Election morning briefing: leaders face one last grilling with one week to go
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Version 0 of 1. Bring on the balloons and the party poppers: it’s the final week of the election campaign. One week today the polling stations will open. One day later we probably still won’t know precisely who will make up the next government. The big picture Well, now we know. The Sun has come out for the Tories to “stop [the] SNP running the country”. In other news, the (Scottish) Sun has come out for Nicola Sturgeon: “Why it’s time to vote SNP.” Although Ed Miliband told Russell Brand in his YouTube interview – a contender there for sentences I never thought I’d write – that Rupert Murdoch is “much less powerful than he used to be”, the Sun front pages are consistent with their proprietor’s recent tweets, in which he praised Sturgeon’s “great performance” in the first TV debate and approved of her “clobbering” of Miliband in another. In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, David Cameron continues his pumped-up, “bloody lively” language by promising to “let rip” in the final week of the campaign (no sniggering at the back, please): Look, when you are a prime minister you have to measure your words carefully, you have to measure your speeches carefully. But sometimes it is the time to throw caution to the winds, let rip and tell people what you really think. And what does he really think? Read the article for the full details, of course. But here’s the tl;dr version: Friends and foes are fluid concepts today, though, as another Guardian exclusive has the very same Danny Alexander taking “the extraordinary step of lifting the lid on Tory plans for an £8bn plan to cut welfare, including slashing child benefits and child tax credits”. The full story is here. Alexander reveals that in 2012 a paper by the work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith suggested limiting child benefit and child tax credit to a family’s first two children; removing higher rate child benefit from the oldest child; means-testing child benefit, and removing it altogether for those aged 16-19. A Tory spokesperson sighed: “This is desperate stuff from the Liberal Democrats who are now willing to say anything to try and get attention. We don’t recognise any of these proposals and to be absolutely clear, they are definitely not our policy.” You should also know: For the full rundown on Wednesday’s news, read Nadia Khomami’s summary here. Now to the polls. With one week to go: Diary After the frantic pace of the last few days, today is quieter, as the party leaders swot up for their appearances on Question Time this evening. But the main action comes this evening, with the BBC hosting three half-hour interviews with the main party leaders. Each will be interviewed by David Dimbleby and the studio audience: The big issue The Question Time interviews will be the final big set-piece event of the campaign. Will they make a difference? Two previous televised debates – only one of which featured Cameron and Clegg – resulted in snap polls that said … pretty much whatever you wanted them to say. But, overall, surveys of voting intentions did not see a huge shift. After the seven-way debate at the start of the month, the Guardian’s data editor Alberto Nardelli made four key conclusions. Do they still hold? (The fresh observations are mine; Alberto will no doubt have his own.) Read these The SNP is the most loopy far-left party in modern Britain outside the Greens. Yet it has managed to get the idea across that any criticism of the SNP is an English criticism of Scottishness. It’s not very likely, I’ll grant you, but rock-solid leads have been squandered before by smugness and premature celebrations. For 50-somethings like myself, the memory of Neil Kinnock’s o’er early victory party in 1992 is impossible to erase … And of course, more recently, there’s the memory of that 51% poll a week before the independence vote. The problem is, the closest this lot have come to the countryside is Hampstead Heath … The left has no clue about the realities of rural existence and persists with useless ideology. They think they can prevent all creatures suffering, and kick the bejesus out of farmers, while still having meat and milk on the shelves of the trendy organic supermarkets they like to frequent. The day in a tweet If today were a quote possibly misattributed to Harold Wilson, it would be… A week is a long time in politics. The key story you’re missing because of election obsession Overnight, protests have spread across the US over the death in police custody of Freddie Gray. |