“I feel like I win when I lose”

"No-one (in their right mind) would want to find themselves governing in the scorched earth years that lie ahead of us. Not so much a poisoned chalice as a barrel’s worth of the stuff."

A familiar part of any electoral spring is the appearance of our old and counter-intuitive friend – “it’s a good election to lose”.

In varying forms, it has already made an appearance in The Guardian, The Independent and the London Review of Books courtesy of Messrs. Legrain, Lawson and Lanchester, respectively.

PM unveils election pledges at University of Nottingham

As was widely reported at the weekend, Gordon Brown was in Nottingham at the weekend. More specifically, he was at the University of Nottingham’s jubilee campus. He gave his speech at the Nottingham Geospatial Building, a new £9m research centre devoted to global navigation satellite systems and geospatial sciences, which has only just opened.

Spinning the manifesto

Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, has been in charge of drafting Labour’s manifesto since 2007. So he has had a long time to get it right. Over the weekend Miliband claimed in a Guardian interview that the manifesto will prove Labour remains best qualified to lead ‘the next phase of national renewal" and that it "will reform both the market and the state" and help “rebuild our politics”. This is good, classic New Labour stuff – ‘renewal’ ‘rebuild’ and ‘reform’ all evoke memories of 1997.

New MPs, quiet Parliament?

We’ve been running a project, at Nottingham, looking at backbench dissent for the last seven years. Late last year, it revealed that Labour MPs were on course to be the most rebellious group of parliamentarians in the post-war era (anyone who can’t face the full report can read this summary, from Progress). And, in January, we showed how the Conservatives were much less likely to vote against government legislation than people thought (again, anyone who doesn’t want to read the report can read its coverage in the Times or on ConservativeHome). And occasionally, it’s even benefitted charities, when people are prepared to bet their opinions against our evidence.