So I’ve been thinking and I think the way to come out winning the last of the three debates, this Thursday, is to say something dramatic and new.

The first debate was obviously the game changer. People had the chance to see that there was a third real option, they liked it, as few as 1 in 10 people decided to switch to it, and the rest is history.

The second debate was always destined to be the quiet one - neither the first or last chance to see the leaders, supposedly focussed on foreign policy (though if you had tuned in hoping for some actual discussion of foreign policy issues you would have been fairly confused), and it was on the subscription channel (Sky). And indeed all it did was really confirm the impressions of the first one, just with Cameron behaving a bit more like Clegg, and Brown attacking Clegg instead of agreeing with him.

So what strategy for the third one? We’ve now had 3 hours of being able to watch these men and surely by now people have a pretty clear impression of what they think of them. Bar a few more tinkerings with the acting and the nuances of positioning which may tip things slightly in one direction or the other, we can’t really expect people to form a radically different view of the three men from their behaviour this time.

The only two ways it seems to me that the final debate could really change the position again, are these.

First, is the one we always knew about: that a leader could just make a brief and terrible mistake by saying something they really didn’t mean to. A few slipped up words could so easily have an impact out of all proportion to their actual significance, in giving the impression of that leader as incompetent, or really intending to do something that they have denied. Clearly all the participants will want to avoid this way of making their performance in the last debate memorable!

The only other way, it seems to me, is to say something new. Not a new major policy position - at this stage in the campaign that would simply give the impression that their manifesto isn’t a firm plan at all, but something flexible which they’re willing to change just to get a good headline. We have seen hints of this already with Cameron’s instant commitment on alleged cuts in last week’s debate (in response to Brown’s challenge), or Brown’s commitment on NHS funding to the RCN yesterday. At this stage, changing a policy position of any significance does considerably more harm than good.

But there may be other elements which a leader can throw out there, which are both new to the campaign, and actually important (suddenly deciding that you don’t like the phrasing of the commitment on marine biology on page 427 of a rival’s manifesto is not really going to cut it).

This could be a significant attack on one (or both) of your opponents. This needs to be something new and major, which may be a challenge at this stage in the campaign. But there may perhaps be new ways of putting this, particularly if it’s about their political positioning, rather than a policy. Labour is sure to try some version of this, along the lines of “Vote Clegg, Get Cameron”. Cameron will surely also try to sell a line which boils down to broadly “Vote Clegg, Get Brown”. Neither of these are very new - though if Nick is able to come up with an imaginative response to them which is not just the bathtub defence (”They’re both just the same, like squabbling children in the bath: vote Clegg and get Clegg”) then this may qualify as a killer line.

Or it could be something about their own positioning. Any of the three leaders proclaiming that in the event of a hung Parliament they’d be prepared to work with one of their rivals, but not the other one, would certainly qualify as this, but I doubt very much it’s going to happen.

But something about the way they would govern might do it.

Something which is a radical way of putting something which is already in their manifesto, perhaps implying they would go even further along a road already set out in principle in their manifestos, might do it.

All the parties have certainly left plenty enough room for more detail in their plans for sorting out the nation’s finances that they could outline more detailed plans here without being inconsistent with what they’ve already said.

And of course a good emergency would be ideal, allowing the leaders to give a distinctively different response to their rivals, and allowing them to start from a blank sheet of paper, relatively unconstrained by what they’ve said before.

It could be lots of things. It just has to be new, important, and not obviously inconsistent with anything they’ve already said.

This may not be particularly easy at this stage of the campaign. But it is surely the only way to use the last debate to give your popularity a real upwards boost, beyond the impression that the public already has of you.

A large part of David Cameron’s job, of course, is getting the balance right between keeping his traditional base of supporters happy, while simultaneously also appearing appealing to enough others to vote for him. In striking this balance, generally his strategy as leader has been to prioritise appealing to the new voters he needs, “detoxing” the Conservative brand, and generally trying to end the image of “the nasty party”. Part of this calculation, similarly to Tony Blair  in this respect if not in others, is surely that those on the extreme had nowhere else to go.

