As the Queen starts making her own Windsor wine, the industry enjoys a record year

✒ It's been a tremendous year for English wine with our vineyards producing an amazing 4m bottles, a record. And it turns out that the Queen is going to start making her own wine at Windsor, though you won't be able to buy it for three years and will, of course, have to wear a ridiculous hat while drinking it.

I popped along to English wine's annual show this week and tried as many as I could without falling down. The days when a French vigneron could say to me "yurr English wine, eet tastes of rain" are long gone, and some of the sparklers are now quite exceptional – far better than champagnes selling at the same £20-24 mark. In fact, some, such as Camel Valley, Ridgeview and Nyetimber, strike me as being just as good as the premium brands from famous names being sold to footballers and rock stars for more than £100 in shops and at even sillier prices in clubs and restaurants.

It's a matter of prestige. People still feel that for really special occasions, the wine must have the word "champagne" on the label. Soon, however, I'm sure people will say: "We're laying this aside for our daughter's engagement; it's from Cornwall…"

✒ I really enjoyed the royal wedding. I know most people didn't – the viewing figures were comfortably less than half the population – but I saw no point in leaving the country as some did. You could always keep the telly switched off.

But here are the seven worst things about it, aspects of the event that were actually quite annoying:

• Tony Blair and Gordon Brown not being invited. Whether Blair "cashed in" on Princess Diana's death (he didn't), or because Cherie refused to curtsey, or because Blair's memoirs said too much about his dealings with the royals, the snub was to all of us and to democracy. And it gave what should have been a national celebration a nasty, class-bound, party political tinge.

• Beatrice's fascinator, or "repulser" as it should have been called. As if Medusa had gone to Nicky Clarke.

• The fly-past. A miserable six planes! A real, eardrum-rattling, fly-past would have looked like an RAF raid on Schwenningen.

• Prince Harry's speech. Obviously we only have press reports, but a proper, traditional best man's speech would have been packed with disgusting jokes and filthy allusions to the groom's previous girlfriends. That is Prince Harry's role in life and he let us all down.

• John Rutter's specially composed anthem. Sounded like Coldplay.

• Elton John's hissy fit when he asked to be moved to a more prominent seat. Calm down, dear, as we say these days.

• The kiss. Call that a kiss? A bit of tongue, please, Will.

✒ Why does the BBC insist on calling the soldiers and police employed by various tyrants in the Middle East and north Africa "security forces"? For example: "In Syria, security forces are said to have killed up to 60 demonstrators…" Security is the last thing these people provide. The Beeb wouldn't say: "A bomb planted by IRA freedom fighters has caused at least 10 deaths…" Just say, "government troops".

✒ I've been watching some of the host of new cop shows on TV. (The BBC says it has scrubbed Zen because it wants more women detectives. Well, many of the women I know think that Rufus Sewell is quite all right to be going to on with. You might as well say: "Men aren't interested in watching Scarlett Johansson. They want to see burly chaps pouting on TV…")

The new crop of women detectives are real people, damaged and with problems. If they get on well with their male deputies, then they have a terrible relationship with their male superiors. As my colleagues in the Guardian have pointed out, the more realistic the cops, the more fanciful and improbable the murders. And the cliches remain the same, whether in Vera, Lewis or Case Sensitive.

Here are some more recent ones I've spotted: the first murder is usually the weirdest and is unexplained at the end. Any group of children having a boisterous outing will always stumble on a body. All mobile phone calls come at the worst possible moment. When the sidekick searches for a crucial clue on the internet, he invariably finds it immediately, usually with a cry of "bingo, boss!"

✒ Labels and notices, continued: Suzan Carter bought a pack of "whole almonds" from Sainsbury's: "allergy advice – contains nuts". David Voas also went to Sainsbury's, for a steak. The label gives instructions for cooking rare: "2 ½ to 4 minutes each side… Always check that the product is cooked throughout, and no pink colour remains." Thanks, paranoid lawyers!

Les Herbert bought some fish in his local posh supermarket, the one that pushes up house prices by just existing: "plaice fillets in a bespoke Waitrose crumb". A bespoke crumb? Sounds like a very annoying tailor's assistant in Jermyn Street.

Vic McLellan photographed a sign mounted on a fence by a stream near his home: "Kew Angling Society. Strictly No Fishing."

A reader who requested anonymity to spare his wife encloses a leaflet for the Estring brand vaginal ring, used to replace oestrogen for post-menopausal women: "The Estring vaginal ring is not recommended for use in children," it says. Into what bizarre mind could that warning have wandered?

Linda Paramor bought some limnanthes seeds for her garden. "Handy tip," it says on the packet, "plant carefully as they can be evasive." I love the idea of the flowers coyly hiding when anyone tries to admire them.

I didn't love the leaflet that came with Dick Tuckey's penicillin prescription: "Unwanted side effects can include nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, and black hairy tongue." No, please!

✒ David Scott startled me with a tale of a merciful guard on, of all services, Virgin. He was on a London to Manchester train sitting near two Norwegian tourists. One of them said he had lost his ticket and the ticket inspector let him off! "I won't tell you which train it was," David says, "because he would be sacked."

The single most important consequence of Thursday's voting is the sheer bloodiness of the bloody nose delivered to the Liberal Democrats

So many of the most potent themes of British politics came together for a few hours in Thursday's elections that the contests, and the simultaneous AV referendum, seemed as important as a mini-general election. Except that a general election has only one overridingly large story to tell – the new government. This week's Super Thursday, by contrast, produced such a bulging goody-bag of resonant local and national stories – the defeat of electoral reform, the nationalist triumph in Scotland, the nationalist setback in Wales, excellent news for the Conservatives, grim news for the Liberal Democrats, something in between for Labour – that it is hard to know where to start.

On any other day, the triumph of the Scottish National Party in winning an outright majority in the Holyrood parliament – the very outcome that the devolved electoral system was expressly designed to prevent – would take the palm. While the United Kingdom survives, however, the single most important consequence of Thursday's voting is the sheer bloodiness of the bloody nose delivered to the Liberal Democrats. The damage is truly shocking. One in three Lib Dem voters from 2010 abandoned the party. At least 550 councillors were lost and the party was bundled from power in cities like Newcastle and Sheffield. The Lib Dem presence at Holyrood was decimated and in the Welsh assembly is now vestigial. The writing is on the wall for many of the party's biggest names in the House of Commons. And the AV referendum, so central to the party's hopes of having something distinctive to show for the coalition, was swept away by two-to-one.

There is something for the Lib Dems to cling on to all the same: the 15% share of the poll is grim not catastrophic; council victories in Burnley, Eastbourne, Watford and elsewhere serve notice that this was not an all-out rout, while in Eastleigh (the seat of Chris Huhne) there was even some Lib Dem advance. Yet Nick Clegg now presides over the rubble of his party's 20-year incremental forward march through British politics. This defeat is the all but inescapable price to be paid for an all but inescapable decision to enter government a year ago. Much the same may happen next year too. The bottom-line is that a large swathe of liberal Britain, more than this party can afford to lose, feels abandoned by Lib Dem membership of a coalition which is overwhelmingly defined by the slashing of public services, the overturning of the health service and the about-face on tuition fees. Mr Clegg and his party must confront this or face a decade of marginalisation.

The contrast with the fate of the Conservatives makes this all the more dismaying. If liberal Britain feels abandoned, conservative Britain feels vindicated. The Tory vote held up. There were even some council gains. And AV was crushed. True, there were Scottish and Welsh setbacks yet again. But the party of David Cameron, George Osborne, Andrew Lansley and Michael Gove – the real architects of the coalition's core policies – went not merely unpunished but has been majorly rewarded. In some ways, the Conservatives have more to cheer than Labour, who should have done better, not just in Scotland, but everywhere outside its traditional heartlands. For Labour, feeling good about winning well in Wales and about attracting back voters who should never have been lost in the first place are the easy bits – Labour's eight-point boost since 2010 and its nearly 700 new councillors are in one sense the Gordon Brown departure dividend. The larger point is that Labour's electoral counter-attack against the Tories is still almost non-existent. Yet without a credible strategy for turning some Tory votes into Labour ones, Labour's hopes of governing again may remain stillborn.

