The government today announced some more projects that would have to be put on hold in light of the economic circumstances we find ourselves in. Among them was the £80m loan to Sheffield Forgemasters, which sits very close to NC’s constituency.

Labour beatniks, keen to grab back Sheffield City Council from the Lib Dems and keep them out of the Sheffield Central constituency where the majority is now just 165 for Paul Blomfield, have already been condemning this move. But to say that it will cost jobs is just nonsense – no jobs currently exist; the postponement of the loan will mean that they won’t be created as planned. This money would be better spent avoiding cuts to the hundreds of other projects where cancelled government funding will mean private contractors losing revenue and having to lay off staff.

But as they are involved in the “leaching” industry of outsourcing away from union-backed in-house public sector workers, Derek Simpson doesn’t give so much of a monkey’s about them. Apart from anything else, £80m is simply far too much public money to spend on 150 jobs, whether in Sheffield, South Wales or Surrey.

Catching flies - Miliband won't be the threat Tories fear

Labour held its leadership hustings today in Southport and according to the BBC, which seems to be intent on pretending that Labour is still in power, this internal Labour Party process was an event that merited live TV coverage. In fact, the reason that the hustings were held at all seemed to me to be all about David Miliband in particular getting some welcome exposure.

Yesterday, the BBC news lead with the bare-faced revelation that Miliband was accusing the PM of “hypocrisy” on spending cuts and “broken promises”. The sheer brass neck needed to occasion such a piece of naked and mendacious opportunism is difficult to quantify with words alone – suffice it to say that the corporation seems to have decided that Miliband is the next Labour leader and they are determined to make him PM in 2015. Personally, I can’t see the British people going for it but there we go.

Today however and in front of the GMB, comrade Miliband was talking about “our people” and building Labour up “workplace by workplace“. And he’s supposed to be the Blairite – can we assume that the likes of Ed Balls, brother Ed and Diane Abbott would wish to be seen as even more substantially left? No doubt the coalition has pulled the Conservative Party to the left and the Liberal Democrats to the right to end up somewhere in the genuine centre rather than the centre-right with which many Conservatives would be more comfortable.

Is the only place for Labour to go back to the left? From 1994 onwards, Labour had a go at being capitalists but forgot that supporting and spending the proceeds of economic growth also entails a measure of responsibility and after 15 years of profligacy the money has run out. They can’t go to the right, they no longer look credible in the centre ground and so with Miliband heading back to the comrades for support, they can only move to that left ground vacated by NC. Fine by me.

Until today, I think most Conservatives were hoping that Ed Balls might get the leadership in an attempt to saddle Labour with a leader even more unelectable than Gordon Brown. However John McConnell seems to be intent on taking on that mantle after some very ill-judged comments about Lady Thatcher. I admire her in many ways; but not in others as I’ve said before. But the idea of assassinating political leaders is either puerile posturing or dangerous nonsense from a man who wants to become Prime Minister (presumably). Leaving aside the poor taste, if the best answer Labour has got to Britain’s problems is time travel back to the 80s and taking out the then PM – who for a greater part was simply sorting out the last mess Labour left – then their ideas barrel clearly has sprung a leak.

If Labour is sensible it will elect David Miliband as leader – but I’m not sure Conservatives should be too worried by that prospect.

Not particularly unexpectedly, the papers continue to turn on Gordon Brown as Labour heads for utter wipeout at the election. The Times, which has backed Labour for the past three elections, returns to the Conservatives along with the Sunday Express but interestingly the Grauniad and its sister The Observer is backing the Liberal Democrats, presumably in order to force a hung parliament and keep DC away from Downing Street.

It will also push Labour voters tactically into the hands of the Lib Dems in a reverse of 1997.

What previous Conservative voters thinking about chancing one on Nick Clegg have to consider is this: do they really want to be voting along with Guardian and Observer readers who’ve been happily voting for Labour since 1979? I’ll be the first to admit that the Conservative Party isn’t perfect and I’ve posted before on how I think that is but really, take the thoughts of the Times – which hasn’t supported the Conservatives in 18 years – on board and think about what Britain needs right now.

A hung parliament and Nick Clegg’s promise of change, which means different things depending on where you live, or David Cameron’s visionary and responsible blueprint for Britain that is backed up by a depth of experience within a party with a track record of sorting out Labour’s mess.