So declaring as he did this week that Conservative MEPs after June’s European elections will not sit as part of the European People’s Party (EPP, the main-centre grouping containing most of Europe’s governing parties) to seek an alliance with others who do not share its “federalist” ambitions, appears to go against this strategy. (Whether the EPP really is federalist or not is another question, but it’s close enough for British Conservatives of a not very internationalist bent). It does look very much as though the British Conservatives will end up in a group with some rather odd, and generally very right-wing partner parties.

But presumably Cameron and Hague have made the calculation that to the Conservatives’ core support, being “in bed with federalists” is the sort of thing that renders them spluttering into apoplexy over their Telegraph and cornflakes in the morning - whereas to the population generally, which alphabet soup of foreigners some people that they’ve never heard of sit with, is simply meaningless.

And I have to say I am starting to wonder if they might not be right. The risk they run is that opposition parties such as ourselves are able to paint the Conservatives in these European elections (and of course more importantly set the tone for next year’s General Election) as somehow in league with some very unsavoury people. And this is certainly not unjust.

But I wonder, quite simply, how much this resonance this really has with the average British voter. If I recall correctly we campaigned a few years ago to tell the public that the Conservatives were in league with Alleanza Nazionale (the Italian post-fascist party). But quite frankly I don’t think many British voters cared much.

And perhaps more psephologically importantly, on this one occasion, those to his right do have somewhere else to go: UKIP, the BNP and any other parties who will be attacking the Conservatives from the right, for being too integrationist-minded.

So maybe it is the right strategic thing for them to do. But there must surely be a risk that some normal people - those he needs to vote him into Downing St next year - do actually notice. And remember.

And it surely is odd that at the same time as he is doing his best to get the Conservatives to come over as normal people, he feels the need to leap into the arms of some thoroughly un-normal people, just to escape company which even Margaret Thatcher kept - and that was at a time when real leaps forward in integrating European policy and lawmaking were actually on the table.

Earlier this week David Cameron launched a policy green paper entitled “Control Shift – Returning Power to Local Communities”. According to the party website this sets out “a series of policies that will see powers transferred from the central state to local people and local institutions”.

If true, this is surely very welcome: it is indeed quite right that power in Britain is far too centralised, and that many decisions would be very much more effectively and democratically made closer to the people they affect.

But does the Conservative party actually really believe this? They have started to talk of localism more in recent years, but the test is in their deeds, not their words.

The history is not promising: the last Conservative government famously centralised all sorts of elements of power, from abolishing regional government in London to, for example, introducing national control of local taxation (rate-capping).

Cameron Conservatives of course claim that the party has changed radically since those days, and it’s not fair to judge them today on actions of two decades ago.

Fair enough. So are they are now proposing to, say, remove central control of local taxation?

Hardly. In fact on the contrary, they seem to believe that the level of local taxation should not just operate within nationally-set parameters, as Mrs Thatcher thought, but in fact have its actual level set by the national tier. Here is George Osborne making a national pledge about the level of every Council in the country at their party’s autumn conference last year. Mr Cameron himself confirmed the pledge again at Christmas.

They are not crude enough to propose formally removing this power from local authorities, but make it very clear that they expect Councils to fall in line, and when local authorities receive the vast majority of their funding not through local taxation but in a grant from central government – a system Cameron does not appear to be proposing to change – and are regulated and inspected to the nth degree, then central government can have overwhelming influence on what Councils actually do.

Quite simply, you cannot be taken remotely seriously as actually believing in decentralisation of power, while simultaneously making policies to set every Town Hall’s Council Tax from the centre.

Not everything they suggest in their paper is itself a bad idea: some of their proposals might, at the relative margins, improve local Councils’ control of their local area.

But they do not address the real, big questions about greater local control. Will their proposals give local people greater control over, say, their education and health services? They will not. Above all, they make no proposal to give local communities greater control of their finances, and without control of the money, much of their talk of empowering local communities is just playing with shadows.

