Round one of the ratings war to Michael Howard

Quite what you can read into this is hard to say but more people tuned in to watch the first Tory TV election broadcast last night than Labour’s commerical featuring Tony and Gordon the night before.

According to BBC Online the Conservative broadcast got 12.8m viewers while Labour’s had an audience of 11.9m.

The Lib Dems’ first election PEB is on tonight.

The Labour film – put together by English Patient Director Anthony Minghella – was a soft focus discussion of Gordon and Tony talking about old times and how they saw the future. A neat move was to adopt the handwriting approach of the Tory posters and the cover of their manifesto.

Whether this has any electoral significance is difficult to assess and it might just be that the Tory ad was up against less tough competion on other channels than Labour’s.

Meanwhile more individual seat betting markets have opened – for a list check here.

UPDATE: Politicalbetting is going to be featured on BBC 2’s “The Daily Politic” tomorrow.

Mike Smithson