Gordon Brown gave a punchy and passionate speech in Nottingham to launch Labour's key election pledges.

It's not wrecking the economic recovery, stupid.

The pledge card is the central tool of a political age in which we campaign in prose more than poetry. John Rentoul has a point when he wonders whether "strengthen families in communities" is English or Dutch.

But isn't the sunshine image on the pledge card very interesting too?

Remember the central message of David Cameron's first party conference as leader in 2006:

Let us show clearly which side we are on. Let optimism beat pessimism, let sunshine win the day.

Or George Osborne

The Conservative Party mustn't sound like the old man on the park bench who says things were better in 1985, or 1955, or 1855.

Yes, there was cynicism. But many commentators thought it was smart. Andrew Rawnsley wrote:

This is the sharpest, most significant and yet also one of the least remarked-upon breaks that David Cameron has made with his party's past. William Hague, IDS and Michael Howard told Conservative audiences that Britain was going to hell in a handcart. They painted a dystopian picture of the country.

Not Dave.

Yet David Cameron has ended up running on broken Britain, the debt crisis and the age of austerity.

He may even have left Gordon Brown taking up the sunshine side of the argument!

If we get it wrong, we face what they themselves call an age of austerity. If we get it right, we can achieve an age of shared prosperity. The economy is more central and the choice more serious in this election than any time in my lifetime.

Funny old world.

At Liberal Democrat Voice, Stephen Tall points out how the tightening polls could throw see the electoral system throw up some ' crazy results.

My Fabian Review essay on the electoral system back in Autumn 2007 imagined what the papers might say if a party with fewer votes won an overall majority (tactfully pitching the timetable forward four years, and introducing weekend voting too!).

Do the closing polls mean that this type of scenario is more likely?

Here's the extract:

It is one minute past ten pm on Sunday 4 May 2013. After a hard-fought campaign, the most expensive pie chart in BBC history spins towards the viewers. Has the New Tory call for 'change' finally worked? Their fetching new sky blue segment at 39 per cent edges the Prime Minister's deeper red back to 37 per cent, and the Lib Dems are squeezed to 21 per cent. Seven nail-biting hours later, Labour is back for a fifth term with a slim working majority of 14. Not because the exit polls got it wrong – they turned out to be uncannily accurate - but because the electoral system did.

Result: meltdown.

"Democracy crisis as losing party wins" reports the Times.

"Labour's Strange Victory – half a million votes behind", says The Guardian.

"Disunited Kingdom: Tory England denied" complains the Telegraph.

"Stolen: The Great Election Shambles", shouts the Mail.

"No Mandate to Govern", declares The Independent.

One question dominates angry radio phone-ins: why weren't we told this could happen?

The secret flaw of first-past-the-post is that it is a very poor majoritarian system if we ever have close elections. It needs a lot of luck to do what it says on the tin - award most seats to the party with most votes - at a national level.

The flaw is hidden because we mostly don't have close elections: 2005 was not much of a contest but it was the first election for thirty years where the two parties finished within 5% of each other. On the six post-war elections where the main parties have been separated by less than 5% of each other, FPTP has picked the "wrong" winner twice.

What we don't know is whether the reaction would be much less sanguine in an era of political disengagement and distrust. As I wrote of my hypothetical scenario:

As commentators observed over the next few days, there were historical precedents. Attlee had won Labour's highest-ever share of the poll in 1951 on 48.8 per cent, yet Churchill, trailing on 48 per cent, won a majority and the Tories governed the age of affluence. (Harold Wilson turned the tables in the first 1974 election, winning most seats when a quarter of a million votes behind).

But few were convinced by the history lesson. The 1951 election had taken place in a different political universe from our own. With no national TV or radio reporting, the local constituency contests were the focus of the campaign. Polling was in its infancy and totting up the final national vote was almost an afterthought.

