a) Gordon Brown wants to be seen as a team player (hence massed ranks of Cabinet behind him for election announcement)
b) David Cameron wants to be seen as Barack Obama (hence shirt, rolled up sleeves and people behind him when he speaks!)
c) Nick Clegg wants to be seen with Vince Cable (hence Vince becomes the first non-leader to ever have his picture emblazoned on a party leader’s battlebus)
Welcome to this latest LDVideo instalment, and today as a special holiday treat we’re highlighting four political video clips showing the Tory leadership team at their most embarrassingly gaffe-prone.
First up is this one from Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne, committing a diplomatic faux pas by referring to “the Sarkozy box” used by the diminutive French president when speaking from behind lecterns. (Yes, it’s sort of funny. But when you’re hoping to be this country’s chief finance minister, it really is better to avoid needlessly antagonising world leaders – as David Cameron might also learn) …
Only the day after David Cameron admitted he does not expect the Conservatives to do well in Scotland, one of his leading candidates has quit the Conservative Party.
In today’s Sunday Herald Heather MacLeod, who has resigned after a “bitter and bloody” feud with fellow Conservatives, said she felt “complete and utter disgust” with a section of the Scottish Conservatives:
She also accused the Scottish party of failing to match leader David Cameron’s progress and said she had concerns about an allegedly inappropriate relationship between two senior Tories.
As with all polls, what follows comes with caveats. Only three polling companies – YouGov, Angus RS and Mori – this past month asked questions specifically to find out the public’s views of the three main party leaders. And each asks variants on the basic question – do you think Clegg/Brown/Cameron are doing a good job – to come up with their figures, so comparison ain’t easy. But, still, we don’t indulge in polls often, so here goes …
Here, in chronological order, are the results of the four polls published in March asking the public to rate the three major party leaders:
The Tories’ pledged this week to reverse Labour’s National Insurance tax rises by increasing the UK deficit. Today Labour’s Lord Mandelson accused the Tories – seemingly without a trace of irony – of “peddling deception”.
The Lib Dems’ shadow chancellor Vince Cable is having no truck with the Labservative approach:
Labour and the Tories are as bad as each other. Under both their plans, public finances would be driven into the ground. Whether it’s for tax cuts or filling in the deficit hole, both parties seem to be in a competition to see who can come up with the
Supporters of hunting across the country are being sent to help in the marginal seats the Conservatives need to win to form the next government, in the expectation of a free vote on hunting with dogs early in a Cameron government.
The hunt chairman , Tim Page, wrote: “I would like us all to reflect on what is at stake if we do not succeed in helping get a Conservative government elected at the forthcoming general election, and, importantly with a sufficient majority to give the time to a free vote on the repeal of the Hunting Act 2004.”
He went on: “Quite honestly, it is not long-term sustainable to carry on as we are … Many of us have kept the show on the road, living for the day of repeal. The Committee of the Hunt, supporting the position of the MFHA expects everyone who hunts, whether mounted, by vehicle or on foot, to spend a minimum of two days leafleting ahead of the election being called.”
Here’s a bit of fun speculation, at least if you’re not a Tory. Let’s suppose most of the last 10 days’ polls are right, and David Cameron’s Tories are destined to have fewer MPs than Labour in the House of Commons (even if they win more votes) – what would the Tories do?
Yes, it’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for: David Cameron’s bewildered, stumbling, confused, squirming, befuddled, painful TV interview with broadcaster Martin Popplewell is now available to view on YouTube – over 17,000 people have watched it to date.
The Tory blogger Iain Dale loyally attempted to gloss over Mr Cameron’s dire performance, desperately claiming “I think the inherent problem with the interview was that Cameron didn’t know if he was giving a print interview or a film interview”. Sure thing, Iain – I can see exactly how the confusion arose. After all which senior politician hasn’t wondered, when being interviewed two metres away from a three-person camera crew, “Is this being filmed?”
And Paul Staines’ right-wing Guido Fawkes blog decided to ignore it altogether. Quite right, Paul: much better to devote yourself to your forlorn campaign to persuade people Vince Cable doesn’t understand economics. Good luck with that one – I think your crusade has a way to go.
