Saturday 29th September 2007

8pm ToryDiary: Stamp duty promise for first-time homebuyers as polls show reduced Labour lead

4pm Seats and Candidates: Maria Hutchings selected for Eastleigh

3.30pm Seats and Candidates: Stephen Mosley selected for Chester

3.15pm ToryDiary: Play Taxman Pacman!

11am Columnist Cameron Watt: Shame of the NHS

ToryDiary:

• Grassroots members want a return to traditional Tory policies in Blackpool
• Tories fall to 31% in new Populus survey
• What James Purnell did next...

Platform: Nick Vaughan previews the challenges that need to be met in Blackpool

Interviews: Pauline Neville-Jones answers your questions

Brown enjoys large opinion poll leads after his Party Conference

"A special Populus survey for The Times gives Labour a double-digit lead, meaning that the Conservatives will arrive in Blackpool tomorrow for their make-or-break conference more convinced than ever that an election is imminent. A second poll, carried out by YouGov for The Daily Telegraph, shows a similar lead. The Prime Minister will meet allies this weekend to consider his options." - Times

"The Conservatives are now trailing Labour by 11 points, a new Daily Telegraph poll shows, leaving David Cameron on the brink of a landslide defeat if an early election is called." - Telegraph

>> Yesterday's ToryDiary on the YouGov/Telegraph poll

"After a good start, Mr Cameron has failed either to establish an attractive new identity for the Tory party or to re-establish its old One Nation identity. As YouGov's findings show all too clearly, a large majority of voters now see Mr Cameron as being as glib and insubstantial as Tony Blair had come to seem by his last days in office." - Anthony King in The Telegraph

"Close allies of Gordon Brown will tell him this weekend he will never have a better chance of crushing the Conservative Party after two new opinion polls gave Labour a huge, 10-point lead.  Mr Brown is to consult trusted advisers on whether to call a snap election but will not make a final decision until after he has seen the reaction to David Cameron's closing speech to the Tories' conference in Blackpool on Wednesday." - Independent

What can David Cameron do?

A Sky News feature highlights the elimination of dissent, policy clarity and strong leadership.

The Guardian suggests that Shipley's experience may have trailblazed a comeback trail for the Tories.

Do the Tories lack courage and consistency?

A leading article in The Guardian accuses George Osborne of "cowardice" on green taxation

A leader in The Times attacks the "vacuous" Tories

"What will the Tory party believe in next week, we might ask? Or next month? If you were to be taken in by Little George's drivelling hypocrisy, and were to vote for them, what do you imagine you would get? How quickly would they revert to another brand of Toryism?  One reason why Thatcherites like me respected Ian Gilmour, who died last week, was because he had the integrity to stick to his principles, whatever the consequences. The Tory party is now short of men and women of honour, and my God it shows." - Simon Heffer in The Telegraph

'Policy blizzard' expected in Blackpool

"With Mr Brown this weekend meeting allies over the timing of an election, Mr Cameron and his team are planning to calm Tory nerves with a blizzard of policy announcements for each day of the conference in Blackpool. The Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is expected to deliver a video conference call to the Winter Gardens tomorrow before Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York, speaks." - Independent

Family tax promise to be financed by welfare crackdown

"David Cameron has put families at the heart of Tory policy by announcing a tax break for couples bringing up children.  The Tory leader's radical plan is designed to end the benefits anomaly which penalises parents who stay together.  An estimated 1.8million families would be up to £2,000 a year better off under the proposals, to be announced formally next week.  And the £3billion cost would be met by a crackdown on workshy benefit claimants, including "aggressive" penalties for those who turn down jobs and the privatisation of welfare-to-work programmes." - Daily Mail

BMA unhappy with Tory plan to renegotiate GPs' contracts

"The Conservatives on Saturday promise to renegotiate the family doctors’ contract to make them responsible for out-of-hours care and extended opening hours, as David Cameron underlines again that the National Health Service is his party’s “number one priority”... The British Medical Association accused the Conservatives of wanting “to turn the clock back” by restoring to GPs the responsibility for out-of-hours cover that their new contract removed from them in 2004. The answer lay in primary care trusts funding the service properly and not trying to find “even cheaper private companies to run it”, says Dr Laurence Buckman, who chairs the BMA’s GP committee." - Financial Times | BBC

The more voters see David Cameron, the more they'll like him

"The Principal Opposition, and its activists countrywide, who converge on Blackpool this weekend in an uncertain mood, should steady themselves and take heart. In David Cameron they have a leader who is not pretending to be something he isn’t, and whom the voters will not like less as they know him more. He and they stand for ideas and instincts that a country heading dangerously into the red needs badly. They face a Labour manifesto that if taken seriously would be unaffordable; an incumbent Prime Minister to whom there is less, intellectually, than the nation has yet tumbled; and who is emotionally the opposite of what he pretends. All the voters need to do is find Brown out, and all the Conservative Party needs to do is help them. Reality is on their side." - Matthew Parris in The Times 

David Davis interview

"Thanks to the leadership contest in which he was defeated by Cameron, we know that Mr Davis’s own agenda would be radically different: tax cuts, grammar schools, patient passports. So did he now agree with Tory policy in those areas? “Ronald Reagan once said, talking about the tensions and debates that go on inside parties, you know, if somebody agrees with you 80 per cent and disagrees with you 20 per cent, he is an 80 per cent friend and 20 per cent SOB. And I agree with that. You know, these people, I agree with the vast majority of what we are doing and where there are disagreements they are minor." - Times

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