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The secret comments by Howard Flight revealed in the Times this morning and his subsequent removal as Tory candidate at Arundel at the election have made for a lively Good Friday. It was good to see Labour moving quickly with their hastily arranged press conference providing John Reid, Ruth Kelly and Alan Milburn the opportunity to get election campaign onto the territory that Labour wants – the danger of Tory spending cuts. It was also good to see Michael Howard’s…

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Let’s liven up the betting Notwithstanding yesterday’s BES poll giving the Tories a 2.8% lead amongst those “certain to vote” the weight of polling evidence is that the chances of Michael Howard’s party winning most seats, let alone gaining a Westminster majority, are very slim indeed. For even if the pollsters are overstating Labour’s leads by as much as the 6.6% of 2001 the polls are doggedly showing that Tories are still behind and even if they managed to get…

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How Lynton Crosby helped another Howard to win 4 elections in Australia An interesting feature in the Guardian today by Sandra Laville on the methods of Lynton Crosby – the Australian who has been drafted in by Michael Howard to run the Tory campaign – gives a sense of what we might expect from the Tories in the final 45 days of this campaign. Based on interviews with those who have worked with and against Crosby during his four succesful…

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bbc Isn’t Blair’s “the Tories are a threat” claim hard to swallow? With the pollsters showing Tory deficits of between 1-9% and an electoral geography that means that the Labour party will win most seats on a uniform swing even if it’s 5% behind it’s no wonder that the balance of money on the betting markets is on the Tories getting less than 200 seats. For a majority they need 324 MPs. One of the many problems is that the…

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bbc Can Lynton Crosby really grapple with the Labour spin machine? After more than a decade of almost total dominance of the media could the New Labour machine, now joined again by Alistair Campbell, be finally meeting its match. Is the Tory party getting its PR and campaigning act together? In the past week or so we’ve seen moves by Michael Howard’s party that would have been unheard at previous elections. There’s the concerted attack on Campbell’s return to centre…

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Are things better for the Tories than they look? The Tory Chairman, Liam Fox, is reported to have set out the following analysis – some of it “borrowed” from Politicalbetting – to MPs on why he thinks things are not as bad for the party as some are predicting. Stage One: Take the current polls which put Labour on 37 per cent, with the Conservatives on 32 per cent and the Lib-Dems on 21. TRUE – and we believe that…

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