For those who haven’t yet seen it, then, here is the footage of David Cameron going into meltdown in front of the TV cameras:
Channel 4 tonight broadcast excerpts from a quite extraordinary filmed interview with David Cameron in which the Tory leader appears utterly confused and clueless about his party’s position on the issue of gay equality. After stumbling over his own words, contradicting himself, and admitting he hasn’t got the answer, a visibly flustered Mr Cameron eventually pleads for the cameras to be turned off so that he can compose himself.
That Mr Cameron has run into trouble on the issue of gay equality is wholly predictable. (That he went into meltdown in front of the TV cameras a little less predictable). Lib Dem Voice has on three occasions this year highlighted the many contradictions between what Mr Cameron says his party believes, and how the Tory party votes:
Yikes. Not quite sure what’s the most surprising from the interview I’ve just watched. The good joke from Gordon Brown about Peter Mandelson or the collapse of David Cameron, who asks for the interview to stop, turns to his minder off camera and asks for a different style of questioning.
It’s 19th March and LDV Towers will shortly be taking delivery of an enormous cake for Co-editor Stephen Tall’s birthday. Rumour has it he will be leaping out of said cake, and if he does, we’ll be first with the news and photos.
In the meantime…
2 Big Stories
Clarke fails to toe line on party pledge
David Cameron last night overruled Ken Clarke, after the shadow business secretary appeared to backtrack on a Tory commitment to spell out details of a core tax policy ahead of the general election.
The Conservative leader acted after Mr Clarke told a London event that the party could not decide until it was in power whether it would reverse the one percentage point rise in national insurance that is due to take effect in April.
The Tory former chancellor said the party needed to have “the reins of power” before it could make Budget decisions such as the potential tax reversal. “We will only know if we can afford it in the 50-day Budget,” he told a business audience. “The Budget is not just something you knock off for a TV programme.”
In the past week, the Conservatives have been talking up their chances of doing a deal with the Liberal Democrats if the forthcoming general election fails to deliver them a working majority. Conservative shadow business secretary Ken Clarke has even suggested that “Nick Clegg is a conservative”. David Cameron meanwhile regularly describes himself as a “liberal Conservative” and has claimed that on a range of policy issues, “there’s barely a cigarette paper between us”.
But in a new report from CentreForum, the liberal think tank, we argue that the two parties’ similarities …
The opinion polls are up-and-down day-in-day-out at the moment, making it almost impossible to say with any confidence whether we are firmly in hung parliament territory, or whether the most likely result is still a Tory victory at the coming general election. But one thing is beyond doubt: the last six months has seen a substantial narrowing in the Tories’ opinion poll lead.
In October 2009, the Tories were polling at around 42%, Labour at 28% – a convincing Tory lead of 14%. Last month, the Tories were at 39%, Labour at 31%, a 3% swing from the …
Over at The Observer today, the Lib Dems’ newest MEP Edward McMillan-Scott, former leader of the Tories in Europe, writes about why he had to leave David Cameron’s party in protest at their extreme views. Here’s an excerpt:
It was chilling to hear say to one very senior spokesman at an EU meeting some years ago: “We can say what we like here, but it will be different when we are in government.” I should have left then, instead of carrying on the pro-European fight from within.
My decision to join the Liberal Democrats this weekend was made easier by the
He’s recently been touted as a Lib Dem supporter after attending one of their parties at the House of Commons, but Rory admits that, professionally speaking, he doesn’t want them to do well in the general election – because he can’t take off Nick Clegg.
“I struggle with David Cameron, but I find Clegg particularly difficult to master,” confesses the impressionist and satirical comic, who is about to embark on his first tour in five years.
“I imagined meeting him at the party and him asking ‘Can you do me?’ I was going to say ‘No, can you?’.
In June 2006 Professor John Curtice, commenting on opinion polls and shifts in the UK political environment said: “It looks as though we may have entered a new political era”. Andrew Grice, The Independent on Sunday’s Political Editor, observed that the Independent’s ‘poll of polls’ showed “David Cameron’s rejuvenated Conservative Party a seven-point lead over Labour.”
The focus of their political analysis was the impact of a recently elected Conservative Party leader on UK party politics. Here was a leader who had set out to detoxify the Tory brand, and he and his party appeared to be making significant headway.