Both Scotland and electoral reform also remain crucial to any future centre-left advance of any kind. Yet Alex Salmond's stunning SNP win – amazing under a proportional system as well as the biggest personal electoral triumph for any party leader since Tony Blair's 1997 Labour landslide – poses a double challenge to Labour aspirations: it threatens Labour's future Westminster election chances and if – big if – the SNP win their way on independence, it may mean the end of any Scottish MPs at Westminster at all. In the wake of the abject failure of AV to win public backing, meanwhile, many will conclude that electoral reform is off the agenda for a generation. Yet if British voters go on producing general election outcomes with which the two-party Westminster system cannot cope, electoral reform may get back on the agenda sooner than now seems likely.

Braintrust by Patricia S Churchland, The Unfinished Global Revolution by Mark Malloch-Brown, Tweetonomics by Nic Compton, Adam Fishwick & Katie Huston

Braintrust, by Patricia S Churchland (Princeton, £16.95)

Where do moral "values" come from? From the evolved brain, says the philosopher author. Churchland's superbly written, dense-with-thinking book is fiercely alert to what can and cannot justifiably be inferred from modern science. She is a brilliantly precise (and often slyly funny) demolisher of exaggerated claims (both in popular literature and research papers) about the hormone oxytocin, mirror neurons, "genes for" behaviours, "innate" capacities, or the functions of particular brain structures. The nuggets that survive her scepticism form the suggestive scaffolding of her own hypothesis: mammals came to regard their young as part of themselves (so recognising the babies' distress or hunger), and then widened this "me-and-mine" concern to extended family and others. Hence caring, trust and co-operation: "Morality originates in the neurobiology of attachment and bonding."

Churchland's message is that greater scientific knowledge could help us reason more "wisely" about ethics and politics, which is perfectly plausible: facts do inform moral decisions. But she also tries the far stronger claim that science can just tell us "as a matter of fact" what is right and wrong, given what our brains have evolved to "value". The examples do not seem exactly bulletproof. "Allowing military assault weapons to be purchased by ordinary citizens does not serve anyone's wellbeing." OK, so maybe you'll never get to heaven with an AK-47, but what about the wellbeing of gun-makers, gun-sellers and gun-lovers?

The Unfinished Global Revolution, by Mark Malloch-Brown (Allen Lane, £25)

What counts as "wellbeing" is a moral argument in itself, as we are reminded in this energetic manifesto for the reform of global institutions. The author alternates colourful tableaux from his globetrotting career (journalism; humanitarian work in Thailand; World Bank; head of UN development programme; deputy to Kofi Annan; FCO minister under Gordon Brown) with approachably wonkish analysis of the problems that "globalisation" poses (specifically to poor people), and the decades-long reluctance of member countries to properly arm the UN, both metaphorically and literally. Malloch-Brown offers pointed analyses of feuding between the World Bank and the IMF, the insufficiency of mere "democracy" to make people happy, and even the world itself as an "underregulated hell". The tone has enjoyable bite, as in the splendid put-down of John Bolton, the Bush-appointed ambassador to the UN: "An advocate of small government, he has nevertheless spent his whole career living off government." I think we have a few of those over here too.

Tweetonomics, by Nic Compton, Adam Fishwick & Katie Huston (Apple Press, £6.99)

Globalisation and measures of "wellbeing" pop up again in this friendly little dash through finance and political economy, with no sentence longer than Twitter's 140-character limit. This has virtues in concision ("Hedge funds are mutual funds for rich people"), while allowing the authors to skip lightly over controversy ("most economists advocate . . .") or deploy dubious metaphor ("deregulation" resulted in "more relaxed financial markets").

Here are super-compact exegeses of the credit crunch, Marxism and Keynesianism, derivatives, the World Bank and IMF, and "green economics". In Daniel Mackie's beautiful and slightly scary colour illustrations, massive men in pinstriped suits toy with little people, or race to catch dollar bills spewing from Breugel's tower of Babel. "Since the 1960s, the US has run a trade deficit," the authors explain. "To fund this it prints more dollars. If we all collect dollars, this is okay." As a staunch Atlanticist, I immediately began stuffing greenbacks under my mattress.

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Nat Rothschild's stakes in mining groups and money from his investment funds have pushed his wealth up to the £1bn mark

As a scion of the world's most famous banking family, Nat Rothschild was never going to be a pauper. Even if he had continued to live the famed playboy lifestyle he enjoyed at university, the son of Lord Jacob Rothschild was always thought to be in line for a £500m inheritance.

But now the 39-year-old has joined his super-rich friends – such as Russian metals tycoon Oleg Deripaska and Ivan Glasenberg at soon-to-be-floated commodity trading house Glencore – having achieved billionaire billing in his own right.

Rothschild's stakes in mining group Vallar and Chateau Lafite are now valued at about £400m according to the latest Sunday Times Rich List, while his holdings in businesses of friends and family, such as Deripaska's Rusal, Glencore and investment trust RIT Capital Partners are worth £150m. Other wealth, including stakes in electrical group Volex and money made from his hedge fund, Atticus, have pushed the financier's wealth up to the £1bn mark.

It is an heroic number that only a few years ago appeared completely unobtainable. At school and university at Eton and Oxford, tales of Rothschild's social life were legion, with stories of a string of girlfriends as well as a fondness for extravagant parties. These tales continued after he left university and while travelling in India he met a model called Annabelle Neilson, who he swiftly married and almost as quickly divorced. However, since concentrating on his business career – and becoming close to the likes of Deripaska and former minister Lord Mandelson – stories of hedonism and girlfriends have decreased.

Of course, Rothschild's closeness to the Russian tycoon and one of the founders of New Labour still shapes the financier's reputation. In 2009 while in Corfu, he infamously invited George Osborne – the then shadow chancellor, an old university friend and co-member of the Bullingdon club – on board the Queen K, Deripaska's £80m yacht moored off the island. They were joined by Mandelson, then the EU trade commissioner, and the conversation proved politically explosive.

Back in Westminster, Osborne gossiped about Mandelson speaking "pure poison" about Gordon Brown which, among other things, provoked much speculation about the previously lower profile links between Mandelson, Rothschild and Deripaska.

The revenge was brutal: from his base in the Swiss ski resort of Klosters, Rothschild wrote to The Times accusing Osborne and Andrew Feldman, the Tories' fundraiser, of trying to solicit a donation for the Conservative party from Deripaska – an approach which would have breached party fundraising rules. It was swiftly denied by the Conservatives, but for months Osborne appeared politically emasculated.

Still, all seem to have moved on now, with Rothschild shaking off other setbacks, such as the closure of the flagship funds at Atticus, to create a business empire which has prompted the New York Times to predict that he may become "the richest Rothschild of them all".

The new fortune has been built on old-fashioned Rothschild contact-building, as well as business savvy: the financier's relationship with Deripaska is seen by many observers to be key, and the pair's closeness may provide the motivation behind the 2009 knifing of Osborne.

Certainly Rothschild's circle appears tight, with the same powerful names, who control large portions of the natural resources sector, always seeming to emerge. His friend Glasenberg sits on the board of Deripaska's Rusal, where Glencore and Rothschild are leading investors. Glencore, in which Rothschild's £25m convertible bond will soon yield a 50% return, is also a large shareholder in miner Bumi, in which Rothschild's Vallar owns a quarter stake. Meanwhile, Vallar's prospectus mentions Glencore 73 times, an indication of the importance of the trading group's long-term marketing deals with the group's assets.

The circular nature of Rothschild's business network does not end there. Tony Hayward, the former BP chief executive who is in talks about setting up a natural resources fund with Rothschild, has just been named a new director of Glencore. Meanwhile, during the trading group's search for a chairman, which ended with the farcical appointment of Simon Murray, Glasenberg called Rothschild to obtain Murray's mobile telephone number.

