if they swing further to the right (hard to believe!) they will be even more unelecteable and hopefully nowhere near office for another decade or two.

It'd be better if it was a millenia.

I'd have thought that the Tories would have learned from their defeats in 2001 and 2005 that the last thing the people of this country want is a more right wing Tory party. I don't think Boris won in London because he was more right wing, I think he won (only just) because he was up against a someone who in certain quarters was very unpopular e.g in Barnet - a largely Jewish community, the Labour candidate for the London Assembly won with a comforatable majority, Livingstone (same electorate) lost by roughly the same majority. Ken (like Galloway) is a well known anti Zionist and this stance is obviously unpopular.

I love the way the Tories are blaming everything on the LibDems.

Let me get this right... The majority party has to get the nod from the smaller one before it can proceed? Really?

Or is it more that the Tories have the ear of the press, whereas the LDs don't, and can get their lies across more easily?

Have the ear of the press?

In most case they ARE the press

Fair comment.

IMO the relationship is the other way round, which is what makes it more sinister.

It's not a case of the Conservative party making the running and using their puppets in the press as a propaganda mouthpiece. It's the right wing press making the running and holding a gun to the Conservative party's head, that if they want their continued support, they have to 'act tough' on a certain agenda. Hence the fact the right wing press has been quite barbed towards Cameron.

It's interesting how party activists are out of touch with the electorate.

After the Tories have had a setback this week, the calls from the party are that the electorate has 'punished them for not being Conservative enough' and that the solution should be moving to the right, focusing more on being against Europe and immigration. This is exactly what happened when they looked for lessons from the 1997 defeat when Blair hammered them, they went into a right wing posturing rump under Hague, Duncan Smith and then Howard, campaigning about Europe and immigration, remember all those "are you thinking what we're thinking?" posters they had which featured some stereotypical right wing message. They were smashed at three successive elections. Cameron then brought them more towards the centre and made them electable (up to the point of being a minority government) and now their activists are lobbying to try and go back to the right wing wasteland again!

I suppose there has been a similar effect in Labour in the past, when they go into times of struggle the call from the party is that it should rediscover socialism, stand for renationalisation, restoration of trade union powers etc. Again that sort of thing cheers the party members but just pushes Labour away from the electorate.

The smart leaders are the ones that bring their party as close as possible to where the British electorate is. Cameron for his faults has done that better than other Conservative leaders since the early days of Major. Blair was the best at that by far. David Miliband would I believe also have done that and if he was Labour leader now I think we would be looking at a no-contest march to victory between now and 2015 similar to Blair from 94-97.

Except of course that many of the policies were not true Labour policies. Some of them were, and under Brown as Chancellor quite a bit of discreet redistribution occurred, and the NHS became what it should have been under the Tories. But taking the country into wars is not the Labour way. TBH I'd like to see Labour offer a true alternative to the Tories' cuts that benefit the better off and leave the rest worse off, a government like the post war Attlee government that made a real difference to the people of this country. A government elected by a landslide and which never lost an election in terms of the popular vote. A government which re-wrote what governments could and should do for a generation.

Yes a government which took Britain into the Korean War and Hugh Gaitskell introduced an austerity budget to pay for it. It laid the precedent for Tony Blair that Labour were not afraid to make tough choices and sacrifice spending on health and pensions to stand shoulder to shoulder with the US allies.