Election catch-up: paper tiger savages Miliband; Miliband unmarked

The Conservative press is doing what the Conservative press does, and other unsurprising news

1. The Conservative press campaign against Ed Miliband is gathering intensity. The front pages of the Daily Mail, Times and Telegraph are all devoted to anti-Labour propaganda. Inside The Sun, there is an editorial spread on “St George” Osborne’s fight against the dragon of Scottish interference in English taxes.

It is all a bit third-rate. None of the stories amounts to much, as Alastair Campbell points out with gleeful vim this morning. As for the anonymous business leaders quoted in the Financial Times’ front-page lead, whingeing about the Conservatives’ negative campaign, they have either tender consciences or short memories.

2. Miliband’s response this morning is to deliver a speech about foreign policy. Now that would give a decent Tory press something to get its teeth into. Even the BBC points out that Miliband supported the intervention in Libya in 2011 about which he now complains. Migrants drowning in the Med are David Cameron's fault: they are “in part a direct result of the failure of post-conflict planning”.

That will impress nobody. And if this is the best line to summarise the speech that Labour spin doctors can provide to the BBC, we might as well elect the Platitude Party and have done with it: “Genuine and hard-headed multilateralism with our values at its core.”

3. Election pedantry: what is a majority in the House of Commons? The answer is, as the May2015.com website so succinctly puts it, “Technically, 326 is a majority. In practice, 323 is.” But people keep getting it wrong, in particular by excluding the Speaker from the numbers.

There are 650 constituencies in the UK. Therefore 326 seats in the Commons would be an absolute majority. But the five Sinn Fein MPs do not take their seats. People who know Irish politics better than I say that Sinn Fein is not going to change its policy of abstention; and also that the number of Sinn Fein MPs is most likely to remain at five after 7 May. So the number of MPs in the Commons is likely to be 645, which means that 323 would be a majority in practice. A majority of one, 323 to 322.

Some people then add a further complication, at which other people nod sagely thinking that it is sophisticated when in fact it is an error. They exclude not just Sinn Fein but the Speaker, presumably on the grounds that he does not vote in Commons divisions. (Also, the main parties by convention do not stand in the Speaker’s constituency, appearing to give him or her “independent” status.) But the Speaker has three deputies, none of whom vote. One of his deputies, Eleanor Laing in the last Parliament, is a Conservative; two, Lindsay Hoyle and Dawn Primarolo, are Labour. Thus the two main parties have two non-voters each, who cancel each other out.

Thus, it is much easier to understand if the Speaker is counted as a Conservative for the purposes of election totals, and 323 is regarded as the winning post for the construction of a government.

4. And the most important thing we need to know about that is that the Conservatives need to be 4-5 points ahead of Labour in share of the vote just to have a chance of forming a government with the Lib Dems and the DUP. Yesterday’s four polls put the Tories on average 0.75 points ahead.

5. One result which will be important but which will not have much effect on the forming of the next government is that in Thanet South. Survation published a poll of the constituency last night showing Nigel Farage nine points ahead of the Conservative. I had thought that UKIP might have only one MP in the new Parliament, Douglas Carswell for Clacton, but now three looks more likely. Carswell will probably be joined by Farage and either Mark Reckless in Rochester or one other.

But UKIP, unlike the Lib Dems and the DUP, is not swingable in a hung parliament. Farage has made clear that an EU referendum, which Cameron offers and Miliband does not, would be the most important condition of the party’s support. UKIP is therefore the mirror-image of the SNP: if it takes seats from the Tories, it doesn’t affect Cameron’s chances of staying as Prime Minister; just as if the SNP takes seats from Labour, they stay on Miliband’s side in deciding who forms a government.

6. And finally, thanks to Moose Allain, just brilliant every day, for this:

“I lost my job at the garden centre shortly after my boss brought a customer over to me and said, ‘He wants decking’.”