More importantly, the electoral system had deep and almost unquestioned legitimacy. The institutions had come through the war. The two main parties had 97 per cent of the vote on an 85 per cent turnout. Both strongly supported the system, treating unfair results like bad umpiring decisions, likely to even out over time.

That broad legitimacy lasted almost three decades ... It no longer works. At the next election, a six point lead could give Gordon Brown a majority of 100, while David Cameron could need to finish nine points ahead just to escape hung parliament territory. Labour could expect to be 90 seats ahead of level on votes, and still be the largest party in the Commons even if they were up to five points behind.

Gordon Brown is to unveil Labour's 2010 election pledge card today. He speaks to The Guardian and so one can read the interview, the news story, and now the eggs and bacon blog of the interview too.

He says he wants the Labour pledges, which will be enshrined in a new pledge card to be revealed tomorrow, to be readily enforceable. The five pledges are: secure the recovery; raise family living standards; build a hi-tech economy; protect frontline investment in policing, schools, childcare and the NHS – with a new guarantee of cancer test results within a week; and strengthen fairness in communities through controlled immigration, guarantees of education, apprenticeships and jobs for young people and a crackdown on antisocial behaviour.

Gordon Brown confirming that Alistair Darling would stay as Chancellor if Labour win offers a remarkable echo of the opening of the 2005 campaign - the day of the short ice creams (video) which confirmed Brown's post-election position as Chancellor (and, in effect on that occasion, the leadership succession too).

It is for the same reason as last time. With a post-budget poll showing Brown and Darling now ahead of Cameron and Osborne on the economy, confirming Darling's position is necessary to deploy the Chancellor as an electoral asset.

Labour identified Oliver Letwin as a weak link in 2005. (Poster).

With so much focus on the economy, how much more true is that of George Osborne in 2010.

So Alistair Darling is unassailable. (Of course, you read it here first).

Is George?

***

PS: In the Telegraph, the fiercely Eurosceptic commentator Simon Heffer explains why he would put up with a Europhile Shadow Chancellor. The Tories need to change to Ken Clarke because "the combination of inexperience, opportunism and stupidity is a lethal cocktail when it comes to trying to work out how to govern". Sorry George. (Spectator editor Fraser Nelson wasn't impressed by Osborne's "weak response" to the budget either).

Labour's record on redistribution is easily underestimated, perhaps especially on the liberal-left. A large part of that is because it has often been a case of 'running up the down escalator': I discuss this in a Progress magazine piece.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies report, covered on Left Foot Forward which rounds-up media coverage does clearly shows how government policy has had an important redistributive effect.

An major new book by Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University 'Britain's war on poverty' this week set out why the government's child poverty strategy is being increasingly championed by US anti-poverty campaigners because it shows that "policy works".

***

But among the greatest, unsung successes of this government is its record on pensioner poverty. Pensioner poverty has been reduced by a million. But the most striking change is this:

Pensioners are now less at risk of poverty than adults of working age, undoubtedly for the first time in British social history.

As The Solidarity Society's overview of both the successes and failures of Labour's record on poverty and inequality explained:

Throughout most of our history, living into old age was for most a passport into poverty. From the early 1960s to the late 1970s, the risk of poverty for a pensioner was around 40 per cent, compared to around 14 per cent for the population as a whole ... Pensioner poverty has fallen very dramatically since 1997 from 29 per cent of pensioners (2.9 million) to 18 per cent (2 million). The key driver of this has undoubtedly been huge increases in welfare benefits for pensioners. Today, the risk of pensioner poverty is 18 per cent, compared to 22 per cent for the population as a whole ... Poverty rates for single female pensioners halved from 41 per cent in 1997 to 20 per cent in 2005.

Conservative leader David Cameron was today announcing a pledge to pensioners. He used the occasion to attack the government's record - "Increase the value of the basic state pension for all pensioners and help to stop the spread of the means test by linking pensions to earnings. You won’t get a repeat of Labour’s mean 75p rise with us".