Elsewhere, Roland Rudd's City PR firm, Finsbury, spins for Vallar, Glencore and Deripaska. Rudd's close friend Mandelson has a new venture called Global Counsel, which is owned by marketing group WPP, Finsbury's owner. Rothschild is also thought to be close to Roman Abramovich, the billionaire oligarch who owns Chelsea, where Deripaska takes a box in which Rothschild is known to be a frequent guest.All of which is a long way from Lazards in 1994, when Rothschild began his financial career.

A year later he had moved to New York where he met Timothy Barakett, the founder of Atticus, which at its peak managed more than $20bn (£12bn) for wealthy investors.

After initially recording stellar returns, and earning Rothschild a small fortune for his contribution, the flagship funds made big losses, prompting Rothschild's father to redeem his £36.5m investment and the fund to subsequently return cash to investors.

SNP triumph in Scotland must end Labour party complacency, warn shadow cabinet members

Ed Miliband is to be warned by senior Labour figures that he must work hard to fight a sense of complacency among many MPs after the party was rebuffed in Scotland and failed to make a breakthrough in the English local elections.

Shadow cabinet members were disappointed by results across Britain, with some saying the only hope was that the elections would jolt the party into appreciating the scale of the battle ahead.

The greatest blow came in Scotland where the SNP became the first party to win an overall majority in the parliament's 12-year history – a result widely described as an unmitigated disaster for Labour.

Miliband announced that he would launch a review of the Labour party in Scotland as Iain Gray, its Scottish leader, announced he would resign in the autumn. "While we have seen good results today, gaining councils and councillors across England and winning in Wales, this is clearly a very disappointing election result in Scotland," Miliband said.

"We need to learn the lessons of that result, both political and organisational. That is why I, with Iain, am today putting in place a root-and-branch review of the Labour party in Scotland. This will bring together all elements of the Scottish party to renew it for the future."

One Labour source said: "It was a total disaster at all the key levels of policy, organisation, personnel and message."

There was better news in the English council elections, where Labour gained more than 700 seats – at the upper limit of the party's official projections. But shadow ministers believe Labour should have done much better because the same seats were last contested in 2007, a month before Tony Blair handed over to Gordon Brown, when the party lost more than 500 seats and only just beat the Lib Dems.

The Tories are on course to secure about 38% of the vote, down two points on their strong performance in 2007. Labour is up 11 points on its weak performance of 2007 on about 37%. The Lib Dems are down seven points on about 17%.

One Labour source said: "It was good enough but it was not a knockout."

Unease on the left was reflected by Neal Lawson, of the Compass group, who said: "These results show that Labour is flatlining from its terrible result at the general election. It still looks, feels and acts too much like New Labour."

Labour officials tried to put a brave face on the results as they said successes in Gravesham, North Warwickshire, Lincoln and Sheffield showed the party could succeed across England. "We were worried until we heard the results in North Warwickshire and Gravesham. These are the sorts of places we need to win."

Miliband travelled to Gravesham to hail the result.

"North, south, east and west, Labour is making gains and coming back," he said. "I say this to David Cameron and Nick Clegg: you must listen to the people. The Conservative party does not have a majority in parliament and has only been able to govern because of the Liberal Democrats' willing participation in a Tory-led government."

But there was concern at senior levels of the party after the Tory vote held up in England and Labour failed to show it was making major inroads across the south.

There was an acknowledgment that Labour performed well against the Lib Dems and humiliated them in the strongholds of Sheffield and Hull and former stronghold of Liverpool. But there are fears that these successes could give Labour a false sense of security and mask the scale of the challenge ahead. "You cannot build a majority just by beating the Lib Dems," one source said.

The Tories delighted in pointing out that Labour only just hung on in the Birmingham city council ward of Kingstanding – after a 9% swing to the Conservatives – where Miliband launched Labour's local election campaign. They also reminded Labour that Miliband announced that his fightback would start in Scotland.

Party figures hope the lacklustre results will silence the likes of Kelvin Hopkins, the Labour MP for Luton North who told Cameron in the Commons on Wednesday that Labour was bound to win the next election. "Will the prime minister enjoy saying goodbye to most of his colleagues and sitting on this side of the house," Hopkins said, prompting the prime minister to tell him he was in Benny Hill's "fairy dairy land".

One source said: "If there is one silver lining it is that some of the complacency will hopefully be knocked on the head."

Alex Salmond wins overall majority at Holyrood and promises to hold referendum on break from United Kingdom

Alex Salmond touched down on the manicured lawns of one of Edinburgh's exclusive hotels in his campaign helicopter, Saltire One, after securing the most stunning victory in recent Scottish political history – a win that has the potential to change the fabric of the United Kingdom.

The scale of the SNP's victory was clear: Salmond had won Holyrood's first overall majority and a total of 69 seats – a result he believes has swept aside his opponents' last hopes of blocking his plans for a referendum on independence. No wonder he gave waiting reporters and supporters the thumbs up.

The statistics were devastating: the SNP took Labour seats in every city in Scotland and, Orkney and Shetland aside, wiped out the Liberal Democrats. The SNP's vote jumped by 13%, while Labour's dipped.

The SNP leader stated he had the "moral authority" to deliver a referendum within the next five years, setting in train one of the most significant constitutional battles to face a modern UK government. Lawyers and opposition parties insist the referendum plan is outside Holyrood's powers, a claim Salmond has previously dismissed.

Salmond declared: "Just as the Scottish people have restored trust in us, we must trust the people as well. Which is why, in this term of the parliament, we will bring forward a referendum and trust the people on Scotland's own constitutional future."

David Cameron, the prime minister, acknowledged that the SNP had won an "emphatic" victory but warned that he would vigorously oppose Salmond's referendum plans.

After pledging to work constructively with Salmond where possible, he stated: "On the issue of the United Kingdom, if they want to hold a referendum I will campaign to keep our United Kingdom together with every single fibre I have."

Labour's Scottish leader, Iain Gray, announced he would stand down in the autumn after watching Labour lose seven seats. He very narrowly avoided a humiliating defeat in his own constituency, East Lothian, surviving an SNP challenge by 151 votes, and said there were "many hard lessons" to learn.

The scale of the SNP victory is also wounding for Ed Miliband, who had pledged that a Labour victory in Scotland would give his party a new platform to challenge Cameron at Westminster, and humiliating for Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister and Lib Dem leader.

The SNP's landslide was substantially due to a Scotland-wide collapse in Lib Dem support in protest at its coalition in London, with hundreds of thousands of voters switching to the SNP.

The Lib Dems lost former strongholds in North East Fife, the seat held at Westminster by former UK party leader Menzies Campbell, and in Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch, where the previous UK leader, Charlie Kennedy, holds the equivalent Commons seat.

The SNP took 45.4% of the constituency vote and 44.7% of the regional vote. Salmond said: "For the first time, we're living up to the idea that we're the national party of Scotland, all classes, all communities, all parts of Scotland; we will do our absolute best to redeem the people's trust."

The UK government faces an immediate battle with Salmond over his demands to greatly strengthen existing proposals in the Scotland bill which is currently going through Westminster.

The bill – which was devised by Labour, the Tories and Lib Dems in an ill-fated attempt to quash SNP demands for independence – already proposes to give Holyrood powers to set its own income tax rates, modest new legal powers, and authority to borrow up to £2bn to finance public works.

Within days, Salmond is likely to set out fresh demands for Scotland to be allowed to set its own corporation tax, similar to plans for the Northern Ireland government, and to significantly raise borrowing powers to £5bn.

From early on Friday there had been roars of victory from SNP activists and candidates in counting halls across Scotland as some of the strongest seats held for decades by Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Tories were toppled. Across much of Scotland, Salmond's party cleared the board.

The SNP won every constituency seat in Aberdeen and the surrounding area, it has every seat in Dundee and Tayside, it won five out of eight constituencies in Glasgow and four out of five in Edinburgh. Its victory also increases the tension with Labour, which still dominates Scottish seats at Westminster, holding 41 to the SNP's six.

