Election swinging, of course.

With all the polls about, it seems just about time to share with you my predictions, which are based on a wide number of polls and a patented (not really) formula I’ve created in order to predict the swing in the upcoming election. I intend to make this a regular-ish feature, because as new polls come out the figure will change.

So where does the swingometer lie today?

» 4.39% swing to the Conservatives «

So what would this mean for Mr Blair? Well the news wouldn’t be so bad, actually. He’d still be left with an overall majority of about 70, which wouldn’t be seen as such a bad defeat. And my local constituency would have turned Conservative, too.

I’ll do my best to keep you updated on how this changes as the polls change. But there’s every chance I’ll forget.

It’s still unfortunate the Blair doesn’t have the courage of his convictions necessary to stand up to a live TV debate before the election, but at least this will bring us something close – a special live edition of Question Time, in which the party leaders will all partake – but separately from each other. Since the same audience will be used for each party leader, it’s going to be something like a debate via third-parties, and the success of the event will depend completely on the order in which the party leaders appear.

Clearly, this whole event will be unfair if the leaders simply appear one after the other, with the first not able to respond to the accusations of the second, and so-forth. Mr Blair will end up going last, telling lies (like the big £35bn lie), and the Conservative leader will not have a chance to respond. That’s clearly unacceptable. There has to be an opportunity for the non-participants in each round to reply to any accusations made, or the whole thing is simply a farce.

Having said all of that, this is clearly a major election coup for the Beeb, and they should be very proud that they’ve managed to bring it all together. I’ll certainly be watching: 28th April, 8.30pm, BBC One.

Other good news from Auntie this week includes the fact that This Week is going twice-weekly, now appearing on Mondays as well as Thursdays. Good news indeed.

It’s my favourite kind of spam again… this time, purporting to be from Mr Anthony Blair himself:

If you have been keeping up with the news, you may already know that I went to the Palace a few minutes ago to ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament.

What, no greeting? Well, anyway, yes, I did know that. But it was more than a few minutes ago. In fact, it was several hours ago.

I wanted to get this message out to you straight away about what’s at stake at the election and how you can help. This will be a tough campaign and we will have to fight for every seat and every vote.

Well you didn’t do very well on your ‘straight away’ target, did you? But then, what targets have you done well on? This will be a tough campaign, I quite agree – after all, most polls agree that Labour’s going to win, and it’s not going to be easy to get the necessary swing to stop them. We really do have to fight for every seat and every vote, you’re quite right.

We’re going to need the help of every Labour supporter – to distribute the leaflets, to talk to voters on the doorsteps and get on those phones.

I know much of the local party membership dislike Mr Blair, but would they really campaign against him? I think you’re being a bit optimistic, dear.

If you’ve never volunteered to help Labour’s campaign before, make this your first time. If you’re an old hand, we need you now more than ever.

Why would I want to volunteer to help Labour? Oh, I understand, you think I should sabotage the campaign from the inside. But isn’t that a bit of dirty politics? I guess we have to stoop very low, though, to beat a party which is a dab hand at cheating in elections.

For what’s at stake on May 5 is the future direction of our country – whether it goes forward or back.

I certainly don’t dispute that.

Labour hasn’t, by any means, achieved all we want yet.

After eigtht years? What have you been playing at, then? Launching illegal wars, and getting your knickers in a twist about keeping the fact they’re illegal secret?

And you may not agree with every decision I have made.

Too true.

But there’s been real progress in communities up and down the land.

What’s progress? Where exactly are you talking about?

Our country is fairer, more modern and successful than it was eight years ago.

Is the introduction of top-up fees by people who were paid to go to university fair? Is the inability to run an election free of blatant fraud modern? Does the fact that we have to cater to Brussels’s every whim make us successful?

And May 5 will decide whether we can build on – and accelerate – the progress made in spreading opportunity and prosperity.

What progress in spreading opportunity? Does providing young people with criminal records through ASBOs help their opportunities? And what’s this about prosperity? We’re worse off now than we were last year!

Or whether the Tories can succeed in taking Britain back to the failed and risky policies of cuts, charges and economic mismanagement.

