The serialisation of Lord Mandelson’s memoirs, eerily entitled The Third Man, in The Times has attracted the expected attention of the Westminster world. Despite the enhanced level of detail contained within the dark reaches of Lord Mandelson’s book concerning the Blair-Brown feud—barely scandalous after thirteen years of New Labour—Lord Mandelson’s account of his former government colleagues is yet to have been judged particularly breathtaking or revelatory.

Indeed, former Ministers whose whole career had been spent denying the very existence of the faction-fighting at the heart of New Labour now simply blithely acknowledge what everyone else was aware of long ago. Lord Mandelson’s memoirs have not received many favourable reviews. London commuters would not doubt have read the London Evening Standard’s headline ‘Critics savage Peter Mandelson’s book as damp squib and duplicitous’, as even left-leaning elements within the media have failed to give the book and its author a sympathetic hearing. Lord Mandelson is being blamed for Labour’s electoral defeat and current crisis by many on the left beyond Charlie Whelan and the Brownite rump: Mary Anne Sieghart, for example, writing in The Independent, has attacked Mandelson’s ‘selfish vanity’ and labelled him ‘The man who ensured that Labour would spend five, possibly 10, years out of power’.

However, it may well be wrong to follow this analysis and write off Peter Mandelson. Rather than being the cause of the deepening of Labour’s defeat, he may well continue to be seen as a key party power-broker and a contributor to the untimely recovery of New Labour.

Crucially, the central thrust of Mandelson’s memoirs seems to be an intense, individual and unforgiving criticism of Gordon Brown. Tony Blair’s comments about his colleague and rival within what was effectively an unstable intra-party coalition government are presented in brutally un-edited form and Mandelson does not seem to conceal his complete lack of faith in Brown as Labour leader and Prime Minister. Peter Oborne, writing in The Daily Mail, appears right in his judgement that the ‘fundamental purpose of this book (besides making a huge sum of money for P Mandelson Esq) is to make sure that Gordon Brown gets the personal blame for all the disasters and mistakes of 13 years of Blair government’.

This allegation is wrong, misleading and potentially dangerous on a great many levels. Wrong, because the failings of the past government were not the fault of one man, but the result of far greater structural, ideological and governmental failures within New Labour. Misleading, because it attempts to prevent a thorough and fair analysis of these failings and, ultimately, dangerous because it suggests that the only thing Labour got wrong, the reason why they are in a somewhat arrogant and disgruntled opposition, is Gordon Brown.

With a new leader, the old, flawed answers are made right again. This new leader, however, cannot be an individual linked to the Brown camp. Lord Mandelson has thereby proved once again that he can make or break ambitions and control his party colleagues. Similarly, his memoirs provide an intellectual excuse and an argumentative framework to explain Labour’s defeat and to establish grounds for its immediate recovery: a recovery which would threaten the integrity and well-being of this country.

By demonising Gordon Brown to such an extent, Lord Mandelson has attempted to revive his party’s fortunes without a debate on policy. His argument encourages the belief that Labour were right all along, they just had the wrong man at the helm: an idea which may easily gain traction within the press and public commentators, especially as the Coalition government continues to address the shameful economic legacy of New Labour.

By presenting such a specious and characteristically deceitful explanation of New Labour in power, the Prince of Darkness may well be set to reign again.   

Filed under: corruption, gordonbrown, ukpolitics
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At 8.05 this morning, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg unveiled his latest pet project: the Your Freedom website, an internet forum in which members of the public are invited to discuss the laws they would like to see repealed and the civil liberties they would like to see restored. At 8.30, I signed up, fearing the worst: as an occasional browser of the BBC’s abominable Have Your Say pages, I expected a continuous stream of fervently right-wing, borderline-bigoted vitriol.

In fact, I was pleasantly surprised. One of the very first suggestions, perhaps due to some early-bird member of PEN or follower of Index on Censorship, was an intelligent proposal to reword sections 4a and 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. These sections currently allow the police carte blanche to arrest anyone who engages in a speech act which, intentionally or otherwise, causes “harassment, alarm or distress”. If the new government is at all serious about protecting free speech, this has to go.

Alas, by 9, this suggestion had long been drowned out by a chorus of rather more predictable bugbears. Fox hunters stood up to demand the right to torment animals. Smokers stood up to demand the right to smoke in public places. Cannabis users stood up to demand the right to smoke cannabis. Illegal downloaders stood up to demand the right to carry on downloading without fear of disconnection. And some people perversely decided that the best way to protect our rights was to scrap the Human Rights Act.

