Election catch-up: Nicola Sturgeon, the anti-Tory who needs the Tories to keep her popular

All you need to know about what’s going on. And some things you don’t

1. “I’m not going to do anything that heralds in a Tory government,” said Nicola Sturgeon in her BBC interview with Evan Davis yesterday (video here, transcript here). I like “heralds in”, as if Alex Salmond would line up with trumpets to march David Cameron and Boris Johnson up Downing Street.

Just in case we hadn’t got the message, she repeated it in different forms. “I’m not going to do anything that sees a Tory government be likely.” Talk about protesting too much. She’s not going to do anything to make a Conservative government be likely, apart from scaring English voters into voting Conservative.

2. I don’t know what’s going on in this election any more. My usual policy towards Russell Brand is “total ignoral”, one of George Brown’s finer coinages. But Ed Miliband’s visit to the guru of democratic abstinence, at his home, to record an interview strikes me as possibly quite clever.

3. Of course, if Miliband loses, it would have been one of the many stupid things he did that anyone could see would have put the voters off. I wrote about “prism” reporting and confirmation bias on Sunday.

Ed Stradling has put together some wonderful TV clips from the 1992 election, which provide a case study in opinion-poll-driven prism reporting. The entire campaign was suffused with the assumption that the Conservatives were going to lose, because the polls said so. I enjoyed the reports of Conservative criticisms of the party’s flawed campaign, especially the obvious folly of trying to present John Major as the boy from Brixton rather than as an international statesman.

And at the time few people, apart from Michael Heseltine, thought Neil Kinnock’s Sheffield rally was a mistake.

4. So we should be cautious this time. The one thing we know is that the opinion polls are unlikely to get it exactly right. They are also unlikely to be as wrong as they were in 1992 (a one-point Labour lead turning into an eight-point Tory lead on the day), but a few percentage points either way could make the difference between a Miliband government that is not dependent on the SNP and Cameron re-elected.

I created a flow chart decision-tree thing for The Independent on Sunday to try to explain the permutations of a hung parliament. It looks like this, and there is a zoomable version of it here.

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5. To more pressing matters: a good post last week from Paul Anthony Jones on Haggard Hawks on why i and j have dots. Jones’s book, Word Drops, is highly commended. It daisy-chains its way from one language curio to another so that it becomes hard to break the spell.

6. And finally, this just in from Moose Allain:

“Anthropomorphism is dead, a little bird tells me.”