Here we are again with the ‘Tories = Evil’ message, without actually making any firm promises of your own. Do you think the electorate don’t notice this?

Over the next five weeks, I will be out and about across the country spelling out that choice. And so will all my colleagues.

Oh dear God, please don’t come near here. And I’m sure you won’t be out and about that much, given you’re absence (until today) from your party’s homepage, and your unwillingness to engage in an open debate with the other party leaders. What is it you’re scared of, Mr Blair?

I hope to see you on the campaign trail.

I very much doubt that sentiment.

But if you have a question for me, you can visit the website labour.org.uk and let me know.

Hmm… How about, ‘What exactly was the full advice given to you by the Attorney General in advance of the Iraq War?’. Or how about, ‘Why did you present intelligence you knew was shaky as firm and concrete?’

I can’t promise to answer them all.

I’ll bet. It’d be something of a first if you actually answered any questions that weren’t to your liking.

But I’ll answer as many as I can throughout the campaign.

Carefully screened first, of course. In fact, why don’t you just make up your ideal questions, and answer them? It seems to be your PMQs strategy.

It’s less than five weeks now to polling day. Five weeks in which the future of our country is in our hands.

Very definitely.

We have a good story to tell.

Very true – a story of lies, deceit, and corruption.

Let’s go out and tell it.

Well, you see, I would, but every time anyone criticises your government, you launch a massive smear campaign that’s always full of blatant lies and often offensive to great swathes of the population, which rather creates difficulties for us.

Yours sincerely, Tony Blair

I doubt that very much – do you even know what the word ‘sincere’ means? And do you think anybody believes you actually write this political poop?

If that isn’t a cliché, I don’t know what is… but the point is that the Election is now officially underway. Don’t forget our special election page (sjhoward.co.uk/election2005) which has been online for some time now, and the accompanying election RSS feed.

Stick with sjhoward.co.uk throughout the election for partisan, biased, opinion-based election coverage.

This should be much more damaging that it has been for the Labour party – in the run-up to a general election, it has emerged that members of the Labour party have been involved in rigging a local election – this should be huge. Talk about a corrupt political party – you can’t get much more corrupt than actually rigging the vote. Tag on to all this Alan Milburn’s comment that he’d do anything to win the election, and it becomes a very big story indeed for one of the tabloids.

If only this had come out a week earlier, when we weren’t all so concerned with the Pope and the Royals, it could have done considerable – perhaps irrepairable – damage to the Labour campaign. Of course, Michael Howard can’t throw this particular mud at the PM without being made to look stupid for trying to extrapolate one local council election to the whole Labour party. Anyway, we’ll see what happens tomorrow, but I don’t think many will have a free front-page to sling it with.

Some good news on the ID Cards bill:

Controversial plans to introduce the ID cards are also expected to be shelved, with both opposition parties again determined to block the them.

But given that Labour are still marginally leading in the election race, it looks like it’ll be a temporary reprieve:

Clarke said their position ‘was crazy’ and pledged to reintroduce ID cards if Labour is re-elected, adding: ‘It will then become an election issue – which it doesn’t have to be. If it is, it will be because the Tories and Liberal Democrats have decided to make it an election issue.’

I really think that a scheme that is to cost hundreds of millions with little actual advantage to the fight against crime – or anything else for that matter – should be an election issue, and the fact that Mr Clarke thinks otherwise is perhaps because he knows that he can’t form a robust defence in the eyes of the public.

From this poster, you might get the impression that interest rates have halved under Labour. An easy mistake to make, I agree. Sadly, though, it isn’t true. When Labour came to power, the interest rate was 6.25%. It’s now 4.75%. If Mr Brown’s maths thinks that’s interest rates halved, then how on earth are we supposed to trust his budgets?

The Conservatives have produced some figures that you can argue about, but they have a pretty clear explanation of how they’ve done their calculations and why they’ve done them that way. And, as it happens, they haven’t used the figures that would show Labour in the worst light: They’ve tried to be as logical as possible using the next-to-useless government figures produced by Labour. Their crime ads are blatantly misleading, though, and quite a disappointment because of this. But, by my count, Labour are still streets ahead on the number of blatant lies they’ve told during this pre-election campaign. But then, Alan Milburn said he’d do anything to win. Labour should be ashamed.

