move that saw them retoxified as the nasty party – not 24 hours after they had been defending the super-rich tax avoiders formerly known as non-doms. To round off this day from hell, a trio of polls arrived showing Labour with a slight but unmistakable lead.

Of course the original Wobbly Thursday was followed a week later by a landslide Tory victory. The wobble turned out to be no more than that. It was a blip. The same may be true this time, too. After all, two more polls appeared a few hours later showing the Tories with a nose in front. And, in contrast with 1987, this wobble came a month before polling day. The Conservatives have plenty of time to regain their equilibrium.

And yet the fundamentals are very different now – and not in a way that will encourage the Conservatives. In 1987, thanks in part to an economic boom and an opposition still divided between Labour and the Liberal/SDP Alliance, the Tories were out in front throughout. The four-point lead that sent Thatcher into a fury would bring shrieks of delight at Conservative headquarters today.

The current numbers are dispiriting indeed for Cameron's party. Stay like this and, even if the Tories win the greatest number of both votes and seats, they will be locked out of Downing Street. They could team up with the remnant Liberal Democrats, Northern Ireland's DUP and a couple of Ukippers and still not reach the magic number. To retain power the Tories have to add three or four points to their vote share. They need liftoff.

And they've been waiting for that moment with great patience. Lynton Crosby reportedly told Conservative MPs to expect it after Christmas. Then it was scheduled for February. Then March. Then after Easter. Easter Sunday came and went, and still the mythic number has not risen. If anything, it's got slightly worse as Miliband's personal ratings – whose poverty was meant to be the Tories' insurance policy – have started climbing, even on one poll overtaking Cameron's for the first time.

The result is that Conservatives are getting twitchy. For now, MPs are holding their nerve, in a state of mind that might be described as pre-panic. One told me he and his colleagues will remain steady just so long as there's something with a bit of "wow factor" in the manifesto launched on Tuesday. Taking a break from door-knocking, one confided that "long term economic plan" is just not cutting it. The phrase is too bureaucratic, too devoid of optimism: two in three voters think it means more austerity. They're hoping that, just as no one expected George Osborne's pension liberalisation in the 2014 budget, the PM and chancellor will spring another dramatic surprise in the party programme – on the lines of the £8bn NHS funding increase promised by Osborne today.

The Tory foot soldiers want something sunnier to sell. If they don't get it on Tuesday, and if the polls stay static, a full panic is pencilled in for next weekend.

Others lack even that patience. The Tory press is always a good guide to the party's unrestrained id – and look at what they've been up to. Friday's Mail and Telegraph claimed to have uncovered the secrets of Red Ed's "tangled love life". In fact, all they revealed was that before he was married, Miliband had, as the Times columnist Janice Turner put it, "dated a bunch of hot, clever and successful women". It was hard to see how that might hurt him with voters.

Combined with the Fallon salvo, all this suggests confusion in the Tory tribe. They've lost their confidence over how exactly to condemn Ed Miliband. Is he a useless dweeb or a ruthless, power-hungry cad? In the 1990s, the Tories and their Fleet Street outriders couldn't decide whether Tony Blair was Bambi or Stalin. In the space of a few days, the Conservatives of 2015 have turned Miliband from Wallace into Poldark.

Miliband was meant to have folded by now, crumbled under the pressure and turned into a drooling, gaffe-prone wreck

That's partly because he has refused to follow his part in the script. He was meant to have folded by now, to have crumbled under the pressure and turned into a gaffe-prone wreck. Instead, he has proved more resilient than they – and perhaps the voters – expected. Whatever else the public thinks of him, they are surely beginning to recognise that he has some steel and an improbably thick skin.

The failure of these attacks to penetrate is leading to desperation, especially in those parts of the press that, thanks to Miliband's stance on media regulation, are determined to keep him out of No 10. Both the Trident and ex-girlfriends stories smack of Tory operatives frantically stabbing at the old buttons and pulling at the familiar levers, only to find they no longer work.

Lynton Crosby has, by all accounts, delayed his deadline. He now says the key moment will come in the final week. Not because that will bring some game-changing TV appearance orpolicy announcement. It will simply be the imminence of polling day. "The clarifying moment is the fact that you're about to vote," says Rick Nye, director of the Populus polling organisation.

