A week is a long time in politics (I): full of sound and fury

I am in fact so excited about the upcoming election that even A is bored, so I've decided to hit the blog instead. As I reckon this could take more than Thursday to get the result sorted out I've decided Harold Wilson's adage best captures the period to a new government (please God*). If it takes longer than Saturday, I will have gotten bored and anyway will be in California so won't care.

However, the adage is wrong. A week really isn't a long time in politics anymore. Either things happen instantly, or nothing happens at all. Here are some polls (both YouGov):

Today: Tories - 35; Liberal - 28; Labour 27
17 April: Tories - 33; Liberal - 30; Labour - 28

Two weeks, bigotgate, two more debates - all that, and basically Cameron and Clegg have mopped up a few 'don't knows.' Now, those may prove critical (based on the BBC's rough seat calculator, this converts the outcome from Labour lead to a Tory lead in seats), but it's not very much. In 1992, where on he 16th March Labour led the Tories 43-38, when by 8 April (the eve of the election) they were tied on 38. Now that's proper movement. But when the relative shares haven't really moved, it's hard to see this entire election campaign as anything other than the playout of the first debate.

Now, this is partly because, bigotgate aside, no-one has done anything stupid, and that both Cameron and Brown have absorbed the lessons of the first debate. But it also points to the fact that campaigns only change when new information is given. Depressingly, about 10% the electorate appear not to have heard of the Liberal Democrats before the debate on the 15th, and Plaid and the SNP are quite right to point out the debates will hurt them (though it shouldn't get them on the podium) and people will simply forget them. More significantly, the intense scrutiny of politicians through expenses and economic crisis has meant and people have already pretty fixed views of their votes. While politicians actions can shift polls, it's their actions before the campaign that do so, not their actions on it, hence the collapse of the Tory lead from the beginning of the year. On this note, it's been striking to me how bad the themes of the main manifestos have been. Labour's soviet-like banner has given the electorate nothing to hold onto and the Tories' manifesto is just terrible electioneering. As a result they've done anything to the vote and they're unlikely to. Similarly, bigotgate was wonderful car-crash television, but it didn't change many people's mind. If you cared about Gordon's temper and paranoia, you already weren't voting Labour.

May 6th is going to be fascinating, not lease because of the bewildering complexity of our splendid electoral system (I'll be covering that later in the week), but we could almost have had it three weeks earlier and nothing much would have changed. The only thing we have really learnt is that for all the nonsense about new media, it's been peripheral - what's changed the game is a debate, on traditional, live, Television and Radio, based on a format that was created in 1960. Otherwise, it has been a campaign full of sound and fury, but for last twenty days it has largely signified nothing.

*about both the new government and the timing of getting one in