General Election I: The Conservatives

There's no avoiding it - it's make your mind up time. To which end I've been scouring the manifestos for you. A dead sea of platitudes.

So here is all you need to know about the Conservative manifesto. In fact it appears in the Foreword to the eighty odd pages. All (or pretty much so) thereafter is an  attempt to bribe people with my money and yours, this being the unthinking modus operandi of all our major parties - what we might term the Attlee Legacy, that doughty survivor of the Thatcher Revolution.

It is a profound Conservative belief that our country is made great not through the action of  government alone, but through the flair, ingenuity and hard work of the British people.

Let me be quite clear, this (to my mind) admirable affirmation of proper political will is hardly at all borne out by the Con-Dem efforts of the last five years, but at least the Tories have not so lost sight of the mantra that they are unable to repeat it.

That my friends is as good as the political thinking gets these days. Thus do I have to part company with one of my heroes, Rod Liddle, who has come out and explained that he will be voting Labour (you can track it down at Call me insane but I'm voting Labour - brilliant as usual). I have no great faith that the Boy Cameron really knows enough of the world to live by these words but at least he is still capable of mouthing them.

Labour to follow.