I said I’d love FactCheck. Talk about multiple lies from the Labour party:

I notice that the Conservatives are offering £50 a week to help with childcare. A couple of months ago they were getting headlines for offering £150 a week, so there has already been a huge cut in the help they are offering families for childcare

So said Patricia Hewitt on Breakfast. The only problem being that the Conservatives never promised £150 in the first place. So does our Trade and Industry Secretary walk off with her tail between her legs. Erm, not exactly…

In November, the Tory offer was £150 a week to mothers to stay at home. Today we learn that the Tories have backtracked on this and will only offer £50 a week. It is clear the Tories cannot afford the £150 a week because of their commitment to cut £35bn from public spending

That was Alan “I’ll do anything to win” Milburn, writing in The Grauniad. As much as Labour would like it otherwise, repeating a lie does not suddenly make it true. But you’ve got to give them credit for perseverence:

At a press conference after her BBC appearance on Easter Monday, Ms Hewitt was challenged about the claim by a journalist who accused her of mixing up maternity pay and childcare allowances. The female reporter said: “You have said the Tories have obviously cut their pledge on childcare. They have not. That is a cheap shot as far as I can see.”

But Ms Hewitt refused to admit she was wrong.

She said: “If you go back to the headlines at the time of the Conservative briefing a couple of months ago, what you will see is very clear headlines, that they persuaded people to write, saying £150 a week for childcare – that has now come down to £50 a week for childcare.”

But, you see, FactCheck did go back to the headlines at the time of the Conservative briefing:

FactCheck went back to the press cuttings relating to the Tory proposals in November and the coverage made it very clear the £150 payment related to maternity pay and not help with childcare costs.

So she’s trying to weasel her way out of blatant lying by – erm – lying some more. Go Pat!

The official party response to this much-repeated lie?

We would accept that after they [the Conservatives] had done their press conference that particular claim is not something that we are going to continue to make. We will not continue to make that claim

So they’re not going to admit they were wrong, nor apologise for lying. But then, what more could we expect from Labour?

FactCheck is on the case very quickly about Ruth Kelly’s promised £280m worth of ‘new money’ for school meals. Which was very kind of her, and somewhat convenient with Mr Oliver on Mr Blair’s doorstep.

But the truth will out, and usually quite quickly in an election campaign, so no-one was really surprised when Mr Blair later admitted

Of course it is part of the education budget, but it is still new in the sense that this is money now specifically allocated to school meals.

So does this make it new money? Short answer – no. They’re playing that age-old game of announcing the same money again and again. They’ve announced the education budget, and now they announce a subsidiary of that, claiming that it’s new money. As far as I can see, ‘new’ money is money that has not previously been announced.

But, of course, if I announce ‘I will spend a whopping £2 on fruit today’, and then another day announce ‘I have £1 of new money to increase the apple budget’, most people would take away the message that I’m going to spend £3, which is good for the election campaign when the opposition announce that they are only going to spend £2. But, of course, we would both be spending only £2, it’s just that I’ve announced my apples budget separately from my fruits budget, and so made the whole thing look like it’s worth more than it really is.

But then, isn’t that Labour policy through-and-through?

The Tories don’t want to be called that anymore, according to a letter by Michael Salter to all the major television channels. I think that’s pretty understandable. No doubt, the less favourable press (the Guardian included) will have tried to cast this as the Tories ditching their extensive history, and trying to appear ‘modern and funky’. But I doubt that’s what the issue really is: They’re just asking to be called by their party name. There’s little use in the Average Joe saying ‘I really like the Tories’ if they are then confused when voting to find that there is no ‘Tory’ candidate on the list.

I think that this measure is somewhat futile, especially since the news channels are always wanting ever-shorter headlines for their slugs (ITV and Sky) or astons (BBC News 24), and ‘Conservatives’ doesn’t fit the bill nearly as well as ‘Tories’. But it certainly makes sense to ask to be called by their proper name, and maybe it will reduce some of the ‘Tory’ references after all. Good luck to them.