He might have more honestly praised the government's remarkably successful record on pensioner poverty, and so committed to maintain it. He could have made a virtue of the cross-party consensus on restoring the earnings link too (where the hyper-partisanship we have seen recently over funding social care was thankfully avoided, despite fears that reform would prove politically impossible).

It would be good to hear all parties commit to the principle that in tightening the public finances, every effort should be made to ensure the old, the vulnerable and the poor are not disproportionately affected. It is certainly a test which should and will be applied to every party which aspires to be progressive.

The Red Tory publicity machine is gearing up once again, with Phillip Blond's book of that title published by Faber & Faber on Monday.

Blond is the great thinking hope of the ProgCons. Yet Red Toryism is socially conservative but heavily market interventionist. Cameronism is often the opposite on both fronts: socially liberal but much more free market.

But only now do we have new and surely conclusive proof of the depth of that Red Tory-Cameroon rift: the book launch is at the Carlton Club, where the jacket and tie dress code will be strictly enforced.

I will be in conversation with the great man at Foyles (Charing Cross Road), London next Wednesday night (31st March). (Free tickets are available from events@foyles.co.uk). I am also due to be talking Red Toryism with him on Sky News around 10.30 on Sunday morning, so I had better read the book.

In the new Prospect, Blond picks a fight with Tim Montgomerie and the Tory right, describing Montgomerie's prescription of 'less Red Toryism and more red meat Toryism" as "disastrous". This clash of ideas within the right has long been prophesised: we shall see whether red Tory or blue blood is spilled.

For those struggling to make head nor tail of it, try Next Left's guide Everything you wanted to know about Red Toryism but were afraid to ask.

The New Statesman believes a 'realignment of the left is needed, and has begun a series to debate what this might mean. Editor Jason Cowley argues that "the Labour Party remains the primary means by which to achieve a plural, social-democratic transformation". Yet the series began with Anthony Barnett's "hang 'em" essay arguing very much the opposite.

The highly untribal David Marquand found that a "diatribe" too far, which would surely let David Cameron in. There are further responses this week from myself, from Roy Hattersley and Neal Lawson. (Mine is the only of the three not to throw around references to Militant and the SWP to characterise the new danger of Barnettism! But we all argue that there is no plausible left pluralist governing strategy which writes Labour out of the script entirely).

Let's come back to Barnett's characterisation of Labour another time. Here, I want to make a narrower point. The cover of last week's New Statesman appeared to promise that Anthony Barnett will be advocating a hung Parliament, so advising voters attracted by the idea as how to maximise their chances of getting one.

But he didn't do that. Following his advice would make a hung Parliament less, not more, likely, because he has two different and competing objectives

1. Voting against New Labour and not voting Conservative.

The hope is to kick New Labour out, without helping the Conservatives in.

2. Voting to promote the chances of a Hung Parliament

Anthony Barnett hopes that (1) voting against the big two will lead to (2) a hung Parliament.

It won't. Barnett entirely prioritises (1) to the neglect of (2). So he advocates a quixotic electoral pact in which Nick Clegg and the LibDems would endorse Nigel Farage's Buckingham campaign to get Britain out of Europe, SNP MPs advocating Scottish independence, and honorary major party mavericks Frank Field and David Davis.

Voters who want to"maximise the chances of a hung Parliament would clearly weaken their chances if they followed Barnett's advice. Here's why.

First, what is a hung Parliament?

There will be a hung Parliament if no party - neither the Conservatives nor Labour - win 326 seats (and a majority of 2) in the House of Commons.

Which of these is the most likely "risk" to a Hung Parliament?

The bookmakers make a Conservative majority government 8/13, a Hung Parliament 13/8 and a Labour majority 9/1. (You can get 200/1 on the LibDems having most seats, even if short of a majority).

So here is the accurate and as impartial as we can be strategic advice to any voters who - unlike Barnett - see making a hung Parliament more likely as a priority.