During the last few days, the Lib Dems have been playing a clever PR game by trying to link electoral reform – by which they mean proportional representation’s introduction as our voting system – with “new”, post-expenses, politics.

I’m not altogether against electoral reform. I think that the boundaries currently used for our first-past-the-post system are unfair and give Labour a huge advantage by handing them a built-in majority of about 90 seats, according to Electoral Calculus. I want to see those boundaries re-drawn and the number of seats re-calculated to make for a fairer local representative system – and that includes fairer to the Lib Dems as well.

You routinely hear commentators in the press and the BBC say that the FPTP system discriminates against the third party, as if they had done some research on it and drawn a scientific conclusion. That’s rubbish. All that conclusion is based upon is the realities and record of the system – there is no reason why the Liberal Democrats should have any more difficulty in winning constituencies than anyone else.

The reason it is biased against them is quite simple – they pretend to be a centre-right alternative to the Conservatives in London and the South and a hard-left alternative to old Labour in the north and Scotland. Their manifesto for 2010 cleverly leaves either possibility open. But it does mean that such a dual-personality party cannot hold a “core” vote sufficient for it to win constituencies in sufficient numbers to hold power in FPTP. If the Lib Dems decided what they wanted to be – rather than just pitching for whatever they think they can get away with – their vote in some areas would harden and in others soften. It’s their choice to be at a disadvantage in the system.

But they’re quite happy to overlook that. What they want to do is hold the country to ransom by demanding a referendum on proportional representation in return for offering stability in the event of no party receiving a majority. PR, of course, would not only allow them to hold the balance of power, it would help put pay to their biggest weakness – the idea that a vote for the Lib Dems is a “wasted vote”. It would also allow them to pretend to be “savage cutters” in the south and “tax the richers” in the north while scooping the maximum value from each deluded voter.

It’s not a bad strategy for them – but it should be ringing alarm bells with every single previous Conservative supporter who’s thinking of giving Clegg a chance because he came over well on telly. If you give him the chance he wants, he’ll go into coalition with Brown (or more likely Miliband). They’ll embark on a series of tax hikes and spending cuts not witnessed before in the post-war era. That’s not necessarily to their discredit because any government will have to do the same.

But if you decide after four years that you don’t like them, if Clegg turns out to be not quite what you thought (on Europe, immigration and law and order) and you think in 2014/5 that you’re going to give the Conservatives a chance after all – well, you won’t be able to. Because Lib/Lab will have changed the way things are done and neither the Conservative Party nor Labour would ever be able to govern on their own again. And guess who the beneficiaries of this gerrymandering will be? That’s right, the Lib Dems.

They may call themselves Liberal Democrats, but that doesn’t seem very liberal or democratic to me.

JK Rowling with a book containing more truth than the Labour manifesto

I’m not a fan of JK Rowling – I think her books are terrible and the fact she gives money to the Labour Party is borne of an similar level of fantasy. Today she writes in The Times about DC and the party’s manifesto for single mothers and although the Times subs have done their best with it, it’s still a couple of commas short of iambic pentameter.

But depressingly, I find myself agreeing with some of what she says and I think she’s done the party a favour by spelling it out, albeit after the manifesto is published. I’ve written on it before and I’ll say it again – the Conservative Party policy to reward married couples with a (very token) tax break is a step backwards in bringing its attitudes in line with a modern Britain that isn’t interested in recapturing 1950s social norms.

Firstly, the fact is that society will no longer be told by government what it should find acceptable and unacceptable – the role of government in this area is now defunct and no amount of bleating by the right of the party will bring it back. Yes, the family unit is still the single most important building block of society but the family unit can no longer be described as one man married to one woman and their resulting offspring. A government that tries to impose this doctrine through the tax system will not succeed and the party it is formed from will ultimately lose credibility.

Secondly, JK Rowling points out that “it’s not the money, it’s the message” is a deeply misguided view of what single parents go through. For those who have decent independent incomes and families to fall back on when they part, it may just be about the message – although not a very welcome one, I should imagine. But for others who don’t have partners at any time in their parenthood or families able to support them financially following separation, it is very much about the money. And if anything, we should be spending the money otherwise used in this tax break supporting those who need it ie the single-parent families, not married couples.