Labour lost a host of MSPs who have served since 1999 and former ministers Tom McCabe, Andy Kerr and David Whitton. Their rout came despite doorstep campaigning on polling day by former prime minister Gordon Brown, his wife, Sarah, and 10,000 activists branded "Labour's volunteer army".

Labour now has only two seats north of the central belt, in Dumbarton, near Glasgow, and Cowdenbeath, after losing several key seats in Fife.

The scale of its defeat forced Labour to grapple with an immediate leadership crisis and bitter, public recriminations on the quality of Labour's campaign. Henry McLeish, a former Labour first minister, said his party had suffered "a drubbing". He added: "It has been the most negative campaign I have seen. What do we stand for? What are we offering Scotland? The obvious conclusion is that they didn't want us."The unexpected losses of possible leadership contenders such as Andy Kerr and David Whitton dramatically reduced Labour's options, officials admitted. "We're having to make a radical reappraisal of the situation," said one official.

Salmond was jubilant at the scale of the SNP's triumphs and scathing about his Labour opponents. "This idea that Labour had ownership of parts of central Scotland, well that's gone for ever, hasn't it?" he said, shortly after winning the new seat of Aberdeenshire East with a 15,295 majority. "It's a bit like the American bison. I dare say we will still see one or two dotted about here and there, but the great herds of Labour they have gone for ever."

Salmond said voters were motivated by the SNP's positive and optimistic campaign, and repulsed by Labour's negativity and its attacks on the SNP's plans for independence.

"A positive campaign will always trump a negative campaign," he said. "People are motivated by that, that's why they come out and vote. They're not going to be motivated by Labour's ridiculous scare mongering and fearmongering against Scottish independence."

On Monday all 129 new MSPs will be sworn in. Many of them had never expected to be elected. Some are political novices. The SNP admitted it was shocked by the scale of its victory; its internal estimates had shown it would take up to 56 seats. Holyrood's proportional system, which ensures all parties are equally represented with 56 regional "top-up" seats, was designed to prevent one party gaining overall control.

The Tories were saved from losing some of their best-known figures, including David McLetchie, the former party leader who was stunned to lose his once safe seat of Edinburgh Pentlands by 1,758 votes to the SNP. The party had insisted all its candidates "doubled up" by also standing in the regions: McLetchie is top of the Lothians regional list.

Annabel Goldie, the Tory leader, said: "More than ever Scotland needs a party which will stand up to the excesses of nationalism and bring reality to Scottish politics. That will be the Scottish Conservatives' task in the months and years to come. We will be driven by one consideration: what is in the best interests of Scotland."

Based on his new lead over Labour, Salmond will now be able to push through a dramatic programme of policy and public service reforms, including a minimum pricing scheme for alcohol that his opponents insist is illegal; cutting Scotland's eight police forces to three or one; freezing the council tax for a further five years; and pressing ahead with contentious plans to generate 100% of Scotland's electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

But there will be a bigger mission: to persuade the people of Scotland, who currently disapprove of independence by more than two to one, that they should leave the UK. For some party loyalists that dream is now very much alive. When Salmond arrived for his final day of campaigning in the Borders town of Peebles on Wednesday, one father, cradling his daughter in his arms, invoked the ancient folk hero of Scottish independence, shouting out: "You're our modern William Wallace, Alex!"

Nick Clegg's hold on his Sheffield Hallam constituency looks vulnerable after Labour wins back city council

It isn't quite a return to the famous "socialist republic of south Yorkshire", but the big beasts from Sheffield's heady Labour days are trumpeting the demise of their cocky Liberal Democrat rivals at the hands of the voters.

"Clegg-mania? Clegg pneumonia!" chortles former city council leader and later cabinet minister David Blunkett, celebrating with a posse of old-timer colleagues, and a lot of eager new Labour activists.

Alongside him, his latest Labour successor in the imposing leader's office at City Hall, Julie Dore, joins in the general Nick Clegg-bashing.

"Empty his bins?" she says, rolling her eyes at the notion that deputy prime minister's community charge payments now contribute to a Labour-run budget. "He doesn't own a house here any more. He's just sold it."

Clegg's hold on his Sheffield Hallam constituency suddenly looks vulnerable, with Labour advancing much further than its strategists had dared hope into the city's leafy – and historically Tory and posh – west end. His very public vote-casting in the morning was unexpectedly crucial; the Lib Dems held on to Stannington, where he now rents a flat, by only five votes.

Announcing his move last month, Clegg talked of bringing his family up from London to skim stones across the beautiful Rivelin river which threads through the area. Time for that will now be limited as the party plans how to bounce back, not just in Sheffield but other great northern cities such as Manchester, Liverpool and Hull where it was also trounced.

"It has been a truly dreadful night for them," said Dore, who promises an open and consultative style of city leadership "in contrast to what has gone before".

Her party's campaign made headway by portraying the Lib Dems' year of minority rule, in loose arrangement with two Greens, as harsh and sacrificing Sheffield's interests to national coalition policy. "Forgemasters," she says laconically, a single word as damaging politically as "Clegg" in the city, since Labour's loan to help the local steel firm develop specialist components for the nuclear industry was cancelled by the government.

The Lib Dems were also lethally wounded by their play for supporters of Clegg's "new type of politics" before last year's general election.

Sheffield's Green leader, Jillian Creasy, says: "They made a huge thing of it, especially among young voters and the thousands of students here. It wasn't just the fees, but a wider sense of disillusion with their compromises which has struck home."

She survived the Labour tide in Central ward – with one feature which is encouraging the Lib Dems' battered Sheffield troops. For all the high stakes, Labour's surge saw some dispiritingly low polls; the battle could hardly have been fiercer in Central but turnout was only 31%.

"We are here for the long haul," says outgoing Lib Dem council leader Paul Scriven, whose files and papers are trundling through City Hall's Victorian corridors to the opposition's humbler quarters. "There is no criticism here among Sheffield Lib Dems of Nick Clegg. We want him to stay the course and stick with policies which we know are right. Not flip-flop to please the voters, as [Tony] Blair or [Gordon] Brown would have done."

The only mutinous call for Clegg to stand aside for a more Liberal Lib Demer, came not from Sheffield but Nottingham, the next big city southwards on the M1. The Liberal Democrats group leader there, Gary Long, broke ranks to say that his party chief was playing the coalition game "very badly".

Scriven is having none of this, and draws strength from the complete failure of Sheffield Conservatives to make up any of the ground the Lib Dems have lost. Even in Dore and Totley, the prosperous heart of their former Sheffield stronghold, they were well behind victorious Liberal Democrat Joe Otten, and that was on a 56%.

But Clegg's other task, besides sticking to his guns on the central, financial challenge, is crucial to the northern cities brand of liberal democracy, Scriven says. "He brings a real and distinct Liberal Democrat agenda of fairness to the government to show that it isn't the Tories of the 1980s. That is the case we have to make."

The Turner prize shortlist – determinedly non-metropolitan – shows that the British art scene is broader and more geographically spread than ever

Every year the Turner prize shortlist is drawn up by four judges with individual tastes, outlooks and backgrounds. There is no continuity, and the prize is not a lifetime achievement award, but rather aims to rigorously reward the four best exhibitions staged by artists under 50 who are based in Britain. There's a limit, then, to the grand, sweeping conclusions one can come to about the state of the art based on the year's Turner prize contender's. And yet, and yet... there is a sense in which, taken together, the nominations, over their 27-year history, provide a crude kind of barometer to taste and trends in British art. Even that's not simple, though. It's easy to talk about a kind of Britart "heyday" in the mid-1990s for the prize: Damien Hirst won in 1995 and Gillian Wearing in 1997; but it was the sui generis Douglas Gordon who won in 1996; and Tracey Emin, though she was nominated in 1999, lost out to Steve McQueen, too much of an individual to be plugged into a YBA classification. And of course, it's impossible to distance the Turner prize from its reception: the prize has always been "about" how its artists have been labelled by the media as much as what its artists' practices have actually been aiming to achieve.

