Liberal Burblings

There’s an entertaining article by James Forsyth in the Spectator entitled: “The Tory situation is now verging on critical” complete with a front page cartoon and the headline “Tories go off the rails”. Most amusing:

Since the beginning of the year, when David Cameron declared the start of his long campaign, the Tory machine has spluttered, while Labour’s has revved up. The Tories have lost momentum and made unforced errors. Labour morale has not been so high for years.

Forsyth indicates that the panic centres on a lack of clarity of the Conservative message:

Why has the Tory lead halved since December? It is nothing to do with Mr Brown’s much-derided interview with Piers Morgan. The Tories conducted focus groups afterwards which suggested that the whole wretched affair had simply hardened the hostility towards the Prime Minister. It is also nothing to do with the economy, which is still weak. (Senior members of the Tory economic team are now openly speculating that the next set of growth figures will show that the recovery has ended.) Rather, it is to do with the campaign. The Labour message is clear and repeated while the Tory one is opaque. One shadow Cabinet member told me this week that he wished the Tories had a slogan as effective as Labour’s ‘a future fair for all’. Candidates report that voters can remember Labour policies but not Tory ones.

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