John Lanchester

We tremble on the verge of greatness today, as the first of the parties – Labour – sets out its manifesto. I’ll comment on it after I’ve read it. In the meantime, a look at how modern politics is conducted, in practice. In this election, one of the Tories’ main tools is a ‘consumer categorisation’ package called Mosaic, developed by the data management company Experian. They are one of the big credit ratings firms, and are also behind that software that spookily knows who you are and where you live when you type in your postcode.

Shocker about Kaczynski, and all the others on his plane. As Denis MacShane points out, no modern European government has ever had its leadership removed en bloc in this way. I’ve noticed before, though, that a disproportionate number of heads of state and prime ministers seem to die in plane crashes. Barthelemy Boganda of the Central African Republic in 1950, Francisco de Sá Carneiro of Portugal in 1980, Samora Machel of Mozambique in 1986, Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan in 1988, Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprian Ntayamira of Burundi in 1994 – and now Lech Kaczynski of Poland. All the first six were either certainly or probably murdered, leaving Kaczynski as the only one to die in a straightforward crash, flying into a fog-bound airport in a creaky plane.

What’s unique about this election? The quality of the debate? The riveting closeness of the contest? The charisma of the party leaders? The visionary vistas opening up in front of the British people as we contemplate the party’s rival visions for out future? None of the above. What’s unique is that it’s the first time (at least in the last hundred years or so) that both of the main parties are being led by somebody with a first-class degree.

Michael Ashcroft’s power in the Tory party comes from two things: the fact that he was giving them money back when no one else would; and the fact that, in the aftermath of their 2005 defeat, he commissioned a study of the reasons for it. He wrote up the analysis and published it under the title Smell the Coffee. This report was to become, in effect, the intellectual underpinning of the party’s turn to the Cameronistas. Smell the Glove, sorry, Smell the Coffee, comes to a memorably blunt conclusion: ‘The problem was not that millions of people in Britain thought the Conservative Party wasn’t like them and didn’t understand them; the problem was that they were right.’ Even a non-Tory would agree with that.

Oy! This is important. I’ve had two conversations since the elections were called with people who aren’t around to vote on 6 May and were saying that it’s too late to register for a postal vote. Not so! The system has been changed to be more flexible, and the deadline for registration is much later than in the past – I imagine in response to the historic lows of the last two turnouts, 59.4 per cent in 2001 and 61.4 per cent in 2005.