Portrait of the Week – 16 April 2005

In the Conservative manifesto, six pledges designated as ‘the simple longings of the British people’ appeared in facsimile handwriting: ‘more police, cleaner hospitals, lower taxes, school discipline, controlled immigration and accountability’. Details included an undertaking to match Labour spending on the NHS, schools, transport and foreign aid, while spending 1 per cent less in total each year. Labour gave six ‘pledges’ of its own: an inflation target of 2 per cent and mortgages as low as possible; a million more homeowners by the end of the Parliament; a million more people helped by the New Deal; 300,000 apprenticeships to be created; minimum wage to rise to £5.35 per hour; education spending to rise to £5,500 per pupil a year by 2008. The Labour manifesto, 23,000 words, against the Tories’ 6,600, included an undertaking to do away with hereditary peers, again. Mr Tony Blair said this election would be ‘my last as leader of my party and Prime Minister of our country’; commentators tried to see what leeway that left him.