Bearing in mind all those provisos, then, what I would nevertheless extrapolate from this year's shortlist is that the centre of British art seems to be drifting away (and not before time) from London. This year, there are two Glasgow artists, Martin Boyce and Karla Black, on the list. Of the others, Hilary Lloyd is based in London but painter George Shaw in Devon. Last year's winner was Susan Philipsz, who was born in Glasgow, studied in Belfast and lives in Berlin. The year before that, was another Glasgow artist: the English-born but Scotland-raised Richard Wright, who studied at Glasgow School of Art and still lives in the city. Lucy Skaer, who also trained in Glasgow, joined him on that shortlist. What we are seeing is the success of a generation of artists, now mid-career who were educated at Glasgow at the height of its powers (some, but not all, coming from the environmental art department which had such effect on those who passed through it). It's interesting that none of the artists on this year's list completed their undergraduate degrees in London (it was Sheffield and Newcastle for Shaw and Lloyd).

There's only so far you can go with this: next year every shortlisted artist will probably live in Hackney. But I'd like to think – as juror Katrina Brown put it – that the geographical spread is a sign of the increasing maturity of the contemporary art scene in Britain. It is no longer concentrated in the few square miles around east London, but finds ways of flourishing all around the country: surely something that is echoed – and will be helped in the future – by the proliferation of contemporary art galleries outside the capital, from the beautifully refurbished Mostyn in north Wales, to the about-to-open Hepworth in Wakefield and FirstSite in Colchester, the newly minted Turner Contemporary in Margate and the recent Mima in Middlesbrough and Baltic in Gateshead – the last being where, appropriately, the Turner prize exhibition will be held this year.

We believe the Lib Dem leader when he says he's doing his best – but it would help if he didn't adopt a tone of injured innocence all the time

Paddy "Tigger" Ashdown is trained to be the kind of man who put the bullets into Osama bin Laden last weekend.

So it was hardly surprising that he abseiled into the Guardian, and assorted radio and TV studios, this morning with all guns blazing at the perfidy of David Cameron during the AV referendum campaign.

All together now: "Come off it, Paddy. Don't be such a bad loser." Cameron gave the Lib Dems the referendum they wanted on the date they wanted, and did so at some political cost. It was naive of the Lib Dems to think they would win, let alone that their coalition partners would give them a clear run.

In any case, the yes camp's claims for AV were as outrageous as the no camp's low blows – read Aussie AV expert Antony Green – though less effective.

The Lib Dems often claim to be holier than the others, which is why they can be so annoying. For example, Nick Clegg's own account of Labour Manchester's 2011 budget – a political and vindictive comparison with Lib Dem (no longer) Sheffield's fiscal virtue – was highly misleading. I'll come back to that.

Even as I type, Clegg is giving an interview urging his party to "pick themselves up and get on with the job of governing".

Ashdown is calming down. Clegg will not be forced out, and "there is no question of ending the coalition". The Tories and the Lib Dems will continue to sleep together. But, from now, Cameron and Clegg will have separate duvets, a sensible arrangement, and Clegg will plead more headaches on Friday nights.

We knew it would be like this, despite the angry words during the campaign, calculated words to create distance between the coalition partners, and the spontaneous ones from no camp slurs like the £250m tag attached to AV for all those voting machines and the "liar" label pinned on poor Clegg.

Win or lose (those AV votes are not actually counted yet), most politicians behave like ("we woz robbed") football managers in the wake of an election.

I've heard Labour's Andy Burnham, the SNP's John Swinney, William Hague and Ashdown on air over breakfast. They've all been talking a highly selective amount of tripe.

What do we know so far about yesterday's voting? Hélène Mulholland is updating the results here, and the rest of the Guardian's copious overnight coverage (I went to bed early) can be found here.

But we can safely say it's been a very bad night for the Lib Dems, who lost a lot of council seats, always an important powerbase for a national party. The SNP's result in Scotland, something I contemplated against the polling evidence last December, is a personal triumph for the redoubtable Alex Salmond, not for Scottish independence.

Beware of what you wish for, Alex. You have (probably) your majority at Holyrood. Watch out! No more excuses now.

Labour had a mixed night, which should sensibly be treated as disappointing for Ed Miliband despite gains in big cities. The party has done a Salmond in Wales and Carwyn Jones (probably) has an overall majority in Cardiff Bay, something the additional member "top-up" system in Scotland and Wales was meant to prevent.

This form of PR voting, incidentally, means Tory successes in mid-Wales seats cost their Welsh leader, Nick Bourne, his seat on the regional party list.

I suspect Miliband is on the Cardiff train with no plans to visit Edinburgh, let alone Glasgow, where the SNP made historic inroads into Labour's heartlands. On top of Scottish Labour, it proved too soon to forgive Westminster Labour, especially when facing such a canny operator as Salmond, one of the few British politicians who scares me.

Salmond apart, the Tory escape is the story of the night. As far as we can yet tell, the junior coalition partner took the big kicking from angry voters – Plaid Cymru, in coalition with Labour, suffered the same fate in Wales – who felt their votes had been betrayed by the compromises of power.

That's always a problem for voters who shy away from the two big parties and vote for rivals with little or no expectation of being in charge of anything.

Disaffection with the Labour-Tory duopoly has been growing for decades so, logically, the small parties were bound to win a share of power eventually.

Even without electoral reform, it's in the maths. Yet when they do – as Clegg unexpectedly did a year ago – too many of their supporters shout "betrayal".

Naive? Self-delusional? The eternal search for a free political lunch? A bit of all that, though I stick to my view that Clegg did the right thing by the country in a difficult moment – stable government is the right course even when it takes wrong decisions.

When Ashdown protested in today's Guardian that no postwar British premier had shown such a shameful betrayal of trust as Cameron in his dealings with Clegg, he was reminding us that he went to SAS school, not to university.

Churchill saying in 1945 that his wartime coalition partner, mild Clem Attlee, would need a "Gestapo" to enforce Labour policy? Thatcher likening Labour to the communists of eastern Europe and "the enemy within"? William Hague's shrill, xenophobic rants? Gordon Brown's vicious instincts?

Come off it again, Paddy. I mentioned Sheffield, which fell to Labour overnight. For months now, Clegg has been accusing Manchester – shedding up to 2,000 posts over several years – of "political" cuts to services and frontline jobs, in contrast to the 200 or so being cut across the Pennines in Sheffield.

But Sheffield's council only set a short-term budget, knowing it would probably lose power – as it did – and that Labour would have to pick up the pieces. The job loss figure was actually 737, plus those in outsourced services such as refuse collection, sport and benefit administration.

Sheffield Lib Dems also raided the reserves in order to set a legal budget. Council officials have signalled that additional mid-year action – ie cuts – will have to be made to keep the city afloat.

In short, Clegg, a Sheffield MP on the affluent west side of the city, must have had a rough idea of what was being done, but chose to spin it otherwise. It's no great crime, but it is what Clegg (rightly) accused Gordon Brown of doing with the nation's finances before the 6 May general election a year ago.

We believe you when you say you're doing your best, Nick, we really do (don't we?) – but it would help if you didn't adopt that tone of injured innocence all the time. No wonder Dave and George Osborne sometimes find it wearing. Government's tough, choices aren't easy, in Whitehall or in Sheffield, and someone has to do it (you).

So don't be a crybaby. Who knows, it may even turn out better than you fear (though I doubt it).

‘El hombre es el único animal que se tropieza dos veces con la misma piedra’, dice el refrán. Una máxima que en el caso de los políticos se cumple cada vez que arranca una campaña electoral. A partir de este viernes y hasta el próximo 22 de mayo podremos comprobarlo.