These demands were iterated many times over in many different threads, leaving almost no space at all for suggestions motivated by a genuine, selfless concern for the rights of others. If the aim of this odd gimmick is to facilitate serious, fruitful debate about civil liberties, it was ill-conceived from the outset and will fail miserably.

But I am disinclined to impute such honest motives to this government. When “consultation” comes in the form of a chaotic, poorly moderated shouting match in which selfish, short-sighted and simplistic proposals are the most likely to rise to the top, David Cameron’s government is left under no obligation to respond to sensible suggestions. It will do as much or as little as it likes, knowing it can point any angered correspondents or petitioners towards this black hole of a forum.

Filed under: civilliberties, conservatives, davidcameron, jonathanbirch, ukpolitics
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Over the last six weeks in the United States, we have seen gradually unfold the true scale of two parallel catastrophes. Both involve industries stuck in a seemingly intractable rut; both have long-term roots, occurring amid a climate of irresponsibility and recklessness.

The first scarcely needs detailing. Perhaps as many as 4.2 million gallons a day flowing from the oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico; more than 400 species of birds, amphibians, mammals and reptiles endangered by the toxic brown sludge; significant damage to the fisheries and tourism industries of the region. The second has not made the headlines, for a simple reason: because it is the headlines.

Commentators have rightly raised concerns about Obama’s populist rhetoric over the oil spill. He has talked about “kicking ass” and provocatively refers to BP as “British Petroleum”, a name it has not used in years. However, it would be misguided to see this, as Iain Dale does, as an example of a demagogical leader wilfully playing to the gallery. Rather, we should see Obama as a beleaguered executive capitulating to the increasingly ridiculous demands of an insatiable mainstream media.

Indeed, in discussing the federal response to the spill, the main talking point of the media pundits has been whether the President is showing enough anger. They want him to take control, to articulate the public’s ire; essentially, they want him to be Peter Finch in Network. “Man, you got to get down here and take control!” squealed political strategist James Carville on ABC News. “Tell BP, ‘I’m your daddy!’”  Obama has been compared to Mr Spock for his emotional aloofness. So unappeasable are the pundits’ demands that it is clear that no amount of presidential emoting would be enough.

The sheer absurdity of this bogus issue was shown by an exchange that occurred at a White House press conference between White House spokesman Robert Gibbs and reporter Chip Reid of CBS News:

REID: You said earlier that the President is enraged. Is he enraged at BP specifically?

GIBBS: I think he’s enraged at the time that it’s taken, yes. I think he’s been enraged over the course of this, as I’ve discussed, about the fact that when you’re told something is fail-safe and it clearly isn’t, that that’s the cause for quite a bit of frustration. I think one of the reasons that — which is one of the reasons you heard him discuss the setting up of the oil commission in order to create a regulatory framework that ensures something like this doesn’t happen again.

REID: Frustration and rage are very different emotions, though. I haven’t — have we really seen rage from the President on this? I think most people would say no.

GIBBS: I’ve seen rage from him, Chip. I have.

REID: Can you describe it? Does he yell and scream? What does he do?

A key role of the press in a democracy is to scrutinise the actions and decisions of those in power and ensure that they are held to account. Thomas Jefferson argued that a free press was the “only security of all”. What’s so sad here is that, while the US news channels are concerned with flippant personality-based questions such as this one, there are serious criticisms to be made and questions to be asked about both the federal government’s response to the crisis and its role in the events leading up to it. A fantastic article in Rolling Stone has related in detail the Obama administration’s record of sluggishness and mismanagement, both in its response to the crisis and in the months preceding it. Despite the initial plea to crack down on corruption in the MMS (Minerals Management Service), Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar left many discredited Bush-era managers in place and let BP, regardless of its woeful safety record, operate with few or no safeguards. It also demonstrates that Obama downplayed the oil spill despite foreknowledge of its severity.

However, we have here a US media that, rather than probing executive decisions and determining levels of culpability, focuses solipstically on hollow talking points of its own making; a media that looks not outward but inward, that rejects the investigative spirit of Watergate in favour of the inconsequential spirit of “lipstick on a pig”. In a world where alternative forms of communication are chipping away at their dominance by the day, the mainstream news sources increasingly have to justify themselves - and they’re not going to do it by wallowing in non-issues like these. Thomas Jefferson must be turning in his grave.

Filed under: barackobama, environment, media
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Before the election, a ministerial post must have seemed a distant pipe dream to Clare Fellow Julian Huppert. Now, a few dramatic weeks later, it still is, but the pipe is considerably shorter.