I believe that DC takes social responsibility and justice seriously but this policy doesn’t back that up. Having said that, much else in the manifesto does. I joined the Conservative Party because I want to see a society where people can get opportunity, work and make a prosperous future for themselves and their families. But if they manage that, they don’t need state subsidy as well. In an ideal world, no-one would.

But this isn’t an ideal world and until it becomes so, that help from the state which exists needs to be focussed on those who need it; married, divorced, single or otherwise.

This is the defining image of the 2010 election

One of the most interesting things about the totally inexplicable Labour poster is the way that the character of DCI Gene Hunt obviously means completely different things to different sectors of political opinion. I’ll say now that I don’t watch either Ashes to Ashes or Life on Mars (although that is based in the 1970s) but my understanding is that he represents everything good – and bad – about how policing used to be before the reforms of the 1990s.

I know him best from the Marks and Spencer ad where he ogles a female model in a harmless enough way – although this was enough to get some people worked up. That is clearly the side that Labour is aiming for – the corrupt, brutal and amoral character that Hunt is in Life on Mars. But what Labour has spectacularly failed to grasp is that the people who see him in that way are people who think like the London-centric, politically-correct Islington sushi set; and the vast majority of people have, as the Grauniad said – the Grauniad , for goodness’ sake – “taken to our hearts” the character of Gene Hunt. People in Britain like a loveable rogue.

Ironically, in the 1980s series Ashes to Ashes, Hunt is a different character – more professional, loyal and with a host of good qualities he lacked previously. Which begs the question of whether Jacob Quagliozzi, the poster’s designer – who was four or five years old when the 1980s ended - actually watches Ashes to Ashes either?

Whatever the reason, Labour has catastrophically misjudged the majority’s viewpoint. People might have reservations about some things that went on in the 1980s but I can remember a time when police were out on the streets rather than filling in forms. I also see that rates were dramatically less by percentage of income, petrol cost a quarter of what it does now and houses exchanged hands for something like the cost of building them rather than a four or five times premium. Everyone had a NHS dentist, doctors gave out appointments in the week they were requested and councils didn’t hand out fines for selling goldfish, or engage in social engineering.

You can see what Mr Quagliozzi had in mind – there are some things about the 1980s that weren’t so great. I just about remember the Miners’ Strike and while British de-industrialisation was necessary in the face of foreign competition, I will never support that the way some of our northern communities were treated. Thirty years on, dozens and dozens of towns across the north will never vote Tory because of the appaling way they were treated and there is some justice in that.

Those towns will “get” this poster (although it’s probably not appearing there). But they won’t vote Conservative anyway. For the majority of people, Gene Hunt is something entirely different and Labour have shown in splendid technicolor how they have become unable to engage with people who don’t think as they do. Up until this point, the Conservative posters have been rubbish. The airbrushed one of DC was limp and corporate and the Saatchis were brought on board to rescue a sorry situation. Luckily, Labour has gifted them the defining image and slogan of this election – Fire up the Quattro. It’s time for change.

No bodge job - David Cameron at B&Q today

I think, just think, that they might have got it. After a good amount of faffing about, it looks like the Conservative leadership have grasped the fact that this election will be about five things.

Those five things are the five seconds between when people put down their polling card at the booth and pick up the pencil on a string and when they mark the X in the box on the card. During those five seconds, a lot rushes through people’s minds. They will be considering the campaign to date and which party has “won” the campaign. The images in their minds will be the leaders of the two main parties and possibly one or two other figures like PM or George Osborne.

They’ll consider the parties locally, whether there’s a sitting MP or new candidate that’s impressed them and who runs the local council and whether it’s successful. They’ll also be thinking about how they’ll feel in 10 minutes’ time, having cast their vote, a once-in-five-years opportunity, about the decision they are making now.

But most of all, they’ll have their own killer question, the thing that will swing it for them and in 2010, that question – allowing for variation – will be this:

“Who is going to get things back to how they used to be in 1999 as quickly as possible?”

It’s a lot to go through your mind in five seconds. But the Conservative Party has got to own those five seconds and not make pondering over Gordon a feature of them. That means firm and credible talk about the economy – and after what has come before, I’m ever so heartened to see how the NI debate has gone today - it is the first day in ages that we have had PM and the PM on the rocks.

