The Current Outlook

The general election is finally over after the Conservatives held Staffordshire South - seven weeks after the other seats had been decided.

Staffordshire South was always going to be a Conservative shoe-in - Patrick Cormack is an old Tory grandee and has been MP there for yonks.

No doubt 2009/2010 will be an interesting (and very close) election.

David Blunkett has returned to the Cabinet as work and pensions secretary as Tony Blair reshuffles his top team.

Now ‘New’ Labour has its third victory, Blair and his chums have been busy perfecting his Cabinet reshuffle.

Surprise, surprise. The thief returns to Government.

Blunkett will be sinking his teeth into bringing in his national identity register project at all costs. Nice position from which to convince people that trampling over liberty is good for Government.

Patricia Hewitt has obviously been moved because of the MG Rover fiasco. The idea that John Reid now looks after our defence is very frightening indeed.

I hope the left-wing old-school backbenchers manage to keep them in line this time with this reduced majority.

Tony Blair has won an historic third term in government for Labour but with a drastically reduced majority.

The BBC pretty much say predict Labour’s majority will be 66 - that’s a fairly significant majority in historical terms, but it cuts away a lot too. The best we could have hoped for I think. We’ve still got five more years of these bastards in power.

Serious message time.

Tomorrow, the voters of Britain go to the polls to decide who their next Government will be. Whatever your political colour, or even if you’re disgusted with the whole lot of them, please do one thing: vote. Vote ‘New’ Labour, vote Conservative, vote Liberal Democrat, vote Green if they’re standing in your constituency, vote whoever. Spoil your ballot paper and scribble ‘NONE OF THE ABOVE!’ all over your ballot paper if you feel the need to - but please take the trouble to go and vote. People die for these freedoms. Don’t allow Britain to lose them too.

Oh, and before you go: give this a read.

Thank you.

It’s the last day of campaigning until the General Election today. I have a feeling that Blair will still win with a very significant parliamentary majority. It doesn’t look good for us. Hopefully the Liberal Democrats will be more of a presence in the next Parliament - there is even talk of them perhaps getting above 75 seats because of tactical voting and ex-Labour people sick of this Government’s behaviour.

I will be up during the early hours of Friday morning discussing the election results, the people at the 2005 UK General Election blog have their own arrangements for Election Night, which can be read here. I’ll most likely be joining them.

The wife of the British soldier killed in Iraq yesterday blamed Tony Blair for his death.

And the Dear Leader looks set to be re-elected with a very considerable majority. Five more years of this bloody lunacy.

RIP Anthony.

Tonight’s Any Questions? comes from The Holy Trinity CE School, Crawley in West Sussex and will be chaired by Jonathan Dimbleby.

Lord Kinnock (Labour)

Lord Patten (Conservative)

Lord Steel (Liberal Democrat)

Haleh Afshar (Professor of Politics at the University of York)

A half-decent panel - Chris Patten is usually good value.

First up was Charles Kennedy for the Liberal Democrats. I thought he was quite uninspiring. There wasn’t an awful lot to him, to be frank. He was reasonably competent and didn’t make any massive screw-ups, which is a good thing. I did like his quip to Dimbleby’s question though:

David Dimbleby: Who would you like to be Prime Minister?
Charles Kennedy: Charles Kennedy.

There was a lot of questioning on Iraq. He used the anti-war argument quite a lot. Mr. Kennedy attacked Blair’s description of the release of the Attorney General’s full legal advice as a ‘damp squib’. He told Blair to tell that to the families of the soldiers who had been killed in action. All in all, I don’t think there was a lot of substance to Kennedy’s appearance - more filler, really.

Next up was the Conservative leader Michael Howard. He was his usual unappealling, uninspiring, unelectable self. He promises to ‘tell people like it is’ but he just comes across as being slimy and unpopular, a problem that the Tories must combat if they are to get anywhere near Downing Street within the next decade. It was interesting that he said that, in the case of Iraq, he would have taken the Blair line on invasion whether or not there were any WMDs: “regime change plus”. Overall I think he did very slightly better than Blair but that’s not saying much at all.

And, lastly, we had the Labour leader and Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who was booed as he came on stage. Blair looked rattled on several occasions as members of the audience kept having a go at him - he was nailed several times during his half-hour slot, over the Iraq war, over hospital appointments and top-up fees and student debts (sweating by this point as the image shows). To be perfectly honest, Blair looks like he just doesn’t want to do the job of Prime Minister and is sick of all the fuss - he is beginning to raise his voice and lose his temper when being questioned by interviewers.

Dimbleby got him at the very end when he was asked…

David Dimbleby: Mr. Blair, can I just ask you one last question? We’ve had Mr. Kennedy in that chair, we’ve had Mr. Howard in that chair - why wouldn’t you debate directly, face-to-face with them– (huge cheering; applause)

…and Blair had no answer to it - he paused for several seconds before rattling on about the Commons and PMQs.

As it is the General Election next week, Question Time has invited the leaders of the three main British political parties onto the show for a special. Each leader will go one after the other and will take questions for the audience for 30 minutes each.

Tonight’s show will be live and will start at 20:30 on BBC ONE.

Tony Blair (Prime Minister; Labour)

Michael Howard (Leader of the Opposition; Conservative)

Charles Kennedy (Liberal Democrat)

This is one of the problems with BBC ‘fairness’, in that they all get an equal amount of time.

I just received mine this morning and am working my way through. Private Eye’s on the ball yet again as you can see.