Learning from the unexpected poll surge for Lib Dems
Nick Clegg’s children are amongst those stranded abroad by the volcanic ash – they were holidaying with their maternal grandparents in Spain and are now having an extended impromptu holiday tagged on the end of their Easter break.
Maybe it’ll give him extra time to focus on the week ahead and trying to hold onto the most extraordinary and unexpected sudden poll surge many people can remember, this close to an actual election date.
The Tories have got a tough line to walk now, emphasising that they are the real party of change. Some strategists feel that David Cameron has all too often said something about the change agenda only to let it slip down the priority message list (and we saw a small version of that last week when he unveiled a vision of the Big Society that was said to be central to his project only to ignore it in the televised leaders’ debate).
Tories will also be wanting to put out a message this week that the country needs decisive government and not a hung parliament (the gilts market might be trying to put out a similar message). And they’ll be wanting to attack the Lib Dems on policy, though the big targets for them here – Europe, crime, immigration – get them on exactly the Michael Howard 2005 agenda that they spent the last few years trying to move away from. Tricky, to say the least.
As for Labour, they will be hoping that the economy returns centre stage this week – unemployment and growth figures are out later on – and they’ll carry on wooing Lib Dem supporters to stick with them in the Lab/Con marginals, carry on with anti-Tory tactical voting even as the Lib Dems get a huge boost to their credibility. Tricky too.
Labour strategists say there’s not really any limit to how high the Lib Dem vote can go as far as they are concerned … it tends to harm the Tories 2:1 more than it does them and they forsee a way back to power that wasn’t there a few weeks or days ago.
That way to power, as all the extrapolations of Parliamentary seats show, would be an extraordinary new ball game if the pieces fell as some of the latest polls suggest … it could usher in a mighty call for full-scale electoral reform if it looked as though first past the post had delivered an even more distorting result than usual.
Labour and the Conservatives will be trying to borrow some of Nick Clegg’s best debate lines from him (the PM on Marr this morning was talking about being “shocked at the moral bankruptcy” of Goldman Sachs … whilst adding “I’m the man” to sort it out) whilst rubbishing his policies.
This election could turn out to be as convulsive and fluid as 1924 or 1929, when all three main political tectonic plates were moving at the same time.
The Tories thought not so many months ago that they might break through to the high 40’s in percentage share of the vote. They resigned themselves to getting just over 40, then to getting just under 40. Now, in the week of the manifesto launches they find themselves in the low to mid-30’s.
Labour, for all its claims that the election is wide open could be looking at a wide open trap door under its core vote … it had been coalescing, not with enormous momentum, but enough to keep people things were moving in the right direction. That’s not how it looks right now.
There 18 days left for everything to fall back into the place it was, stay this exciting or get even more interesting.