19 Liberal Democrats have jobs in David Cameron’s government. As the new Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge (and one of four Clareites in the new parliament), Huppert can dare to hope that a chance to grab a rein of power will eventually come his way. But there may be a slight hitch.

Later this year, Lord Browne’s review of Higher Education funding will make recommendations on the future of tuition fees. Universities are pressing for a whopping increase, and today the Universities Minister, David Willetts, has strongly hinted that the government will happily oblige.

During the election campaign, Nick Clegg rallied the student vote with dire warnings of the consequences of an increase. “The Liberal Democrats are different,” he pledged. “Not only will we oppose any raising of the cap, we will scrap tuition fees for good, including for part-time students.” It’s not unreasonable to infer that this was key to his party’s success in student-heavy areas. Yet, in cosying up to their new Tory allies, the Lib Dems discarded this suddenly inexpedient commitment. The coalition agreement only makes provision for Lib Dems to abstain from a vote on raising fees. To oppose such a rise would require an MP to go against the party whip.

Huppert’s website leaves little room for doubt regarding his opposition to tuition fees. He also pulls no punches on the subject of MPs who duck out of controversial votes by abstaining:

I remember Anne Campbell as Cambridge’s MP promising to oppose tuition fees, and then voting for them. I remember her saying she meant she would oppose top up fees - which she then abstained on. As Cambridge’s MP, I would vote to scrap student fees, whatever they may then be called.

For many Lib Dems, Huppert included, a clash between principle and pragmatism now seems inevitable.

Filed under: jonathanbirch, libdems, ukpolitics
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When the exit polls came in on election night I saw the same reaction from everyone watching: total shock. Their astonishment was not at the projected hung Parliament we had all been expecting, or at the Tory lead over Labour, but at the thought that the Lib Dems, whose ascendancy had apparently been the story of the campaign, were actually going to lose seats. It was incredible. For weeks the media had been telling us we were into a new era of three party politics, that Nick Clegg’s personal popularity was unmatched by any post-war leader, that the Liberals, after ninety years in the political wilderness, were back. How could they have been so wrong?

Of course, the coalition deal means the 2010 election will still be remembered as a Liberal triumph, even though Clegg – and all those journalists who tied their colours to his mast – probably spent most of election night feeling like they’d been sold a pup. But when the next election comes, we would do well to remember that the final result turned out to be exactly what the polls were predicting at the time the election was called. The campaign – the manifestoes, the debates, the gaffes – changed nothing.

This is because the messages parties send out during the campaign reinforce the ideas people already have, rather than changing them. How could they do anything else? Campaigns are about playing safe and avoiding controversy, as exemplified by the contemptible strategy employed by all three parties of keeping their leaders from meeting real people. Election literature consists of a list of vacuous clichés and appallingly poor copy – every pamphlet I read contained incomprehensible syntax, and countless typos. Posters offer vague, forgettable platitudes.

Above all, so much of the campaign is negative. It baffles me why politicians do this. Negative campaigns almost always backfire. So many politicians and journalists are incapable of realising how easily the public can see through their smears. No-one except Sun journalists thought Gordon Brown misspelling Jacqui Janes’s name meant that he didn’t care about the troops in Afghanistan. Nobody except Sarah Palin believed Barack Obama’s acquaintance with Bill Ayers actually amounted to ‘palling around with terrorists.’

Negative attacks rebound by painting the purveyor as desperate and out of touch when they blow irrelevant issues out of all proportion: Labour’s fatuous obsession with Lord Ashcroft was so self-evidently hypocritical that it blew their opportunity to raise real, constructive questions about tax evasion and the Tories’ pro-business ideology. They also make their purveyors seems unlikeable. The pervasive idea of the Conservatives as the ‘nasty party’ was generated largely by their negative approach to the 1997, 2001, and 2005 elections: negative campaigns aren’t just about attacking the other side, but attacking and blaming anyone – the EU, immigrants, benefit fraudsters – in lieu of offering constructive ways of actually helping people.

The month long campaign that precedes each general election is always bathetic and always inconsequential. This may be because British election campaigns truly last for an entire Parliament, because of the adversarial nature of Parliamentary politics, and the conventions that come with having a formal opposition acting as a permanent government in waiting, making the final four-week run in fairly underwhelming. It’s also down to the unambitious attitude parties take to the formal campaigning, playing it safe – whether with fluffy platitudes, or by mudslinging – and seeming to think they have more to lose than to win. It’s because campaigns are so irrelevant that the swings apparently detected during a campaign, like the apparent Lib Dem ascendancy, always seem to prove illusory.

