Douglas Carswell MP says…

“It turns out that Sir Alan is quite a Sugar Daddy. Now we can see why Gordon Brown told him ‘you’re hired’.”

This is the height of an election campaign and you would think a party desperate to be taken seriously would have nailed basic proof-reading  and checking before emailing out their releases. Guido isn’t really enjoying the experience of receiving a press release a minute as he seems to be this week, but especially irritating is the frequency of corrections and amendments from Cowley Street every day.  The Liberal Democrats really need to raise their press operation’s game.

Well they weren’t on the stage as apparent cheerleaders, but the Tories use of Keane’s “Everybody’s Changing” as warm up music hasn’t gone down too well with their public school swampy drummer Richard Hughes. He tweeted “am horrified. to be clear – we were not asked. i will not vote for them.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement. The Foo Fighters, Bowie and Basement Jaxx, who made up the rest of the play-list on Hilton’ iPod, were unavailable for comment…

CCHQ pulled a trick to keep the cameras rolling and broadcasting throughout today’s Tory presser: bookend all the most presentable Shadow Cabinet members with Osborne and Cameron. Cameron was introduced by Hague and Osborne long before he appeared. The trick worked for Cameron’s happy-faces “Big Society” launch and it worked today – by the time Baroness Warsi was on tiptoes at the podium the media were just desperate for Cameron to come out. Next trick on the broadcasters: book up all the post-manifesto launch air time with Shadow Cabinet, then keep them all sitting on the stage while Dave answers questions. The resulting empty air time gets filled up with continuing coverage of the stage, instead of Eric Pickles or Grayling embarrassing themselves…

UPDATE : Michael Salter, CCHQ’s head of broadcast is on a roll.  He was “Tory of the Day” yesterday for smoothing things over with the gay community this weekend.

Guido had been wondering for a while whether anyone on the Labour side would take the foolish risk of putting Jonah Brown on their election literature. Scrolling through the multitudes of leaflets uploaded onto the leaflet archiving site TheStraightChoice.Org, Guido had genuinely started to think that no one would dare.

Finally, today, a breakthrough, and it turns out that the only person willing to feature the Prime Mentalist’s deranged smile on their leaflets is… Jonah Brown himself!

The leaflet sent around Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath features five pictures of an inanely grinning Jonah – but it seems that pictures of his smile are in such short supply that they had to reuse one of them twice. This is possibly the only Labour leaflet in this general election with Brown’s voter-repelling visage on it.

Only one question remains: Is Jonah immune to his own curse? It doesn’t get more sinister…

Ellie Gellard told Gordon Brown to…

“Get your coat: time’s up.”

All credit to Nick Clegg for braving Paxman and coming through unscathed. Tim Montgomerie is advising Dave to duck Paxman and the chances of Gordon Brown finding the courage to endure a grilling are even more remote. The bookies currently make Cameron favourite to win the TV debate and the consensus of the commentariat is that he is a superior performer in the manner of Blair. What this interview shows is that if Clegg overcomes his tendency to waffle, he is no slouch either.

Dave has everything to lose, he is ahead in the polls, expectations are high, he is the superior debater, time and time again he has bloodied Brown’s nose at PMQs.  What the chancellor’s debate showed is that the guy in the middle, the LibDem, can do very well.  Clegg will be accorded equal status with the major party leaders, equal billing and equal time.

Clegg’s policy of equi-distant faux-neutrality shouldn’t be allowed to survive the debate night. He needs to say clearly what his rules of engagement will be in the event of a hung parliament. Logically his party should deal with the party with the most votes, not the most seats.  Since he is always telling us how unfair the first-past-the-post is, if he were to support a party with fewer votes in exchange for say, electoral reform, the voters might be entitled to think he was acting cynically out of party interest rather than reflecting the will of most of the people.   The LibDems wouldn’t do that, would they?

Above is the Guy News rolling poll of polls from the last seven days.

This week last year saw the biggest move in a party’s rating ever recorded by YouGov.  On April 4th, 2009 Labour were on 34%, the following YouGov poll on April 23rd had them down 7% to 27% with the Tory lead soaring to 18%.  It was the week when Smeargate revealed to voters how Brown’s Downing Street cabal really worked and Labour’s electoral hopes of a post-G20 bounce-back in the polls were finally killed.

It was, in the words of one grateful senior Tory strategist at the time, “a game-changer”…