Conservative party

Are the Tories having a bad campaign? It certainly doesn’t seem to be as slick and upbeat as some had expected. Many Tories had expected the polls to stay right where they are until polling day, but others had assumed that there would at least be some signs of a public panic about Ed Miliband by now. Instead, normally gloomy Labour types say their leader is becoming less of a problem on the doorstep. That’s damning with faint praise, still, but the Tories had assumed things would be getting worse for Labour now, not better. The Tories I’ve spoken to over the past couple of days talk of the need

So both the BBC and Andrew Marr have admitted to misquoting David Cameron as having said that foxhunting was his favourite sport. But what did Cameron himself think of Marr’s self-described ‘cock up’? Well, The Spectator caught up with the Tory leader earlier today and asked him about it – and here’s his answer: ‘The old mental filing system, you’re going ‘drrrrrr’ through, and thinking… but I knew the article because I wrote it myself… I just thought maybe there’s something else. You never know, something might have been written by someone else. So I thought it was bollocks. And it was bollocks.’ Was there perhaps a spot of truth

The Prime Minister’s interview on the Andrew Marr Show yesterday showed that despite claims to the contrary, Cameron isn’t lacking in passion; the PM was full of fight and his normal self-confidence. But there was one question he did falter over. ‘You told the Countryside Alliance magazine recently that your favourite sport was foxhunting’, Marr declared. ‘Is that really true?’. Cameron looked utterly bemused, but Marr was so keen on the question that he repeated it: ‘You said: “It’s my favourite sport which I love.” Is that true?’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, a Twitter-storm erupted at the news that Cameron had apparently ‘admitted’ to his favourite sport being foxhunting. But where on earth did

David Cameron’s inner circle are always keen to talk up the parallels between this campaign and 1992. This week, the winner of that election will enter the fray on their behalf. As I report in the Mail on Sunday, John Major will give a speech warning of the dangers to the Union itself if the United Kingdom ends up with a Labour government propped up by the SNP. The Tories hope that Major’s intervention will elevate this point above the usual party political knockabout. They also believe that a former Prime Minister speaking out will make voters pay attention; they were much struck by how much coverage Tony Blair’s speech

Jonathan Freedland has written a compelling column on the challenge that Ed Miliband will face to establish his legitimacy if he becomes Prime Minister despite Labour not having won the most seats or votes. But I suspect that whoever becomes the government after May the 8th will have difficulty in persuading everyone that they have a right to govern. The Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition could claim that 59 per cent of voters had backed its constituent parts. It also had a comfortable majority in the House of Commons with 364 out of 650 seats. Now, unless something dramatic happens, no governing combination is likely to have anything like that kind of

Earlier this year Mr S revealed how plans for a set of campaign posters for the Conservative candidate Flick Drummond had to be revised after the Tories realised that from a distance the poster could be misread as another word starting with F. Now Matthew Hancock has fallen victim to an unforeseeable error in his own campaign literature. A Lib Dem supporter has noticed an unfortunate fault that occurs on folding the Tory MP’s campaign leaflet: Mr S hopes no one gets the wrong idea.

The Tories have another election broadcast out tonight that builds on the message of their manifesto: that they are for hardworking blue-collar people and that if you want sunshine, vote Tory. To that end, every outside shot in the film is bathed in sunlight, and everyone is in a pretty good mood: laughing as they work, smiling fondly at a newborn baby, grinning as they climb up the stairs (a child). Most of the attacks on Labour are framed as positives: that the Tories are freeing people from ‘mountains of debt’ and that businesses ‘aren’t held back’. But there is a direct reference to Labour, which is in the section

Lord Ashcroft has released his latest round of polling, looking at ten competitive Tory-Labour seats. In all of the constituencies, Ashcroft has reported swings to Labour, ranging from 0.5 per cent to seven per cent. At present, five of the seats are set to remain with the Conservatives: Cleethorpes, Dover, Dudley South, Harlow and North East Somerset. Some of the Tory leads are considerable: Rob Halfon in Harlow has a ten point lead, while Jacob Rees-Mogg in North East Somerset has a 16 point lead. Use the interactive chart above to see all the latest polls for each seat. Equally, the other half of the seats Ashcroft has polled are looking