Election Diary
Old Labour

Rose Galt
Will the tallest man win?

Friday 16 April
I will begin with an apology for a non-deliberate mistake that crept into last week's diary. The admirably speedy response of the Icelandic authorities to their banking collapse ran to 2,300 pages, not 2,300 words. Alert SR readers probably clocked that it would be a bit underwhelming to have a whole theatre company read out loud a mere four pages of A4. I should say though that neither me nor the editor of SR take any responsibility for any other Iceland-related event that may be troubling you this weekend.
     Today the media were dominated by responses to the first of the big TV debates. I began watching it rather in the way that many people I fear watch F1 racing, ie waiting for the disaster. This didn't really happen, though Cameron seemed to have unearthed the youngest sailor ever in the British navy. There were no major gaffes and by common consent, Clegg emerged the winner. I confess that I didn't watch the whole 90 minutes for two reasons. Firstly, I found the whole unnatural and artificial formality, presided over by the oleaginous Alistair Stewart, pretty hard to take in a world of 'Newsnight' and ' Question Time'. Secondly I thought 'Have I got News for You' on BBC2 might be more fun. Given that I learned that one of the top-shelf lads' magazines has brought out a Braille version of its centrefold, I reckon that on balance it was.
     But back to the debate. I thought the leaders' responses on law and order and immigration were by far the most telling. Cameron stopped just short of hang 'em and flog 'em old Tory rhetoric: more police, more prisons and presumably more profits for those who run them. We got an 'oh, dear me' type of anecdote showing how bad things are under Labour. Excuse me, but I was expecting facts and figures. Brown was not exactly radical – I seem to remember that he boasted about higher prison numbers – but he did make the point that crime has actually gone down.
     On immigration Cameron unwisely turned anecdotal again with his story about the black man in Portsmouth who wanted it all stopped. It sounded contrived and a less than adequate way to deal with a serious topic.

Saturday 17/Sunday 18 April
The extent to which Clegg was the hero of the debate was revealed in the weekend polls. The BBC poll of polls, amalgamating all of them, put the Tories on 33% (down 4), Labour on 28% (down 3) and the Lib Dems on 29% (up 9). The individual polls varied, one even putting the Lib Dems ahead but more worrying for the two main parties is that Clegg seems to be appealing in an almost Obama-like way to the 18-35 age group, the part of the electorate which notoriously fails to vote in great numbers.
     Not surprisingly, on Sunday Clegg announced his intention to campaign to win the youth vote. I can see here the possibility of those people, not necessarily only the young, who face the prospect of voting either Labour or Tory with distaste, shifting their intentions away from the Greens. They launched their manifesto on Friday with the promise of large tax increases for the rich and increased public spending. Clearly their aim is to be seen as more than a one-issue party, but they seem likely only to win one seat, in Brighton.
     Our first-past-the-post system makes the prospect of a Lib Dem government exceedingly unlikely and the principal loser in the Clegg bounce is Cameron and the Tories. Mind you, they appear to be doing a pretty good job of antagonising quite a lot of people whose support they might have taken for granted. Take the police. Influential figures including the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers have condemned the notion of directly-elected chiefs as a threat to impartial policing with its inherent risk of political interference in day-to-day operations.
     Closer to home on Sunday in an unintentionally hilarious interview on BBC4, Eric Pickles, one of the most well-known Tory backbenchers in the last parliament, drew a highly comedic picture of the Tory promised land, with all 60 million of us (except those with legitimate excuses, like running the country) volunteering like crazy in every town and village in the land. Can't you just hear the cries of 'Leave us alone!'
     I hope it doesn't all come down to 'image'. Apparently some blogger has informed an expectant world that in every presidential election in the USA since 1960, the tallest candidate has won. So welcome prime minister Clegg. Lord Kinnock, who is a lovely man with a great sense of humour, probably didn't do the cause a lot of good by describing Gordon as having 'a good face for radio'. Does anyone out there remember Clement Attlee? On the beauty stakes he would have had his work cut out, despite standing against Winston Churchill, who called him a modest little man with plenty to be modest about. He won in a landslide in 1945 and delivered the most radical legislative programme seen before or since.

Monday 19 April
It seems odd to be devoting myself completely to the election when it is sliding further and further away from the front pages. It was Harold McMillan, I think, who said in response to a question about the greatest threat to the PM's position, 'Events, dear boy. Events'. I suppose he meant something as unexpected and unpredictable as an erupting volcano. Apart from the usual idiot summoned from the midst of his stag do mates to say something crass about 'flying below the clouds', it was gratifying at first to see an absence of the propensity to blame 'them'. It couldn't last. The airlines are turning on NATS, the stranded passengers are turning on the government. As Royal Navy ships are dispatched to the Channel and Spain to pick people up, it is predicted that the prime minister will be the main beneficiary. It's a funny old world.