La consultora Mas Consulting España ha elaborado un listado con los 15 errores –uno por día de campaña– que cometen más habitualmente los candidatos durante estas dos semanas repletas de actos, mítines, ruedas de prensa y conferencias. Es el momento que tienen los candidatos para dar a conocer sus propuestas y su mensaje, pero muchas veces estos ‘fallos’ impiden ese objetivo:

1. Hacer en 15 días lo que se tenía que haber hecho en cuatro años. Buena parte de los candidatos se preocupan por dirigirse a los ciudadanos y dar a conocer sus propuestas sólo en las dos semanas de campaña cuando, en realidad, “un político debe estar en campaña de forma permanente, no sólo las dos semanas antes del día de las elecciones” explica Daniel Ureña, socio director de Masconsulting.

2. Tener un jefe de campaña. Todo candidato debe tener una persona que tenga autoridad y capacidad para dirigir a un equipo y ser la cabeza pensante de la campaña. “Un candidato no puede estar pensando en la cuña radiofónica, la trastienda del mitin o de lo que necesita la prensa” explica Ureña. En Estados Unidos esta función siempre recae en manos profesionales mientras que en España, a nivel local son más bien puestos de confianza y a nivel nacional son pesos pesados del partido (José Blanco en PSOE o Ana Mato PP) quienes se ocupan de ello. Pero es cierto que, como destaca Ureña, cada vez más políticos contratan consultores externos

3. No tener una estrategia clara. Todo candidato debe tener claro el mensaje que quiere trasladar y debe ser capaz de hacerlo en pocos minutos. Echando mano de la famosa frase ‘Es la economía, estúpido’, James Carville, asesor de Bill Clinton, dejó claro que lo que primaba en su campaña de 1992 era la economía sobre cualquier otro asunto.

4. No medir al adversario. En las elecciones británicas todo giraba en torno al conservador David Cameron y el laborista Gordon Brown hasta que empezaron los debates en televisión. “Entonces surgió un señor que luego fue clave, el liberal demócrata Nick Clegg. Nadie le había tenido en cuenta” recuerda Daniel Ureña. No hay que despreciar a ningún rival y se han de conocer bien sus fortalezas y debilidades.

5. Responder a todos los ataques. Un error que comente la gran mayoría de los políticos españoles es responder a todas las críticas y envites que le lanzan sus oponentes. “En vez de eso el candidato debe llevar la iniciativa, imponer su agenda, conseguir que se hable de los temas que a él le interesan. Es muy fácil caer en las provocaciones del contrario cuando quizás no nos interesa entrar en esos debates” afirma el socio-director de Mas Consulting.

6. Estar muy pendiente de las encuestas. Aunque los sondeos de opinión tienen cierto descrédito en nuestro país, hay muchos políticos que se preocupan mucho por ellas. Ureña recomienda “no obsesionarse” con ellas porque “aunque tratan de medir la opinión pública, también tratan de crearla” y no siempre son fiables.

7. Prometer lo imposible. “Las campañas son un concurso de promesas y cantos al sol” explica el responsable de Mas Consulting. Aunque en estas municipales y autonómicas la crisis no permitirá a los políticos tirar la casa por la ventana, un buen consejo es hacer propuestas realistas que se puedan cumplir. Con ello se evitará que luego nos echen cosas en cara.

8. No elaborar el relato de la campaña. Un candidato debe ser capaz de dar a conocer quién es y qué es lo que quiere contar a través de historias, relatos, ejemplos… porque eso le ayudará a trasladar su mensaje. Pero debe saber hacerlo: por ejemplo, la famosa ‘niña de Rajoy’ fue un intento fallido de aplicar esta máxima. Ureña apuesta por ver si funciona el relato de Tomás Gómez, que quiere ser el presidente de la “gente común”, frente a la "condesa" Esperanza Aguirre.

9. Descuidar las emociones. Y en ese relato hay que despertar los sentimientos de la gente: “Apelar a cuestiones identitarias, generar confianza, seguridad, cabreo” explica Ureña, quien destaca que la izquierda y el PSOE son “muy hábiles” en crear campañas muy emocionales, que mueven los sentimientos de la gente mientras que el PP se queda más corto.

10. Olvidarse de la importancia de la imagen. Un error muy habitual entre muchos candidatos es no pensar en la foto cuando preparan un mitin o una rueda de prensa. Como ‘una imagen vale más que mil palabras’ hay que intentar que el escenario hable del candidato. “Por ejemplo, si vamos a presentar nuestras propuestas en deporte, en vez de hacerlo en la sede del partido, nos iremos al polideportivo del pueblo” añade Ureña.

11. No proponer soluciones. La gente prefiere las propuestas a las críticas. Si un candidato sólo señala con el dedo a su adversario y no propone soluciones a los problemas de sus ciudadanos, conseguirá poco.

12. Utilizar internet como una moda. No se debe utilizar la Red para cumplir el expediente. Hay una amplio número de candidatos que se han abierto cuentas en Twitter en los últimos meses por la proximidad de las elecciones. Pero habrá que ver cuántos de estos perfiles estarán activos después del 22-M. Y otra cosa a evitar: Facebook y Twitter son herramientas para dialogar con los ciudadanos, no para que las notas de prensa y actos de campaña tengan más repercusión.

13. Exceso de datos. “En campaña, menos es más” explica el director de Mas Consulting. Por ello hay que evitar pilas de información, números y datos. “Es mejor limitar tus propuestas a tres grandes temas o ejes que contar todo lo que has hecho en Sanidad, Educación o Juventud con cientos de cifras” explica el director de Mas Consulting.

14. No conocer las necesidades de los medios de comunicación. Las campañas electorales se hacen pensando en los medios de comunicación. En función del impacto que tengamos en la prensa, la televisión o la radio, nuestro mensaje tendrá mayor o menor repercusión. “Muchos responsables de campaña no entienden que la clave hoy está en reaccionar con rapidez porque el ciclo de noticias es continuo y si tardas siete horas en responder, pierdes tu oportunidad”, añade Ureña.

15. No cohesionar el mensaje entre los portavoces. En campaña es muy importante la disciplina en el mensaje. Todos los portavoces deben estar a una y repetir esa idea que se quiere lanzar. Por ejemplo, Ureña recuerda cómo a base de repetir la frase de “brotes verdes” por diferentes miembros del Gobierno, esta frase copó los titulares de los medios de comunicación. O cómo La Moncloa ha pedido silencio a los miembros del PSOE respecto al fallo del Constitucional sobre Bildu.

Los expertos en comunicación analizarán si, una vez más, los candidatos han recaído en estos errores durante un congreso que se celebrará en junio y en el que se darán cita asesores de importantes líderes como Obama, Bush, McCain, Cameron, Blair, Prodi, o Schwarzenegger. Será con motivo del congreso que celebra en Madrid la la Asociación Europea de Consultores Políticos (EAPC). Toda la programación se puede consultar aquí.

Embarrassment in Scotland for Labour as Lib Dem and Conservative voters defect to Alex Salmond's party

Alex Salmond is on the brink of a landslide victory in the Holyrood elections after the first declarations and returns saw a significant swing to the Scottish National party across the country.

The scale of the likely victory was underlined when the SNP won the prize seat of East Kilbride, toppling Labour's finance spokesman Andy Kerr with a swing of 6.6%, increasing its share of the vote by 10%. The SNP also won Hamilton, defeating another senior Labour figure, Tom McCabe, with an 11% swing. McCabe had held the seat since 1999. Labour held the first seat to declare, Rutherglen.

Liberal Democrats officials conceded their party could face a disastrous night, after voters deserted the party in large numbers. In the first seats to declare, their share of the vote fell 15%.

With several hours before formal declarations, the Lib Dems predicted they would lose at least two of their three seats in Edinburgh after the SNP support across the city surged far more than expected.

Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP deputy leader, said that she was "cautiously optimistic" about holding Glasgow Southern against a strong Labour challenge. The new seat is the closest to her previous seat, Glasgow Govan, but after boundary changes was a notional Labour win. She said: "These are really truly stunning results … and they augur well for the SNP."