Yesterday, I was a bit impatient about the Big Society idea because the economy is what will win or lose the election. But having read Ben Brogan’s analysis of this, I reacted too much in haste. The important thing though is that DC feeds other policy areas into this overarching idea so that voters can see how the bigger picture (DC would make a good PM) fits in with the smaller picture (why DC wants to be PM).

Together with the genius of an April Fool in the Grauniad of all places - hats off to everyone behind that – it’s been a good day for the Conservatives. But we need at least another 30 of them – and Labour will be anything but a pushover.

Tom Miller

I was taken aback to read such a personal attack of Woking’s Labour candidate Tom Miller by Spiderplant88 on her blog the other day. There really isn’t any need for such things and she followed up with another personal post about him soon afterwards. This is clearly what the Lib Dems mean when they insist that it is always they who are the victims of negative campaigning.

I’m not going to link directly to either because as a former journo I know a thing or two about the Defamation Act 1996. Just because things are in the public domain is not a defence to libel and the fact that they haven’t been actioned before with another author offers no protection either. And libel stretches all the way along the line – the author, the publisher, the domain owner and anyone who provides another pathway to the words complained of by linking.

I consider her remarks about Tom defamatory – whether or not they constitute libel is not for me to say. Understandably, Tom is not particularly happy about her comments and that is reflected in his response. I enjoy reading Spiderplant’s blog 99% of the time but for someone who in her About section decries personal attacks, she doesn’t seem averse to dishing them out.

I’ve never met Tom but I have it on good authority that he is an affable guy who’s easy to get on with. From his website, he seems to have a young, energetic and driven approach to his Old Labour politics, which I might not agree with but for which there is no better advocate locally. I don’t think he’ll ever be MP for Woking but my call is that he is politically astute, intelligent and ambitious enough to be an MP for somewhere in 2014. Whatever service he may or may not have given to the Labour Party, he doesn’t deserve the scattergun smear that he’s been dealt.

I couldn’t ever advocate that anyone in Woking voted Labour. Leaving aside the listless leadership and economic mismanagement of Gordon Brown, voting Labour in Surrey doesn’t exempt you from the terrible central government funding deal that the party has foisted on the county. But if you do admire Gordon, if you think he’s a misunderstood genius who’s going to pay off our debt, cut our taxes and transform public services while re-discovering his human touch on May 7, 2010 then from what I can see Tom Miller is as good a Labour candidate to represent that view as you could want.

Osborne and Clarke could hold the key to election success

It’s been a strange time in national politics during the past three months. There’s no doubt that Charlie Whelan, Alistair Campbell and PM represent the most devastatingly effective political propaganda team in British history. The results of their work are seen in every media outlet, regardless of its official persuasion and sometimes more so, strikingly, in outlets that are not government supporting. There has been a real gusto about the Labour press campaign during the past three months that, had it been waged by the Conservatives, would undoubtedly have “sealed the deal” for DC.

Meanwhile, my reflections on his performance during the same time are probably best left unstated. The PM remains shatteringly unpopular and won’t survive the election either way. He has led us into a recession of drastic proportions and other than the press management outlined above, his government team is utterly hapless and bereft of ideas – as well as the money to enact any meaningful change or reform. There is simply no reason for the Conservatives to be within striking distance of Labour in the polls.

That we are is down to two things. Firstly, people are fed up of waiting to be told what Conservative policy is. They have waited for three years now in the belief that when the time came, DC and his team would be straightforward and clear about how the Conservative Party would seek to re-shape and change Britain in 2010-14. I can see that we have made some attempts, particularly on education policy, to get these messages across. But too often the position on taxation, family values and criminal justice has overshadowed the NHS and education. That’s partly to do with Labour’s art; but it’s also politics and an experienced team like Andy Coulson and Steve Hilton should foresee the tactics of opponents and build these into Conservative planning.

Let’s take for example the Piers Morgan show on the PM, sycophantic and soporific in equal measure though it was. If the DC team thought that a late-night Sunday show with Trevor McDonald would pull in the same crowd either in numbers or demographic, one wonders what kind of analytics they are using. As it happens, there has been some good poll news today (on the front of the Guardian) but I doubt that was much to do with Sir Trevor. And there needs to be a sea-change in Conservative tactics if it’s to stick.

