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“... So, 72 hours to go, and the polls are pointing with a quavering, accusatory finger at a hung Parliament. Or maybe it’s a confident, optimistic finger – anyway, that’s where they’re pointing. YouGov has the Tory/Lab/Lib Dem projection as 34/28/29, ICM has it as 33/28/28. UK Polling Report looked at all five of the polls published on Sunday, four of which showed some momentum for the Tories after the third debate, and all of which showed the Tories as falling short, with the lowest projection 264 seats and the highest 315 (the target, remember, is 326 ...”

“... I never liked David Owen much – even by the standard of politicians, he always seemed to be a self-interested egomaniac – but his interview with David Hare in the Guardian today is interesting. Owen’s most striking claim is this one: I’m pleased that the great British public out there in their strange, almost instinctive way are groping towards a solution ...”

“... The Tory papers are hitting the delegitimisation thing pretty hard today. The front pages are: Nightmare on Downing Street (Telegraph) Miliband trying to con his way into No. 10, says PM (Times) For sanity’s sake don’t let a class war zealot and the SNP destroy our economy – and our very nation (Daily Mail) Post-election shambles looms as legitimacy crisis worsens (Independent, which may have surprised its readers by telling them to vote Tory) And then for light relief, the two papers owned by Richard Desmond: Why You Must Vote for Ukip (Daily Express) Brits live sex show on Magaluf booze cruise (Daily Star) The delegitimisation story is going to be an interesting test of how much power the newspapers still have ...”

“... I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like the Tory press’s onslaught on Nick Clegg over the last couple of days. One minute, the Lib Dems can’t get in the news, no matter what they do; the next minute, they’re notorious cat-stranglers. No, it’s even worse: they’re (gasp!) partly foreign! Well, sort of – Dutch mother, Russian grandfather, Spanish wife ...”

“... Front page of the Sun, over photos of the volcano and the leaders’ debate: ‘Britain Paralysed By Hot Air’. Vulcanologically inaccurate, but not bad. To be fair, the debate was better than that; and I don’t think anyone watching it would have thought that any of the three party leaders was thick or incompetent or mad or self-evidently unqualified ...”

“... Explosive news. Not about the election, where things were quietish while the debate was digested, and not just about the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which is bringing an eerie calm to those of us who live under a UK airport flightpath, while causing chaos and mayhem all over Europe. There's also the news that Goldman Sachs are being charged with fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Tonight’s seven-way leaders’ debate is going to make for a bizarre couple of hours’ telly. The format goes like this: there will be an opening statement by each of the seven party leaders. Then themoderator asks all of them a question to which they each give a one-minute answer, followed by an 18-minute free-for-all debate. Repeat for a total of four moderator's questions, 28 replies, andfour free-for-alls ...”

“... It’s that time, now traditional – traditional since 2010, anyway – when the general election is so close that people start to speculate/fantasise about a possible role for Sinn Féin in the electoral aftermath. The important role they’re most likely to play is not being there. There are 650 seats in Parliament, so the winning line is 326: that’s the number which gives a party an absolute majority ...”

“... One way of mapping the difference between electoral systems is to plot them on a continuum between fairness and clearness. The two qualities tend to have a negative correlation. Countries in which each individual vote can plausibly be said to have some bearing on the outcome – i.e. countries with a system which is to some extent proportional – are fairer ...”

“... Britain decides! Or maybe it sort-of decides! Maybe it decides that it can’t quite make up its mind! But that counts as a decision too! A corker of a point from yesterday’s politicalbetting.com. It’s such a strong and simple point that I can’t believe I’ve never heard it made before. Here it is: only once since 1945 has the UK gone from a majority government of one party to a majority government of another ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... At sporting events in the US, the organisers sometimes set up a fun thing called a T-shirt cannon. This is what it sounds like: a cannon, or rather a bazooka, which emits a thud and sends a T-shirt across the arena where it softly thwacks into one of the punters. Who doesn’t want to be hit in the face by a free T-shirt? The T-shirt cannon was brought to mind by the latest round of policy announcements from the Tories ...”

“... Something has been bugging me about this election, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, and just in the last week or so I’ve realised what it is. It’s the near-complete absence of posters. Not just posters, but the whole apparatus of visual paraphernalia: banners and billboards and advertising. This is my fifth general election in the same street, and it’s the first time I’ve never seen a single election poster in the road ...”

“... Presumably there are people out there who admire John Humphrys’s interviewing style. I’m not one of them, and yesterday’s grilling of Neil Kinnock on the Today programme was an example of why not. Humphrys went after Kinnock on the subject of Labour’s 1992 loss, and whether there was a parallel with the current contest ...”