Role reversal is the name of the game today. With just three-and-a-half weeks to go to polling day, Labour are attempting to reinvent themselves as the party of fiscal rectitude, while the Tories are promising tax cuts and £8bn extra in spending on the NHS.
Launching the Labour manifesto this morning – in the same Manchester hall where last autumn he forgot to mention the word "deficit" – Ed Miliband will unveil a “budget responsibility lock” to guarantee the deficit will be cut every year if Labour form the next government.
The manifesto, he will say, “does not do what most manifestos do. It isn’t a shopping list of spending policies.
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“It does something different: its very first page sets out a vow to protect our nation’s finances; a clear commitment that every policy in this manifesto is paid for without a single penny of extra borrowing.”
The exercise in political cross-dressing may confuse voters but both Miliband and Cameron are desperate to answer criticism of their lacklustre election campaigns, currently heading for deadlock on polling day.
Norman Smith, the BBC’s assistant political editor, told Radio’s Today programme listeners that the "role reversal" was a "make or break" move by Miliband.
Nick Watt, chief political correspondent of The Guardian, says Miliband's move to rebrand Labour as the party of "fiscal responsibility" is the boldest step to recast Labour since Tony Blair's move in 1994 to ditch clause 4 of the party constitution on public ownership and nationalisation.
It is aimed at restoring economic credibility to Labour which has suffered for years from public distrust on the economy. An Opinium poll in February showed Labour's rating on economic trust had remained at just 21 per cent since 2013, compared to a rise in trust in the Tories from 32 to 40 per cent over the same period.
Meanwhile, David Cameron is preparing to launch the Tory manifesto tomorrow with an upbeat message including the two headline-grabbing pledges rolled out at the weekend: George Osborne’s promise (outlined in a Guardian article) to spend £8bn a year extra on the NHS, and Cameron’s pledge (announced in a Sunday Times interview) toraise the threshold for inheritance tax to allow parents to pass on a main property worth up to £1m, without their children having to sell to raise the tax.
As The Mole predicted he would, Cameron has changed tactics to deliver a more positive message about the "Conservative dream" because the mainly negative campaigning – best exemplified by Michael Fallon’s over-the-top “back-stabber” attack on Miliband over Trident – was clearly failing to impress undecided voters.
Cameron's move on inheritance tax was viewed by Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman on the Andrew Marr Show as a defining line between Labour and the Tories, but it won the enthusiastic support of Boris Johnson, the London mayor and Tory parliamentary candidate, in his column for the Daily Telegraph.
“Hooray. Great move, Blue team! At last we are doing something to end the unfairness of a tax that has crept up on countless ordinary families.”
The big question now is whether the voters will be convinced by Cameron's and Miliband's new outfits... or whether they will decide: “The emperor has no clothes.”
