How the Tories are screwing it up.

Now even some Tories are admitting that Cameron is not winning this election.

We shouldn't be losing, and I admit, from every friend fighting a safe or target seat, everything I hear tells me that we're not. Everything, that is, except the opinion polls. And whether or not we're losing, we're definitely not doing what should have been as easy as pie: we're not winning. No leader of the opposition has been as lucky as David Cameron, to have had flawlessly combined for him a monstrously maladroit prime minister and an economic crisis almost out of memory in its scale. And still we can't seal the deal, and still we're closer to our thirteen year run of low 30s rather than the lovely low 40s. Or, to put that rather more accurately, still he can't seal the deal. There was always a danger in literally rebranding the party "Cameron's Conservatives" and now the leader's seeing it good and hard.

Channel Four interviewed constituents in one of the swing seats last night and one of them branded Cameron's call for a small state and a big society "facile". I thought that the perfect example of where Cameron is failing to resonate with the voters.

He's offering sound bites where the public are eager to hear actual policies. Yesterday, he even dared to allow George Osborne out from whatever cave he has been hiding him in.

Call off the search – George Osborne lives! Given he had been entirely absent from public view for a week, the logical assumption was either that the Tory party had covered up the shadow chancellor's death in a bizarre croquet accident, or that he had been vanished somewhere to avoid repelling the voters.

Considering that Osborne himself is coordinating the election campaign, the latter would have indicated an almost admirable self-awareness – so do imagine the thrill when he called a press conference this morning, acting as though nothing had happened. It was like Bobby Ewing coming out of the shower and saying: "Morning, Pam. Let's talk about these unemployment figures."

So it's fair to say that even Cameron probably realises that this is not going as well as he must have thought it would. His campaign is a bloody mess because no-one knows what the Hell he is actually proposing.

Clegg's lead is of course a bubble. The tragedy for the Tory party is, so was Cameron's. A flimsy, shiny lead, pumped up purely by Gordon Brown's premiership, and with the prospect of that ending, Cameron's lead has gone pop too. It will take more skill than Cameron, and his campaign manager Osborne have shown to date to make the Liberal bubble burst before it's lights out.

Cameron's leadership has been all style over substance. Now that people are approaching the point where they actually have to put a mark on a piece of paper and elect him, they are left wondering what it is exactly that he is for.

Cameron still appears to find it impossible to give any answer to that question.

UPDATE:



This is their latest campaign poster. Talk about a panic amongst the ranks. They have spent years trying to lose their image as "the nasty party" and then dump this on billboards all over the country.

To go from "Hug a Hoodie" to this is quite a leap.

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Tags: Cameron, Brown, Clegg, UK election 2010