The Tories are betting everything on the voluminous evidence that the sound and fury of an election campaign rarely matters, that when voters take a hard look – at the economy and at Ed Miliband – on 7 May, just enough of them will switch, giving the Conservatives those three or four extra percentage points they need. If they are right, this year's wobbly Thursday will soon be a forgotten footnote. If they're wrong, it may well be remembered as the turning point.

Is the stab in the back attack on Ed Miliband anti-Semitic?
Michael Fallon's broadside at Ed Miliband yesterday has sparked accusations of anti-Semitism. But the reality is more mundane - and better news for Labour, too
BY STEPHEN BUSH PUBLISHED 10 APRIL, 2015 - 08:00

A weak, ruthless, surrender-minded, sex god? Photo:Getty


Michael Fallon's attack on Ed Miliband yesterday has raised eyebrows  - the Labour leader, we are told is too weak to keep Trident while also being a fiendish backstabber who betrayed his own brother.

It's that latter accusation that has got the Defence Secretary in hot water, with some commentators suggesting it echoes the "stab in the back" myth that was popular in far-right circles in inter-war Germany. Various internal enemies - Communists, Jews, and the politicians of the Weimar Republic -were held to have secretly undermined the German war effort in the First World War to further their own ends.

But was it a deliberate slur? Frankly, as dog whistles go, it seems unlikely that anyone in CCHQ thinks there's any mileage in targeting the historically well-informed and anti-Semitic voting bloc. It's somewhat grating, too, to see people who were willing to share a platform with Ken Livingstone in 2012 suddenly developing bat-like hearing as far as  anti-Semitic code words as concerned.   Certainly there is a cross-party problem with the lazy evocation of North London in British politics, although that's as much an attack on Emily Thornberry and Tony Blair as it is on Miliband.

What really lay behind the intervention was the attempt to pull together the two biggest alarm bells that voters raise in focus groups and on the doorstep about Miliband - that they don't trust him in a room with Putin and that he ran against his brother for the leadership. But the problem for Fallon - and the overall Conservative campaign - is that, increasingly, it appears as if a message that polls well in its constituent parts doesn't hang together very well. Like Nutella and smoked salmon, everyone likes them, but no-one wants to eat them together.

It comes back to the fear that some Conservatives are starting to raise about Lynton Crosby - namely, that his approach has only worked in national elections in Australia, where everyone has to vote, so candidates can focus on driving up their opponents' negatives rather than coming up with a persuasive reason to get them to the polling station. One parliamentary candidate says of their patch: "If everyone I spoke to were marched to the polling station, I'd win. There is still a hatred of Miliband in the country at large. But what are we offering to get our vote out?"

It all feels uncomfortably like Better Together's "Leave and we'll kill you" approach to the Scottish referendum - but with the added worry for the Conservatives that people liked the Union to begin with. They have no such cushion.

[Martinus]

I kinda feel sorry for David Cameron. He seems like a genuinely decent person.

[Admiral Yi]

Worst recession?  I thought the UK economy was cruising.

[Sheilbh]

Worst recession?  I thought the UK economy was cruising.

Gordon Brown. 2010

Edit: Though actually in 2010 we did have one of the stronger recoveries until the Tories took over, wiped out capital spending, raised VAT and plunged us into a second recession

I kinda feel sorry for David Cameron. He seems like a genuinely decent person.

I think he generally is. He's probably as close to the sort-of ur-Conservative in my mind, in a positive way, as any modern Tory is.

[alfred russel]

The man of the people eats a hotdog with spoon and fork: 

It is such a no win situation. Eating a hotdog like a normal person will live on the internet forever with a thousand spoofs.

[Sheilbh]

It is such a no win situation. Eating a hotdog like a normal person will live on the internet forever with a thousand spoofs.

Yeah. I do feel sorry for these politicians. It's like they're caught in between the generation of rigorously controlled spin and messaging and the politicians of the future who will have thousands of horrifyingly embarrassing photos on Facebook and deeply idiotic tweets (assuming we don't only elect sociopaths who've only ever wanted to be PM).

[Tonitrus]

My flatmates have cooked for some colleagues and there is a Tory in my house

Not very tasty, or just bad as leftovers in the fridge?

[PJL]

David Cameron made another foodie faux pas today, he messed up how Devonians & Cornish do their scones. He thought the Devonians put jam and then cream on them, while in fact in was the opposite (Cornish) method:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-32258235

[PJL]

Meanwhile there's been a UKIP sausage roll election bribing scandal (seriously you couldn't make this up):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-32234567

[Ed Anger]

I want some scones now.