The truth is that, away from the margins, at heart the Conservatives fundamentally believe that real power belongs uniquely in Whitehall. In their minds, there is simply something special about the national level.

In the twenty first century, this is simply wrong. Certainly many things are best done at the national level. But others are best done locally – and others best done at a global or European level.

So while the Cameron Conservatives might talk some of the talk about local empowerment, the reality is that when it comes down to it, this idea doesn’t even run as far as their own policy proposals while in opposition. Why on earth would we think that when in government - where the temptations are much greater - they would reverse some of the centralisation that they themselves introduced last time?

It must have seemed like such a good idea to someone to run Boris Johnson as the Conservative candidate for Mayor of London. It seemed he had very little chance of winning, but would raise the party’s profile and, frankly, fill the embarrassingly huge gap that no-one else was coming forward to be the Tory candidate. But then, just as in 2000, the voters of London made the calculation that in the grand scheme of things the Mayoralty of London wasn’t really that important, and so seized the opportunity to vote for the maverick outsider candidate as a cost-free way of showing their displeasure to the occupant of Downing Street.

And so we get to see what a new-style “post-nasty party” Cameron Conservative government would actually do, through what Boris and the Conservative team are doing in City Hall. And make no mistake, Boris may be a one-man maverick, but for exactly that reason, those close to Cameron have foisted on him their top team of managers, to make sure that it is not just a goofy Boris show, but a proper Conservative government of London.

All of which makes it all the more significant that it’s not working out well.

This week Boris’ “First Deputy Mayor” left the team, the third senior figure, and second Deputy Mayor, to leave that team in some disarray (there have also been one or two more routine departures).

Applying the Lady Bracknell test, this is really start to get pretty embarrassing. You cannot continue to lose one senior figure a month, and remain credible for very long.

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My post suggesting that, despite all the reasons for not doing so, there might perhaps be something to be said for voting for Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, as some kind of vaccination against a future Conservative Government, attracted quite a lot of criticism in Lib Dem circles. Jo Christie-Smith, for example, made a good critique of this position on her blog (apologies to Jo that for some reason I don’t understand Wordpress won’t let me link to her blog, but if you put her name into Google, it comes up pretty quick!).

In fact I wasn’t firmly saying that I thought anti-Conservatives should necessarily vote for Johnson, just highlighting the dilemma – and for the record, my own second preference on Thursday went to Livingstone.

I remain firmly of the view that a Boris Johnson London mayoralty is bad news for London – my concern limited only by the fact that the Mayor of London’s powers are in fact pretty limited. Talk of the job being that of ‘running London’, while perhaps understandable, are very wide of the mark. Even of those aspects of running London which lie in the public sector’s hands, few lie with the Mayor – he has no influence at all on health, for example, almost none on schools, not much on the green agenda (despite Ken’s generally admirable efforts to expand its power in this area), very little on waste (despite Ken’s more unsuccessful efforts here too), and very little even such London bete noires as parking. Public transport, policing, some aspects of housing, and major planning issues are the only really important areas the Mayor has real control of. And even in these areas he has to find agreement with a multitude of government departments, local councils and various other bodies (even if you live here you may well never have heard of the Government Office for London or GOL, but it is not too far from the truth to say that this government quasi-department exists largely in order to prevent the Mayor and 33 Boroughs from doing things that central government doesn’t really want them to do).

On the question of whether a Boris Mayoralty is good for the greater Conservative cause or not, it is fairly clear that the Conservative hierarchy, if not quite sharing my views precisely on the merits or otherwise of Boris Johnson, did have some concern about how he might perform as Mayor, and indeed how he was already showing as the Conservative candidate. The role of Australian Conservative spinmeister Lynton Crosby in sorting out the Conservative Mayoral campaign, and specifically sitting on Johnson, has been fairly widely discussed.

