One shadow cabinet member put it to me rather well last week. “When Blair won in 1997, it was a full white wedding, with a huge national party and all of the trimmings.” And if the Conservatives win the general election in a few weeks? “Oh, that’ll be much more like a second marriage: no bunting, somewhere like Chelsea Register Office.”
To stick with the metaphor, our ICM poll today will make the Tory groom wonder whether the bride, having undoubtedly made the decision to dump Gordon, may yet get cold feet about her blue-rosetted fiancé, and leave him standing, jilted and lonely, with the superintendent registrar tapping his watch and the guests muttering about “an insufficient national swing…never going to work, you know”. The Tories’ lead in today’s poll (seven points) is the joint lowest recorded by ICM in the past two years, and would deliver a hung Parliament with David Cameron still 30 seats shy of a majority in the Commons.
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