Nail-biting election ahead – but Gordon’s are growing back!

Gordon Brown “grilled in kitchen” says the Mirror above its interview with Gordon Brown today. And there’s a picture of the Browns holding Christmas presents wrapped in old newspaper.

The Mirror’s Kevin Maguire even reports that the Prime Minister’s nails are growing.

The real interest is the lines of attack that Gordon Brown rehearses in the interview.

The Tories are a “danger”, they would bring back “industrial wastelands”, “let the recession take its course”, their policies are “akin to the 1930s”.

He offers an “age of prosperity” to counter the Tories’ “age of austerity”. The glum, ascetic man with the newspaper wrapping paper is hoping to sell an uplifting message of hope in the general election campaign.

Privately, his own aides cheek Mr Brown in meetings about how his dour manner doesn’t sell cheer very well.

You got a flavour of the Tories’ 2010 message in George Osborne’s (Daily Telegraph) piece yesterday, writing about a “year of change”, and the deluge of daily policy announcements that are promised for January.

Labour sources say they’ll be happy not to replicate that level of activity and see the Tory leader’s policies tested by what they hope will be a challenging media.

As for the date of the election, my money is still strongly on 6 May, the date of the local elections.

You can understand why the Tories fret about a March election. First quarter economic data (due out in April) might not be too cheery, and the Tories rationalise that the government wouldn’t have anything cheering to put in a budget.

But Gordon Brown believes in budget statements as weapons of political warfare and, I guess, will not decommission voluntarily.

So here’s a guess at how things might work. The government could have a budget in the weeks beginning 15 or 22 March (it’s not meant to have one until three months after the pre-budget report under Gordon Brown’s own rules on fiscal stability – the PBR was on 9 December) and call an election quickly off the back of that.

It would mean some of the election happened in the Easter holidays but it often does. It would mean something like a seven-week campaign (John Major pushed it out to an eight-week campaign in 1997).

Related: The TV debates that will change all future election campaigns

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