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The Labour Party is at a crossroads. It has lost an election, and lost power, but its position is far from disastrous. Labour has nearly a hundred more MPs than the Tories did in 1997, and its in-fighting over the last few years has been nowhere near as debilitating as Tory civil war was in the 1990s. Morale is high, based on the party’s recovery from potential electoral annihilation a year ago to a very respectable performance. It is in opposition to a coalition – ripe for division. The vision that coalition will apparently try to govern by – David Cameron’s ‘big society’ – is vague, and has not yet won over the electorate. There is no reason why Labour ought to face a long spell in opposition: the party can realistically target winning the next election.

Whether it can win depends on one factor above all others, its choice of leader. It needs a leader who can be combative in Parliamentary debate, and in TV debates at the next election. It needs a leader who can start acting, from day one, as a Prime Minister in waiting, above all, by having an agenda for government. It needs a leader strong enough to resist the temptations of class warfare and negative tactics. It needs a leader absolutely surely of what they stand for, and what they are in politics for. It needs a leader who can offer something that the Tories and the Lib Dems can’t.

David Miliband is not this person. If Labour make the mistake of electing such a lightweight, he will lead them to utter irrelevancy. Miliband is a man so confused about what he believes in that as Foreign Secretary he repeatedly antagonised foreign leaders and dismayed civil servants with rash, reckless comments, such as the time he described terrorism as being sometimes ‘justifiable’ and ‘effective’. He is capable of appaling tactlessness, tastelessness and thoughtlessness, like the time he chose the Taj Hotel in Mumbai as a venue for a speech attacking the ‘war on terror’. His background is identical to that of Cameron and Clegg: a well-educated, upper-middle class white man, with a background in think-tanks and PR, who went into politics for the intellectual challenge and to satisfy schoolboy ambitions. If Labour elect Miliband, he will be their IDS: vacant, visionless and insipid.

There is only one senior Labour MP with the clout to take on a united Cameron and Clegg: only one MP who came into politics with a clear agenda for change, who has turned their agenda into actual legislation in the past, who has proved an ability both to take down Tories in the House, and to win votes. Harriet Harman won the support of Labour members who elected her Deputy Leader, and of her constituents, having turned what was once a marginal constituency into a safe seat. Harriet Harman is so sure of what she believes in and so willing to fight for her views that she took MI5 to the European Courts when she found out they were keeping illegal files on her. Whether or not one agrees with her agenda, one has to respect her record.

In our apparently post-ideological age, what other politician has articulated such clear principles, let alone enshrined them in law? Harriet Harman is, of course, divisive, arrogant, and insensitive. This does not mean unelectable: Thatcher was these things too, and she won three landslides. Unelectable is not divisive; unelectable is listless and undignified, like the late Michael Foot, like IDS, and like Miliband. If Labour MPs can persuade Harman to run for leader, they can take the fight to the government in the next Parliament and present a real case to the electorate in five years time.

Filed under: labour, ukpolitics
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Interesting times. With an extraordinary Con-Lib coalition about to be finalised, David Cameron and Nick Clegg must be all but salivating at the prospect of imminent power as a forlorn Gordon Brown skulks off into obscurity and Labour braces itself for a spell in opposition.

It looks like a catastrophe for the outgoing government. But it is not. There is a reason why the Lib-Lab talks collapsed: Labour has a huge amount to gain by going voluntarily into opposition. The party’s bigwigs have weighed the options and understood that:

1. A Lib-Lab coalition would have been weak and unpopular from the outset.

2. A Con-Lib coalition is unlikely to hang together for more than a year or two. The ideological gulf between the parties is enormous.

3. Labour needs only a small swing in its favour at the next election to be the largest party in the next parliament.

4. Many Lib Dem voters never imagined that the party would prop up a Tory administration. They will think twice before voting the same way again.

5. The incoming government will inherit a budgetary nightmare. It will have little choice but to make savage cuts in public spending. This is not a recipe for success in the polls.

Consequently, Labour’s prospective leaders are eyeing an open goal at the next election. The price of conceding power now is more than compensated by the probability of a swift return to office with a new figurehead and the past thirteen years already a distant memory in the minds of the electorate.

It’s a gamble, for there is an alternative possibility. Voters, understanding the special circumstances, could forgive Cameron and Clegg, not only for getting into bed with each other but also for the tough times which follow. The new cabinet could be surprisingly harmonious and govern surprisingly effectively, enjoying a honeymoon so extended that, when Cameron goes to the polls in a year’s time, he romps home for a new term with a clear majority.

