Tories: defining times?

The Sun may have switched its support this week by backing the Conservatives, but another of the News International stable is far from convinced that the Tories offer a definig vision of what they would do in government.

It is an old truism that oppositions do not win elections, governments lose them, but voters need to be given a clearer idea about how the Tories would have governed differently from Labour and what direction a Conservative government would take.  If this choice is not made clear, starting this week at the Tory conference in Manchester, we could see the gap between the two main parties close as the election battle gets more intense. 

See the leading article in the Times here.

Let battle commence

Steve Richards, writing in today’s Independent, suggests that it’s possibly too late in the political cycle for the main parties to change their leaders or their policies.  It’s a nice preview of how the months between now and the election will pan out.  For instance, Richards predicts that Brown will go to the country in May—the implication of this, of course, is that many blog readers could be voting in their first general election sooner than they think.