They seek him here, they seek him there, they seek him everybloodywhere. He is the Scarlet Pimpernel of this election campaign. For someone who is without doubt the second best known Conservative in the country, Boris Johnson has been more or less invisible in the election campaign nationally. Yes, he’s been supporting candidates in London, and a few outside, but he’s been far from the national battlefront, which is odd for someone who is supposed to be a huge electoral asset for the Conservatives. Perhaps he is going to be weaponised in the last fortnight. One can but hope.
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Nick Clegg will have achieved at least one thing in this campaign before he and the yellow peril are consigned to electoral oblivion (or not, as the case may be). He’s come out with the quote of the campaign so far. At his manifesto launch in some Bordello in Battersea he made the case for the LibDems continuing in coalition with one of the two main parties by declaring “We’ve put a heart into a Conservative government and we’d put a brain into a Labour one.” Boom boom. I asked Harriet Harman about this and she reckoned they might insert an appendix, but that’d be about it.
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It’s great to see Nick Robinson back on the News at Ten, giving his insights into the election campaign. Top journalist and top bloke.
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This is the first election for thirty two years in which I haven’t been out on the doorknocker canvassing. I kind of miss it. It’s the best way to take the temperature of the electorate and much better than studying polls. So if I can’t do it, the next best thing is to interrogate people who do. I was speaking to a friend over the weekend who has been out in around a dozen Conservative marginal in London and Essex, and what he had to say was quite revealing. In one or two areas he reckons the Labour vote has almost entirely disappeared to UKIP, and that it is very difficult to find firm Labour pledges, even in areas where you’d expect to find them. Now my friend is an experienced canvasser and isn’t someone given to flights of fancy about canvass returns, but he thinks the some of the polls are going to be confounded on election night. I remember having a similar experience in 1992.
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I don’t like doing aggressive interviews as I don’t generally think they shed much light. However, in this election campaign I have released my inner Paxman a little more often than I normally do. One of the main accusations against Labour is they are full of uncosted manifesto promises. It’s a charge that has been made against them in every general election I can remember. The boot is on the other foot this time, as no Conservative politician seems to be able to explain where this sudden £8 billion extra for the NHS is going to come from, or where the £12 billion of welfare cuts are going to fall. The answers seem to be “we can afford it through economic growth” and “it will all become clear in the spending review”. Oh, well that’s alright then. They’d never let Labour get away with such evasive and pathetic answers. And I am afraid that as an interviewer I won’t let Conservative representatives get away with it either, as Eric Pickles, Priti Patel and Michael Gove have recently discovered.
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I thought the Greens and UKIP both made a big mistake by publishing very detail manifestos with all sorts of unnecessary policies. What they should have done is just said, “Look, you know and we know we’re not going to form a government, so here are three things we believe in and here is our vision for the country.” I don’t care what UKIP’s policy is on regarding VAT on tampons or whether the Greens want to extend this benefit or that. And frankly nor do most people. All they need to know is that UKIP wants to leave the EU and curb immigration and that the Greens want to be nice to the environment and animals.
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With that in mind, if you went down Clapham high street and asked people what each party stands for and what their main policy offer is in this election I suspect people would say the Tories want to extend the right to buy, Labour want to axe non doms, UKIP want to curb immigration and the Greens want to curb climate change. But what of the LibDems? Can anyone really articulate a single well-known policy they have at this election? OK, people reading this site might be able to have a good stab at it, but I suspect the good people of Clapham high street might have more difficulty.