David cameron

There must be something about stepping back onto Scottish soil that invigorates Alistair Darling, because his Edinburgh speech is one of the most political and confrontational he has delivered for some time.  Sure, Darling is a Labour man, so it’s part of his job to oppose the Tories.  But, compared to his Cabinet colleagues, he’s normally so restrained about it.  Here, though, the gloves are well and truly off. The Chancellor calls Cameron a “real risk to Scotland’s future,” and throws in a dash of Thatcher-baiting (“The Tories … are as out of touch now as they were 30 years ago”).  But, really, there are two passages worth dwelling on,

The Joanne Cash affair is the kind of story you couldn’t make up. But once you get beyond the comic details there are a few things worth taking seriously. First, CCHQ has not covered itself in glory during this episode. It was aware of the problem but rather than dealing with it, it attempted to massage the situation. If CCHQ had acted decisively, this problem could have been resolved a fortnight ago without all this publicity and damage to the party. CCHQ’s performance hardly fills one with confidence about whether or not it has done the appropriate due diligence on its candidates all around the country.   Second, it is

Labour’s new ad with David Cameron facing both ways highlights what was wrong with the Tories’ opening ad of the year, that one dominated by Cameron’s face. The Tory strategy for the election campaign has to be to try and make it into a referendum on this failed government. But that ad, which emphasised Cameron so strongly, gave Labour an opening to try and turn the election not just into a choice between two parties but into a referendum on David Cameron and Tory policy. Labour’s success in doing this is largely responsible for the Tory wobble. The contrast between Cameron and Brown does work to the Tories’ advantage. But

‘We just need to ram Gordon Brown down the electorate’s throat’ one Tory staffer said to me today when talking about how the party could get back on the front foot. The unspoken thought was that the prospect of five more years of Gordon Brown would be enough to send voters into the welcoming arms of David Cameron.    The Tories are frustrated that in the last few weeks this election has gone from being the referendum on the government to almost being a referendum on them and their plans for government. They are determined to turn the focus back onto Brown, hence Cameron’s aggressive attack on Brown this morning.

I’d like to do a final round of responses to comments to my Keith Joseph lecture. It’s easy for debates about Conservatism to be caricatured as being for or against Cameron – and my lecture fits into neither category. I’m a big supporter of Cameron’s, but often wish he’d have more faith in himself: I fear he feels he has to make more short-term concessions than he has to – thus blunting his message of ‘change’. For years, any debate about Tory policy is described in the terminology of Tory civil war circa 2002 (which all too many people, from both sides, are still fighting) – ie that you an