I’m puzzled that the one issue that will decide the election – and the one that the Conservative are traditionally strongest on – is the one issue we seem to be handing to Labour. Gordon Brown has been given licence by his media friends to paint himself as the experienced hand on the economic tiller, which is akin to the Cray twins applying to the magistracy. This PM has no right whatsoever to claim such a thing – he has shown himself as the most politically expedient of Chancellors and PMs.

There is a clear opporunity for contrast here. A Conservative Party that will plan for 2010-18 rather than just for four years, a Conservative Chancellor who will make the tough decisions necessary to secure long-term prosperity, a Conservative Prime Minister who will formulate policy around what we can pay for rather than what we can borrow against and a Treasury team of Ken Clarke, Phillip Hammond and George Osborne that is both more able, more popular and more trustworthy than Mandelson, Byrne and Darling. To my mind, we have the tools – what I don’t understand is why we are not taking the initiative.

It’s a fluid situation – the level of deficit cuts and savings needed will fluctuate with each pronouncement on how recovery is going – or whether we slip back into recession. But the budget presents an opportunity to brush aside what will be a populist, shameless and cycnical piece of propaganda designed to win votes and create difficult questions for the opposition. We have a clear opportunity to make some assumptions, to take a snapshot of the economic climate and to make our own proposals for the British people.

Without their confidence on the economy, it will be a struggle for DC to gain a majority in parliament. The upcoming industrial action may play into his hands and he needs to capitalise with a clear understanding and strategy for the economy; these two things may alone prove decisive.

Gordon practising his left hook

It was almost inevitable that following the allegations of bullying contained in Andrew Rawnsley’s book appeared to be backed up by the National Bullying Helpline, the Labour machine would turn on Christine Pratt and her organisation and try to claim that it was motivated by political malice. The allegations contained within Rawnsley’s account were so potentially damaging that only the robustest of defences was ever going to be considered.

From PM’s point of view, you have to manage the crisis by not making the story about the PM and his treatment of staff – which, frankly, is an open secret far from the Westminster Village. Instead, the government spinners are trying to make the story about a dodgy charity launching a personal campaign against the PM at a time when they believe people have more capacity for sympathy than they have in the past. To a point, they have succeeded.

But let’s cut through that. The fact that three patrons of the NBH – including Conservative MP Anne Widdecombe - have resigned because Ms Pratt chose to reveal that her charity had fielded calls from Number 10 staff demonstrates that by all accepted standards of ethics, she shouldn’t have made public information about her clients. I’ve listened to her on the radio and she seems very passionate about her cause – but she can’t sustain a charity that is nominally about confidentiality while sounding off to the press if she thinks it is in the public interest.

So yes, Ms Pratt has a case to answer. But then, she’s not Prime Minister. And nothing that she has done (I believe she was so incensed by minister after minister lining up to defend someone she knew ran an office where there was a problem that she let herself be drawn into an error of judgement) detracts from the central allegations.

Let’s look at the evidence. No-one has denied that No 10 staff phoned the charity, even if they were wrong to say so. Sir Gus O’Donnell’s statement roundly leaves open the possibility that he approached the PM and warned him about his behaviour. And both PM and Harriet Harman’s use of the euphemisms “demanding on others” and “he gets frustrated” along with the PM’s “I get angry with myself” all pointedly don’t rule out the account of Rawnsley.

But while Ms Pratt is being shoved through the ringer, the PM is being given a relatively easy ride. The distraction technique has worked – apart from Nick Robinson, whose unwillingness to side with Labour is quite telling. It would be safe to assume that he knows things he’s not inclined to reveal.

All that matters, of course, is what the voters think. The appearance of a Number 10 employee to testify to having been on the receiving end would probably seal the PM’s fate. That won’t happen unless someone is planning to leave the Civil Service at the election anyway because the price of talking would be ostracism from the higher grades. Even though Labour would smear them, the weight of evidence would be too great and the PM finished – it would be poetic justice indeed.

As it happens, things are finely balanced. DC is right to back off and strongly rebut any Labour smears about opposition connivance. But it is worth saying that while Christine Pratt made an error speaking out, that doesn’t discredit the testament that she made. And a lack of self-control and respect for others is not a trait that lends itself well to the modern office of Prime Minister.