The Labour Party is justifiably confident that this will not happen. From their perspective, things can only get better.

Filed under: conservatives, davidcameron, jonathanbirch, labour, ukpolitics
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It’s a scandal: in the 2008 US Presidential Election, 47% of the votes counted for nothing! Rather than granting each candidate a slice of power proportional to his or her vote share, America inexplicably uses an antiquated “winner takes all” approach. Consequently, over 50 million voters received no representation whatsoever in the White House.

That sounded silly, didn’t it? So why does a parallel argument seem reasonable when we’re electing a local MP? Last Friday, The Guardian enthusiastically endorsed the Liberal Democrats as the only party ready to revolutionize our “discredited” and “unrepresentative” electoral system.

But what exactly is “unrepresentative” about the current system? Well, it doesn’t deliver parliamentary seats in proportion to national vote share. That’s just another way of saying it’s not a system of proportional representation. But representation by area is still representation. Under First Past the Post, everyone gets a vote, no one gets multiple votes, and everyone’s vote is worth the same for the purposes of counting. To accuse FPTP of “disenfranchising” voters exaggerates the problem — and trivializes the plight of those elsewhere in the world who are really disenfranchised.

So why all the fuss? Part of the problem, I suspect, is that many people no longer see a General Election as a chance to elect a local MP. Instead, they see it as a chance to elect a Prime Minister and a government by means of a baroque mediating process that bizarrely distorts the outcome.

Admittedly, it’s hard not to see the election in this way. When national media outlets bombard us daily with the latest gossip on the leaders, it’s hard enough to remember your local candidate’s name, let alone see her as the direct recipient of your vote. And maybe this is fair enough. After all, leaders have more power than they used to, and government is more centralized. In these circumstances, maybe a General Election should be a referendum on the government rather than a complex patchwork of local contests.

But there’s something to be said for the current system. As a means of electing a local MP, it is simple and fair. I would like to see the boundaries updated and AV introduced. But I wouldn’t like to see MPs determined from on high by party lists, or a complicated trade-off that combines the worst of both worlds.

Filed under: electoralreform, jonathanbirch
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An inseparable novelty duo, embraced by an adoring nation in the wake of 90 minutes of TV, and propelled from being rank outsiders to serious contenders. If this election campaign really is the start of “X-Factor politics”, then enter Jedward. Nick Clegg and Vince Cable find themselves and their party at the front of the political stage, and, much like that of John and Edward Grimes, their success is completely undeserved. The usual approach of trying to be everything to everyone is evident in both style and substance, but this time their weak, divided party veils itself with the new national obsession with Nick and Vince.

For a start, Nick Clegg’s approach of attacking what he calls “old politics” is cynical and deceptive. Despite the fact that modern day Lib Dems can quite reasonably trace their political routes to the 1860s, there is little new about the modern day party either. The Liberal Democrats on a local level are widely regarded by the other political parties as the most underhand and pernicious campaigners of the lot; their MPs were also embroiled in the expenses scandal; they received huge donations from an ex-con; their first election poster was a copy of a Tory poster from the 1990s, remodelled to contain a outright lie on tax; and Nick Clegg himself received thousands of pounds in donations into his private bank account. Though some of these actions may be put down to a certain naivety, they certainly do not amount to any sort of break from the past - “new politics” it ain’t. Politics is a dirty business and the Lib Dems are no exception, despite their squeaky-clean image and “it wasn’t me, guv” rhetoric. Clegg has been able to ride on the crest of an opportunistic wave, presented to him on a plate with people’s dislike of Gordon Brown and scepticism of David Cameron. He had the easiest job in the world at the start of this election campaign, but now it’s starting to unravel.

And what about the policies themselves? Uninspiring and unsurprising given the lack of thought that has clearly gone in to thinking them through. On immigration, they seriously suggest an amnesty for illegal immigrants, a policy which has been shown in all other countries when it has been tried to subsequently increase illegal immigration. Additionally, forcing economic migrants to work in particular areas of the country, not allowing them to move, and charging the employer if they do, strikes me as a somewhat illiberal policy for a Liberal party.

