It was manifesto week, and the conscientious voter will be sitting down today to digest 83 pages from Labour, 82 from the Conservatives, 157 from the Lib Dems, 75 from Ukip, and 84 from the Greens - virtual pages in the Greens’ case, because they did not print them out.
In a surprising act of political cross-dressing, Labour’s document stressed fiscal responsibility while the Tories’ was chock-full of spending commitments funded with a large dose of wishful thinking. As a result, when Nigel Farage claimed that the Ukip manifesto, a curious mix of anti-corporatism and low-tax uber-Thatcherism, set a new gold standard because it included independent costings, it did not seem wholly unreasonable.
Ed Miliband and David Cameron both had successful manifesto launches, but the Ukip event was overshadowed by aggressive heckling from Ukip activists directed at a Telegraph journalist who had the temerity to ask why there was just one black face in the document, on the page about overseas aid being cut.
At least the reporters got to ask questions. At the Lib Dem’s launch Nick Clegg infuriated the press by taking three questions from supporters, and just one from a bona fide journalist. So they never got to ask about the party’s Wizard of Oz election strategy, which consists of telling voters they would add heart to a Tory tin man government, or a brain to a Labour scarecrow one.
The real Wizard of Oz, though, is Paul Johnson from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, who is having a superb campaign. No one dares question the IFS sage, and Johnson and his team have effectively been umpiring the election, red carding the parties when they spout fiscal weasel. This week Johnson complained about the Tories offering “absolutely no detail” about the proposed “really big cuts”, while complaining that Labour’s imprecision meant “literally we would not know what we were voting for”.
At their manifesto launches the leaders seemed engaged in an optimism competition, with Cameron repeatedly promising “the good life”. By Wednesday, however, he was telling Evan Davis the claim that the Tories were the party of the rich made him “more angry than almost anything else”. When Davis asked him about exploitative bosses and slum landlords, Cameron claimed to be infuriated. The following day he totally blew a gasket, saying that Ed Balls’ description of Liam Byrne’s “there’s no money left” note as a joke was “frankly the most appalling thing I have heard in this election campaign so far”.
He may have had a point. For a proper joke, it was hard to beat Cameron’s claim that he would have really liked to attend the BBC debate, but that it was unfortunate that he had not been invited.
Miliband, Farage, the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon, the Green’s Natalie Bennett and Plaid Cymru’s Leanne Wood seemed to manage perfectly well without Cameron. Miliband won the snap poll afterwards, but social media assessments suggested Sturgeon had the upper hand. It was more illuminating than the seven-leader debate two weeks ago, and at times it was riveting.
One of the best moments, however, came once it was over, when Sturgeon, Bennett and Wood engaged in a touching group hug. Most viewers will never have seen a British leaders debate with a) more women than men and b) a majority of participants who actually like each other. Perhaps our politics really are changing.