With Labour braced for other defeats in west Scotland, candidates and officials insisted their vote had been strong in many seats. However Iain Gray, Labour leader in Scotland, conceded that the SNP had been the greatest beneficiary of a collapse in the Lib Dem vote. His seat of East Lothian was "very tight", adding: "I think the same thing is happening here as has happened in many parts of Scotland. What we're seeing is a complete and utter collapse of the Lib Dem vote and a significant loss of the Tory vote as well, and that has coalesced with the SNP. That seems to be happening from the early evidence."

Annabel Goldie, the Scottish Tory leader, conceded her party was also facing losing seats with the SNP surge. Tory officials admitted that the party's campaign director David McLetchie was under severe pressure from the SNP in Edinburgh Pentlands. "It sounds like it will be a very challenging night," she said.

The final results for Holyrood's 129 seats will only be known later on Friday, with 56 seats decided on the regional lists which are the last to be counted.

Labour's embarrassing defeats came despite an intensive effort to mobilise its supporters on polling day. Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah were out campaigning and meeting Labour voters in two seats in the former prime minister's heartland of Fife, Dunfermline and Glenrothes, and also in a key Labour target seat held by the SNP justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, in Edinburgh Eastern.

The Browns and other senior Labour figures, including the former Chancellor Alistair Darling, joined a "volunteer army" of about 10,000 Labour activists who ferried voters by car to polling stations, visited floating voters at home and manning street stalls in key seats.

The last ditch effort was organised after several late opinion polls suggested that Labour was cutting the SNP's significant lead which had emerged over the last month. The final YouGov poll of the campaign, released on Wednesday evening, suggested the SNP would win for a second successive time and take 54 seats compared to 46 for Labour.

Salmond is bullish about his chances of holding a referendum on Scottish independence in 2014 or 2015, with the support of the Greens and potentially the Lib Dems.

In 2007, the SNP won by a one seat margin over Labour, taking 47 seats against 46 for Labour, in the closest contest in the devolved parliament's short history.

In Wales the picture was far more encouraging for Labour. The party won back its heartland seat of Blaenau Gwent with a handsome majority. It had been held by an independent member, Trish Law, widow of the late Peter Law, who left Labour in protest at the imposition of an all-women shortlists.

But, as expected, it was taken back by Labour's Alun Davies with 12,926 votes. Independent candidate Jayne Sullivan won 3,806 votes. The Liberal Democrats did badly, with only 367 votes, while the British National party took almost 1,000 votes.

Party activists were expecting further gains and an improvement on the 26 seats it held at the last assembly, but insiders accepted they may not reach the crucial figure of 31 needed to claim an overall majority.

The electoral system makes it difficult for anyone to get a majority. David Davies, chair of the Cardiff West constituency Labour party, said it would be a good result if Labour could get around 29 of the 60 seats.

Plaid Cymru, Labour's coalition partner over the last four years, was preparing itself for a tough set of results. Its director of elections, Ian Titherington said he expected his party to lose seats; and, even before the results began to come in, the Plaid leader, Ieuan Wyn Jones, was facing questions about his leadership.

The final make-up of the assembly will not be known until later on Friday because north Wales decided not to count until the morning. If Labour does not win an overall majority, the deal-making and horse trading will begin as the parties try to find partners to work with.

Party loses control of Sheffield and Hull councils, blaming defeats on Labour's 'decapitation' strategy

Nick Clegg suffered a humiliating reverse in his Sheffield backyard when the Liberal Democrats were ejected from power in the city, amid heavy losses for the party across northern England.

As voters punished the Lib Dems for their performance after a year in government, the party blamed a "decapitation strategy" by Labour and the unions which saw it lose power in Hull and suffer big losses in Manchester and Liverpool.

In the first full result of the night, Labour held onto Sunderland where it gained four seats from the Tories. The party's vote was up by an average of 20 points on 2007, the last time the same seats were contested.

Senior Lib Dems also said the party was on course to lose between nine and 12 of the 15 seats it was defending in Sheffield.

A third of the seats on the council, which the party has run as a minority administration for the past year, were up for election. The Lib Dems had 41 seats, with Labour trailing by just one, on 40.

David Blunkett, the former Labour home secretary who is a Sheffield MP, said: "The Cleggmania of this time last year has turned into a kind of Clegg pneumonia. There is a great deal of pleasure [for Labour] in terms of winning the council but a great deal of challenge. Of course because Nick Clegg is deputy prime minister, because of the decisions he has taken over the last 12 months, because of the promises that were made exactly a year ago and were broken people have taken their revenge."

Simon Hughes, the Lib Dem deputy leader said his party had suffered a poor result in Sheffield – Clegg is MP for Sheffield Hallam. "Sheffield is going to be different from every other council because it is Nick Clegg's seat," Hughes told the BBC. "It is his city so any anti-Nick view will be exemplified most in Sheffield."

Hughes admitted the government's controversial decision to cancel an £80m loan to Sheffield Forgemasters was a factor. He said: "The combination of that and tuition fees mean that in the city Nick has become the issue despite of the fact that we have run the council extremely well. We haven't had mass redundancies, we have protected the frontline services."

The Lib Dems lost control of Kingston-upon-Hull after a strong recovery by Labour which saw it gain as many as 10 out of 12 seats from the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems were also on course for losses in Liverpool, where the party had 35 seats to 50 for Labour, after the former Lib Dem leader on the council Warren Bradley criticised Clegg's "record and perception". Bradley stood down before the election.

Lord Mike Storey, who led the city council from 1998-2005, lost his seat to an 18-year-old.

The Lib Dems were struggling in the Midlands. There was a strong swing from the Lib Dems to Labour in Birmingham. John Hemming, the Lib Dem MP for Birmingham Yardley, admitted that his party was experiencing a bad night in the city. The Tories were on course to overtake the Lib Dems as the largest party in Birmingham.

Jeremy Browne, the Lib Dem foreign office minister who is a close Clegg ally, said the party was suffering from its first year in government since the second world war. "We are now in government and are making difficult decisions," Browne told Sky News.

Browne dismissed criticisms that the Lib Dems have broken promises. "We had the general election a year ago. The Lib Dems finished third. We got 8% of the MPs in the House of Commons, so we won no mandate to implement our manifesto in full. I wish we had. We are the junior partners in the coalition. No party won the general election so no party has a mandate to implement its manifesto in full. We are putting into effect about two thirds of our policies. It is worth saying it is 66 years since the second world war [when the Liberals were in government]. Nick Clegg has achieved more in one year than the previous 65 years put together so we have a record to defend."

But John Leech, the Lib Dem MP for Manchester Withington, Tweeted: "We've taken a real kicking in the ballot box tonight."

Mike Hancock, the rebel Lib Dem MP for Portsmouth South, said the party should table tougher demands to the Tories. He called on Lib Dems ministers to "spell out to our Conservative colleagues that we are not going to take anything lying down, we are going to be there fighting our corner and if we don't like it we are not going to go along with it.

Hancock told the BBC: "I am sure that that is what the majority of people in the country who voted for us would expect us to do and what a lot of our members - some of whom will have loyally supported the party and will lose their seats in local government today - will also be saying."

Labour was working hard to play down expectations after Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, said the party should gain 1,300 seats nationally. Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, of Plymouth University, have said that Labour should be in the strongest position of the three main parties because the same seats were last contested in 2007, a month before Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair as prime minister.

Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, believes the Tory prediction overplays expectations for Labour.

Labour said it was performing in the south. It achieved strong gains in Exeter and was gaining in Swindon, Thanet and Gravesham, all key swing parliamentary seats.

Setbacks for deputy prime minister in Liverpool and Sheffield, with defeat blamed on Labour's 'decapitation' strategy

Nick Clegg suffered a humiliating reverse in his Sheffield backyard when the Liberal Democrats were ejected from power in the city, as the party also suffered heavy losses across England, Scotland and Wales.

As voters punished the Lib Dems for their performance after a year in government, the party blamed a "decapitation strategy" by Labour and the unions.

The Lib Dems only managed to hold on to a handful of the seats they were defending on Sheffield city council. The party also suffered setback in strongholds in Liverpool and Hull after an aggressive campaign by Labour which performed strongly across the north of England.