David Cameron had, according to Andrew Grice, called on …
Today’s Telegraph reports that Lib Dem peer Lord (Matthew) Oakeshott has called for all documents relating to Tory donor Lord (Michael) Ashcroft’s peerage to be made public to establish whether the Queen conferred the honour under false pretences:
Lord Oakeshott, Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, wrote to Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell, urging him to publish all relevant papers as a matter of urgency, to make clear whether the monarch had been misled. … William Hague, the former Conservative leader, said that he discovered only a few months ago that Lord Ashcroft had enjoyed ”non-dom” tax status for the last 10
So far, it’s true to say, that despite heavy negative coverage for the Conservative Party day after day about Lord Ashcroft, there hasn’t been much sign of damage to the Conservatives in the opinion polls.
In some ways that reflects the degree to which the issue plays to natural political cleavages: is doing everything you can within the law to avoid paying taxes acceptable? Plenty of Conservatives will answer “yes”, so discovering quite what lengths Ashcroft went to – and the fact of him being a Parliamentarian – doesn’t really damage their view of the party.
What has slowly been dragged out of the Conservative Party over the last day is that senior figures such as William Hague and David Cameron were kept in the dark over the exact facts of Lord Ashcroft’s financial affairs for many years. Despite seeking reassurances and the like – and answering questions about it in public – none of them actually got to the bottom of the matter.
Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of the Ashcroft affair itself for a moment (many of which amount to the simple question, “Is something being legal enough to make it acceptable?”), what does …
Despite some alarms along the way, the rules are now set for the first-ever head-to-head general election debates in the UK a mere 46 years after the first suggestion.
(And no, yawn yawn, it isn’t only in the US that such debates take place: the US wasn’t first and the US isn’t a particularly good place to look for lessons, what with not being a Parliamentary democracy unlike many of the other countries which also have TV debates.)
Now the rules are set, what do they tell us about how the debates may play out?
Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg is to speak first in the first debate, hosted by ITV, while Gordon Brown and David Cameron will do so in the subsequent debates, on Sky and the BBC.
I pointed out before that the key to getting a boost in support out of TV leader debates isn’t so much winning the debate as beating expectations: if people expected you to do dreadfully and you come out doing ok that’s almost always a boost to a campaign, whilst being seen as doing ok when the expectations were that you would walk it means you lose support.
So the pressure really is on David Cameron as he’s the one going in to the debates with highest expectations on him according to the latest MORI opinion poll:
It’s Monday morning. It’s the 1st March, and the question everyone’s asking is, “Where the hell did January and February go?”. For our Welsh readers, meanwhile, may we wish you a very happy St David’s Day. On with the day’s main news …
Result of LDV poll on Tories’ evaporating lead
Yesterday LDV ran an insta-poll asking our Twitter followers and site readers what you thought was the main reason why the Tories’ opinion poll lead has shrunk so fast. Here’s what the 147 of you who voted told us:
David Cameron’s Tories were accused last night of dog-whistle politics after the Conservative leader appeared on the front of flyers saying the floodgates had been opened to mass immigration. Critics say the flyers are alarmist and misleading because they imply limits could be imposed on entrants from EU countries such as Poland.
Last night, the party’s frontbench was forced to distance itself from the hard-hitting material, which was put out under the name of Cameron’s home affairs spokesman, Andrew Rosindell …
The Liberal Democrats’ home affairs spokesman, Chris Huhne, said: “These flyers play to people’s worst fears in an
By Stephen Tall
| Sun 28th February 2010 - 2:15 pm
Today’s YouGov poll in the Sunday Times suggests the Tory lead over Labour has amost disappeared, and that Labour may even end up the largest party after the general election (which would reflect the exclusive LDV election prediction published here at the start of February).
Nor is today’s poll a flash-in-the-pan. None of the last 12 polls has shown the Tories reaching 40%, the psychologically crucial hurdle most feel they need to be able to clear to be sure of a working Commons majority. Only one of those polls has shown Labour below 30%, and – sigh of …
Iain Martin’s general election commentary for the Wall Street Journal is rapidly become a must-read for me due to his record of unearthing useful bits of extra information that shed an extra light on the big political stories.
Advisers close to U.S. President Barack Obama have been drafted by David Cameron to help the Conservatives in their election campaign against Gordon Brown and Labour.