Voters whose priority is to maximise the chances of a Hung Parliament should vote for the best placed anti-Conservative candidate (who they are willing to support) in any seat where the Conservatives have some chance of winning.

They should follow this advice unless and until there is more chance of a Labour than a Conservative majority in the House of Commons.

And let's look at the electoral battleground which will decide it.

After boundary changes, Labour can not lose (net) more than 24 seats, so must hold some of its "super-marginals" to retain an overall majority. If Labour can't achieve that, the "hung Parliament or not" question becomes whether the Conservatives make the 116 net gains, targetting these seats to get over the line. (The Tories nominally start on 209 seats, given boundary changes, though won only 200 in 2005). On universal swings everywhere, they could cross the line making 90+ gains from Labour and 25-26+ from other parties. (Peter Kellner suggests that in practice the Tories probably need 105+ gains from Labour, citing the 1979 precedent where 4/7 Liberal incumbents defied a national swing to the Tories sufficient to defeat them).

This reinforces the argument that the Labour-Con battleground will be decisive. In only a handful of those seats is any other party or candidate in contention at all.

Advocating third party candidates as the best choice for progressive pluralists in these seats must depend on following Barnett's argument through to its natural conclusion: that making a Tory majority government more likely (and a hung Parliament less likely) is a price worth paying to hurt Labour. It follows that Barnett must believe either that Labour can never again be a progressive vehicle, or at least that it must lose first before the question can be asked. He means "hang 'em" in the first sense and not the second, but that does entail sacrificing the best chance of a hung Parliament in 2010 to this broader anti-Labour goal.

That would also make sense of Barnett's willingness to endorse David Davis (a vote for a David Cameron majority government, civil liberties and climate scepticism) alongside Labour's Frank Field (as a maverick), yet not to spare even the most stalwart Labour reformers like John Denham (long-time electoral reformer who resigned over Iraq), Martin Linton and many others. Nigel Farage does somehow make Barnett's "pluralist" cut, though I can't see how the Bercow-Farage contest can make any difference to the chances of a hung Parliament either way. If Barnett has arguments for wanting Farage in the Commons, the case for a hung Parliament risks being a false flag of convenience under which to advance them.

***

The number of what Martin Kettle calls "nottles" (Not Tory not Labour MPs) will make a difference. That is primarily because their post-1974 increase has already much increased the 'spread' between a Tory and Labour majority, as Next Left noted in a previous post.

n the general elections of the 1950s and 1960s, the number of neither Labour nor Tory MPs was 11, 9, 8 and 7 (in the 1950s) and 9, 14 and 12 (from 1964-70). With the fragmentation of the two-party vote, and the increased representation of Liberal and nationalist parties, that rose to 37 and 39 in the 1974 elections, and after falling to 27 in 1979, rose again to 44 or 45 in each of the 1983-92 elections, the jumping again to 76 in 1997 and then 92 in 2005.

It does not follow that voting nottle is the primary route to a hung Parliament, which was also Kettle's argument: the gap between the two major parties which will be decisive in determining whether that wider spread matters in the Commons.

Those who especially want to increase the "nottle" contingent further could simply vote for incumbent 'nottle' MPs, and for other non-Lab/Con candidates who they thought could win. Barnett's quixotic joint "nottle" list would do more electoral damage in lost LibDem principles and crediblity (from the pro-independence and UKIP embrace) while bringing very few, if any, further seats into play.

***

Since there are a range of different potential tactical motivations in the 2010 General Election, here again is a neutral description of the strategic options for those with different preferences as to the outcome.

* Voters who fear the possibility of a large Tory majority and whose priority is to minimise that threat should do the same thing as pro-hung Parliament voters, and back the best placed anti-Tory candidates in seats the party could win.

* Voters who want Labour to govern should vote Labour in all Labour-held seats, and anywhere else where they believe the party has a chance of gaining a seat. They could consider voting tactically for non-Labour incumbents (LibDem, Plaid Cymru, SNP) where they believe the Conservatives have a chance in the seat, and that this is the best way to stop them and for other candidates who they think could beat the Conservatives where Labour can not.