On fiscal policy, Vince Cable brands Tory plans to cut national insurance rises as “nauseating” one week and the next week says it would be better to stop the rises but makes no commitment to do so. Their tax policy instead is to change income tax allowances for low and middle incomes, but this benefits someone earning £50,000 a year more than someone earning £10,000, as low earners already get most of their income tax free and have their income subsidised by benefits like tax credits (some of which the Lib Dems plan to abolish as well). For a party that purports to be one of fairness, they have a funny definition of the term.

Regarding Trident, unless their policy has changed again as I write this, the Lib Dems are prepared to sacrifice our place on the UN Security Council - the last great bastion of Britain’s influence on the world stage - in return for saving what they claim would be £100 million, though official estimates are a fraction of this. Even then, as if the suggestion of putting cost-cutting over national defence wasn’t enough, they haven’t ruled out replacing it with something potentially more expensive.

This indecision and muddling is most evident, however, in their plans for tackling the budget deficit and public finances. Cable and Clegg claim to have put forward a fully costed manifesto, billions of pounds in cuts and a change to economic policy. The sums in the manifesto may be right, but they rely on revenue raising that the IFS says is staggeringly ambitious; their cuts are at least as unspecific as those of the Conservatives, and many of their cuts are alternatives to those put forward by Labour, rather than additions. On the Daily Politics Chancellors’ debate last week, Saint Vince completely fell apart under scrutiny of his economic policy - just as Clegg isn’t perfect, he isn’t infallible. Indeed, these are two men whose zealous support for the Euro and further surrender of powers to Brussels, whatever the cost, would, if enacted in government, make our economic situation a whole lot worse.

So, what appears to be a party with a plan to reshape Britain, led by two trusted figures promising to change politics, is not actually so. They are not new; they were merely unheard of before - there is a reason that nobody has taken the Lib Dem’s seriously for years. They will not change politics; they are politicians like everyone else - plans to abolish safe seats and introduce proportional representation are only offered in cynical self-interest. They will not save Britain; they don’t have any credible plan for the country - nobody is more surprised at the Lib Dems’ new found success than the Lib Dems themselves and their manifesto, rather than being dreamt up on the playing fields of Westminster, was more likely dreamt up on the back of a post-it note. I just hope the electorate sees through the spin and stops falling for the facade that is “Cleggmania”. They certainly won’t be agreeing with Nick if the Lib Dems win any sort of power - here’s hoping that they realise that before it’s too late.

Filed under: libdems, nickclegg, ukpolitics
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The surge of support for the Liberal Democrats over the last week is proof of an extraordinary political coup, pulled off by the Labour Party. When people cast their votes on May 6^th they will cast them not for or against the government, but for or against the Conservatives. David Cameron is the central figure in this election, not the Prime Minister he seeks to replace, and the ranks of Lib Dem supporters have been swelled by that huge part of the electorate who are disenchanted with Labour, but unimpressed by the Tories. This situation could yet produce a result that seemed unthinkable only a year ago – keeping Gordon Brown in office.

A party incumbent for thirteen years has made this election a referendum not on their record in office, but on the suitability of the opposition to solve the problems they themselves have created. The party of Alastair Campbell is able to ridicule the Tories for airbrushing posters. The Conservatives still think their trump card is reminding voters that a Labour government means another five years of Gordon: they’re wrong.

There’s no-one in the country who hasn’t made up their mind about Brown already. The contempt which he attracted when the recession first hit has long ebbed away, especially now the economy is evidently recovering. Voters feel like they did about Blair in 2005: they don’t like the Prime Minister, but they’ve got bored of disliking him, and he now attracts something closer to a weary ambivalence. It’s Cameron who remains a mystery to most voters, not because he’s a new figure, but precisely because he has been around for so long now – the longest serving Leader of the Opposition since Kinnock – without properly defining himself.

The Tory lead over the last two years seems to have been illusory: polls reflected unhappiness with the government rather than any real enthusiasm for the Tories. But Cameron has had five years to capitalise on a government in disarray and an electorate ready to listen to a new generation of Conservatives untainted by the ‘nasty party’ days. Not till last week’s manifesto was the central Conservative agenda for government – to empower individuals to take public services into their own hands – properly articulated outside of Westminster. That message should have been the theme of the last five years, not a couple days of the campaign. Ask most voters what Cameron really stands for, and they’re stumped: Inheritance Tax? National Insurance? Tax breaks for married couples? These are not election winning issues.

The Labour line that the Tories are the ‘do-nothing’ party is powerful because the Tories appear visionless. It’s become a cliché that the Tories have not ‘sealed the deal’, but it is the reality, as exposed by this rush of support to the Lib Dems since the first debate. With less than two weeks left, Cameron is fast running out of time.

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