Boris’s first few pronouncements since his election confirm that he has behind him a strong team who are determined to control what he says pretty closely. Read the rest of this entry »

We citizens of this extraordinary and amazing city will be going to the polls on 1 May to elect ourselves a new Mayor. The polls of the last few weeks have seemed to indicate that this year Londoners really have finally had enough of Ken Livingstone. Personally I still find that difficult to believe: the man who is so far the only person to have held this post is one of politics’ great survivors – and more importantly the issues that have made the headlines about him so far – City Hall intrigues about how a couple of tiny organisations were funded, and how many children he has – seem to me like the sorts of issues which get journalists and political opponents excited, but have no real impact on the lives, and therefore the voting intentions, of normal voters.

It’s no surprise that I will be voting for Brian Paddick – he has a track record of innovative leadership on the London-wide stage, and perhaps more importantly, of doing so in a way which is popular with the local community. He would make a good Mayor. And he comes without Ken’s voluminous political baggage – encompassing everything from campaigning from low transport fares in the 80s to introducing record high ones in the 21st century, from doing odd deals with revolutionary leftwing South American presidents to being one of the biggest fans of City plutocrats.

But then of course there is the second preference choice to be made. And here I stumble across a dilemma which I actually think now faces (even if we haven’t realised it yet!) all Londoners who don’t want to see a Conservative government after the next General Election – which is most of us.

To be clear to start with: I think Boris Johnson would be a complete disaster as Mayor. His various performances over the last few months have entirely satisfied me that underneath the external appearance of a clowning buffoon, there lies in fact….a clowning buffoon. I don’t think he’s really interested in being Mayor of London, and when he did have to make a decision on something, I don’t doubt for a moment that he would do it based on what he thinks would be the interests of him and his friends rather than the interests of London as a whole. He is a true Conservative and I don’t think he should be entrusted with government.

I’m confident that within a few short months it would be clear what a disaster his mayoralty would be – and indeed a taste of what a Cameron Conservative government would be like.

And this is where it becomes a dilemma.

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On Friday the Conservatives launched a major advertising campaign and I think it’s quite an interesting milestone for showing where they have now got to in the development of “Cameron’s Conservatives”.

The top slogan for the campaign is “You can get it if you really want”, with ten individual promises in specific areas: health, schools, immigration etc.

This structure has taken some flak, for example from the Guardian, for emphasising different messages to different groups of people: so for example the immigration ad has gone in the Daily Mail, crime in the Sun and the education one in the Guardian.

This has been picked up by some (though not quite as explicitly as this by the Guardian) as further evidence that Cameron is willing to be all things to all men.

This doesn’t seem to me to be quite the right analysis.

Firstly, all political parties - indeed all of us all the time - say different things to different groups of people, without that meaning that we are inconsistent. It is hardly unreasonable for a party seeking to win votes to emphasise to particular groupings, their policies that they think will be of particular interest to that group. When this becomes a problem is when these messages are either explicitly or implicitly contradictory to each other, or (to a lesser degree) when it’s not possible to discern a linking thread between them.

Secondly it’s all very well to dismiss, for example, talking about education to Guardian-readers - but the actual messages they are putting across there are not the stereotypical messages you would expect Guardian-readers to love: the first headline here talks about splitting children up by ability (not quite the comprehensive ideal) and the second one emphasises discipline. These ideas may be right or they may be wrong - and the Conservatives obviously think they will appeal to Guardian-readers - but they cannot be dismissed as simply pandering to the lefty prejudices which this group of people are commonly supposed to have.

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As part of preparing something last week about politics online, I looked up David Cameron’s website for his TV clips, WebCameron, and I must say that I was very impressed with it.

It was set up with the intention of helping people get to know him better, and I think it does an excellent job of making people feel that. Clearly what is shown is pretty carefully selected, but when formal appearances by politicians are so carefully staged and scripted, it does give a better picture of who someone really is through how they speak relatively off the cuff, and in formats other than just standing up making a big speech or in an interview.

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