The Tories have signed a contract with Squier, Knapp, Dunn Communications—a Washington-based Democrat-leaning political consultancy— to help
The political impact of TV debates in other Parliamentary democracies (and yes, yawn yawn, obligatory American reference, in the US too) has often been more about expectations than about absolute performance. Beat expectations and you benefit from the debate, even if that means people viewed you as the narrow loser. But if you were expected to be a big loser and then beat expectations and only just lose, you benefit.
Also the impact of debates has often been to reinforce people’s existing predilections rather than switch people between different parties or candidates. That has, for example, been a common feature in Canada, where TV debates have been held off and on since 1968. (Yawn yawn, US example, 1988 second Dukakis-Bush debate and others.)
In other words, you’re best placed to come out well from a debate if your party is the one most in need of motivating its supporters and if the expectations about your performance are low. Step forward then, Gordon Brown.
As for Nick Clegg?
Both of Brown’s advantages are advantages over David Cameron – and only over David Cameron. Liberal Democrat share of the vote is fairly static overall as turnout changes: from purely partisan motives, the level of turnout does not really matter, though of course from the perspective of health democracy higher turnout is much to be preferred. The expectations one is trickier, but the expectations amongst many in the media that Nick Clegg will benefit hugely from being in the debates is based on simply him being there, so he won’t go in to them with the pressure of extremely high personal performance being expected by the media.
Moreover, for Nick Clegg there is that third factor: TV debates can raise the profile of leaders beyond the main two parties.
For Nick and the Liberal Democrats this is likely to be a major boost, because consistently the party does best when it is in the news (even if, during the post-Kennedy leadership contest several MPs did their level best to disprove that). As simple a move as asking people about their views of party leaders before asking them which party they’ll vote for raises the third party’s vote in opinion polls. That’s why for many years Gallup gave the party higher ratings that other pollsters.
Compared to that, appearing in a trio of TV debates alongside Brown and Cameron will be a massive boost for Nick Clegg and the party.
Whilst we wait to find out what the televised general election debates will bring, enjoy this moment from the 1988 Canadian debates. The 1988 election was a re-run contest between Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives, who had won a landslide in 1984, and the Liberals under John Turner, still leader despite leading his party crashing out of power in 1984. John Turner is the silver haired one:
By Sara Bedford
| Tue 23rd February 2010 - 9:51 am
Today the people of Guyana celebrate the country becoming a Republic in 1970. Mashramani, often abbreviated to ‘Mash’, is an annual festival that celebrates the nation and people of Guyana with a carnival parade, music, games and food.
On this day in 1945, the Stars and Stripes was raised over the Japanese-held volcanic island of Iwo Jima, rather than the flag of a trade union.
This morning the Liberal Democrat Shadow Chancellor Vince Cable is in Canary Wharf, delivering a keynote speech, which will outline the Liberal Democrats plan for the banking and financial services industries.
There’s a class war going on. So the Tories tell us. They treat it with distaste. But they rather seem to revel in doing so.
It’s all about one man, David Cameron. So the Tories tell us. It’s all about the disgraceful proposal from Labour that we should vote against Dave simply because he went to Eton.
Pause for breath.
Labour, let’s face it, make a pretty implausible bunch of class warriors these days. As Blair put it, they are all middle class now. Recently, the Tory press pilloried Harriet Harman as a class warrior when she dared to point out that Labour …
Peter Wrigley Thank you Sir Vince for a useful survey of the history of "austerity" and the political difficulty of implementing the simple solution to our present social an...
Nonconformistradical "Their overall bills may well be high because electric heating is expensive"
I live in an (almost) all-electric home. I do have a wood burner stove but I've ...
Peter Davies Another group for whom this does not work are those in all-electric homes including many poor tenants in blocks of flats. Their overall bills may well be high b...
Tom Bailey “according to Mark Pack’s website, party membership dropped by a third over the course of the Con – Lib Dem Coalition. “
Did anyone ask those lost memb...
Ruth Bright During the unrest in 2011 Simon Hughes made a powerful statement telling rioters to go home. It came from a place of profound respect for, and understanding of,...
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Lib Dem Rutland plans cycle-path from Oakham to Rutland Water
Brexit and summer holidays
The shame of Liverpool Labour councillors taking their allowances but not turning up to do the work
Peter Wrigley 
Nonconformistradical 
Peter Davies 
Tom Bailey 
Ruth Bright 