* Voters who want Labour out and the Conservatives in would vote Conservative in all of their top 250 target seats as well as for sitting Tory MPs. They could consider voting tactically for other parties against Labour incumbents where the Tories are not in contention, and possibly for LibDem MPs with close Labour challengers, assuming they think the choice of government in a hung Parliament will be between the reds and blues.

* Voters who want the LibDems to govern would vote LibDem in all LibDem-held seats and in pretty much all of the party's top 200+ target seats, in the hope they could increase their vote by more than half to 33%+ and compete to overtake the other parties. They could consider voting for Labour incumbents facing a Tory challenge in seats the LibDems can't win, if (in the event of this political earthquake) they think that the race to be largest party would be between the yellows and the blues, or otherwise consider whether they would prefer either major party to lead a government if in a Labour-Tory marginal.

To which election argument is the Conservative Party most vulnerable?

"Same old Tories". That's the view of Tory chairman Eric Pickles, without needing a moment to think when asked the question.

So how do the Conservatives deal with may be turning into the longest wobble
in election history?

They call in Maurice and Charles Saatchi.

"We have had a relationship with the Tories for the past 32 years so it seems natural", say their people.

As the Political Scrapbook blog notes, the Saatchi's role is bound to be seen as an embarassing public rebuff to continuing 'lead agency' Euro RCSG, to whom we owe all of that airbrush entertainment. And quite a coup for Clifford Singer and the MyDavidCameron spoofsters, somehow still bedevilling the Tory campaign two months on.

So commuters around me are reading the 'Tories turn to Thatcher ad men' on the front-page of the Standard, above the DON'T PANIC splash headline "Cameron calls in Saatchis as lead vanishes".

Maggie stalwart Tim Bell's explains the strategic logic behind the party seeking to recapture its '80s glory days:

At last, the Conservatives are starting to use professionals who have actually won elections before. If M&C; Saatchi can produce the kind of brilliant work that we did, it will have a dramatic effect on the election outcome. This will frighten the other side.

Frighten? Or bewilder? Or delight?

The coverage shows just how much the Labour Isn't Working legend retains enormous resonance in the folk memory of the political classes. Yet "New Labour, New Danger" and Demon Eyes 1997 have inoculated Labour against the fear that the Saatchis have a magic bullet which works even when the Tory party can't quite work out what its argument or message is.

Inside, those iconic images of 'Labour isn't working, the Tax Bombshell and Demon Eyes feature under the headline "Brief is to tear lumps out of Brown".

Bell also says that the Tory mistake in recent campaigns was:

"Trying to be liked".

So welcome back the Nasty Party too?

Team Cameron does nothing when it comes to PR and image management without much forethought. One can only surmise that they think this will be a welcome morale boost for the troops, perhaps calculating that undecided voters simply aren't going to notice or think anything of it.

Maybe. But Labour will surely be chuffed to bits at a symbolic reinforcement of its central message - that, whenever the pressure is on, the Tories don't reach out but retreat to the Thatcherite comfort zone. Of course, that really matters when its about the big decisions on the financial crisis and the recession. But that same thing is true of the process issue of who makes the ads too is a handy reminder.

Perhaps this is more evidence for Cameronism as a masterclass in political ambiguity - more evidence that what he stands for is what Tim Montgomerie calls "the politics of and".

He has his ProgCon adviser in Steve Hilton - and his tabloid-focused pub ready right-wing adviser in Andy Coulson.

Does he now have one ad agency to do his sunshine positive messages - and then the Saatchis to put the boot in?

And will all of this help or hinder the problem that people are still not very clear what David Cameron really stands for?

Surely a deeper ProgCon strategy would have turned not to Maurice Saatchi, but to Trevor Beattie.

But what really matters is the brief: authenticity.

If you can fake that, as the old joke goes ....

But if you can't ....