In the first full result of the night, Labour held onto Sunderland where it gained four seats from the Tories. The party's vote was up by an average of 20 points on 2007, the last time the same seats were contested.

Senior Lib Dems also admitted shortly before midnight that the party was on course to lose between nine and 12 of the 15 seats it was defending in Sheffield.

A third of the seats on the council, which the party has run as a minority administration for the past year, were up for election. The Lib Dems had 41 seats, with Labour trailing by just one, on 40.

Simon Hughes, the Lib Dem deputy leader said his party had suffered a poor result in Sheffield. "Sheffield is going to be different from every other council because it is Nick Clegg's seat," Hughes told the BBC. "It is his city so any anti-Nick view will be exemplified most in Sheffield."

Hughes admitted that the government's controversial decision to cancel an £80m loan to Sheffield Forgemasters was a factor. He said: "The combination of that and tuition fees mean that in the city Nick has become the issue despite of the fact that we have run the council extremely well. We haven't had mass redundancies, we have protected the frontline services."

The Lib Dems were also on course for losses in Liverpool, where the party had 35 seats to 50 for Labour, after the party's former leader on the council criticised Clegg's "record and perception".

Labour was working hard to play down expectations after Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, said the party should gain 1,300 seats nationally. Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, of Plymouth University, have said that Labour should be in the strongest position of the three main parties because the same seats were last contested in 2007, a month before Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair as prime minister.

Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, believes the Tory prediction overplays expectations for Labour.

Tory attacks on Labour's performance indicated that David Cameron wants to treat the Lib Dems with kid gloves after setbacks for the junior coalition party.

Meanwhile the Scottish National party was on course for a strong result amid signs that it would add about 10 seats to the 47 it won at the last election for the 129-seat Scottish parliament in 2007. The party was unlikely to win enough seats to secure a majority though a strong performance by the Greens – in the face of a poor Lib Dem performance – raised the prospect of a majority in the parliament in favour of holding a referendum on Scottish independence.

Alex Salmond, the SNP leader who is on course to serve a second term as Scotland's first minister, had indicated during the campaign that a bill on a referendum would be an issue for the latter stages of the parliament.

Salmond's success came after former Lib Dem voters have switched to the SNP, ignoring Labour's warnings about the risks of helping the independence cause. The Lib Dems fear privately they could lose more than seven seats, sinking to below 10 at Holyrood for the first time since the Scottish parliament was set up. Early returns suggest the Lib Dems could lose a prized seat in the northern Highlands and two of its three seats in the capital, Edinburgh.

The strong SNP performance was seized on by the Tories who claimed that it showed that Labour was struggling to position itself as the natural opposition to the Westminster coalition in what was once a natural heartland. Iain Gray, the Labour leader in Scotland, was criticised for running a lacklustre campaign.

After talking up its prospects of gaining an overall majority at the Welsh assembly for the first time, Labour was playing down the idea . One party insider said it would be a good result if it won 29 of the 30 seats (they took 26 in 2007) but expressed concern that the media would portray this as a failure for Labour.

Plaid Cymru, who have governed in coalition with Labour over the last four years, also said they expected to lose seats. Final results will not be in until this afternoon because counting will not start in north Wales until themorning.

Peter Hain, the shadow Welsh secretary, said: "It is nip and tuck whether we will form a majority. I am sure we will get our best Labour percentage share of the vote in the assembly elections."

It was also reported that a Liberal Democrat council candidate, Neil Hamilton, standing in Westerhope, Newcastle, has been found dead after spending the day campaigning.

Police were called to his address after colleagues were unable to contact him, a party spokesman confirmed.

The death is likely to invalidate the result in the ward and trigger a fresh election.

Madrid.- El presidente del Gobierno, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, participará el viernes 13 de mayo, en el ecuador de la campaña electoral, en una conferencia de líderes progresistas que se celebrará en Olso (Noruega), donde intervendrá en una mesa redonda sobre "empleo y crecimiento".

Fuentes del Ejecutivo han confirmado a Efe este viaje del jefe del Gobierno, que ya acudió a las dos ediciones anteriores de este foro progresista celebradas en Viña del Mar (Chile) y Londres.

En esta ocasión compartirá mesa con el anfitrión, el primer ministro noruego, Jens Stoltenberg, que ha invitado al mismo debate al primer ministro griego, Giorgos Papandreu, y el exministro británico Peter Mandelson, entre otros.

Zapatero participará en una cena el día 12 y al día siguiente intervendrá en la mesa redonda para después regresar a España y volver a atender los actos de campaña, que esa tarde le llevarán a Inca (Baleares).

La cumbre es una iniciativa del centro de estudios "Policy Network", que tiene como objetivo promover internacionalmente políticas progresistas y renovar la socialdemocracia.

La última conferencia fue organizada en Londres, en febrero de 2010, por el entonces primer ministro británico, Gordon Brown, y la anterior tuvo como anfitriona en Viña del Mar a la que era la presidenta chilena, Michelle Bachelet.

En aquella ocasión, marzo de 2009, Zapatero decidió participar en la conferencia a última hora y viajó a Chile con el claro objetivo de entrevistarse con el vicepresidente estadounidense, Joe Biden, para cerrar la polémica que había generado el anuncio de que las tropas españolas abandonaban Kosovo.

On one level, today's referendum closes the political cycle that started with the eruption of the expenses scandal in 2009. That scandal brought forth a set of demands for political reform which found outlets in different channels.

On the one hand, there was limited institutional reform in Westminster itself (the creation of IPSA and the Wright Committee reforms, in particular), coupled with the deselection, resignation and even prosecution of MPs caught up in the scandal. This was mirrored at the grassroots by a rebirth of interest amongst politically engaged young people in democratic reform groups, like the Purple People who gathered in Smith Square to put pressure on Nick Clegg during the Coalition negotiations. But it was not more widely mirrored in the public, whose revulsion at the expenses affair did not translate into concerted political pressure for change - a fact which lies at the heart of the failure of the Yes to AV campaign's messages to connect with the electorate.

Within the political parties, there were attempts to harness the popular outrage about expenses to different political objectives, both substantive and tactical. Labour sought to revalorise its constitutional and democratic reform project, which had stalled since Gordon Brown's initial statements as prime minister in 2007; the Liberal Democrats used it to press for long-held reform commitments; while Cameron ruthlessly used the crisis to outmanouevre both the Conservative old guard and the Labour government, promising little by way of substantive reform but achieving a lot by way of political positioning.

The AV referendum became a fulcrum point in this set of processes when Gordon Brown announced his commitment to it to a surprised Labour Party conference in 2009. (It was something he had spent the summer thinking seriously about, and finally decided to announce it on the day itself, with some pushing from pro-reformers in the Number 10 team.) That set off a chain of events which led to the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to amend the constitutional reform legislation which was then passing through the Commons to allow for a referendum at some time before October 2011. For reasons that now rebound on Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats argued that Gordon Brown's unpopularity was such that if he were Labour leader and prime minister at the time of the referendum it would fail, and thus that it should not be held on general election day, which would have been impossible in the time left to the government anyway.

Nevertheless, the upshot of all this was that Labour included a commitment to an AV referendum in its manifesto, which meant that two parties went into the Coalition negotiations on the reform side of the argument, forcing the Conservatives to shift ground.

As it happens - and as Andrew Adonis confirmed this week - Labour negotiators were sympathetic to the idea of a referendum on three options: proportional representation (PR), the alternative vote (AV) and First Past the Post, albeit that they would not commit to supporting PR in a referendum, which the wider Labour Party would never accept. In the days leading up to the general election, I and others in the Number 10 team advised Gordon Brown to offer a two-part referendum, on the New Zealand model, with a yes/no question about whether to change the system at all, followed by a further ballot on which reform option to pursue, should the electorate have chosen reform. In the end, there was no final agreement on these issues in the negotiations, as it became clear that once the Conservatives had moved on the AV referendum question, any prospect of a Labour-Liberal Democrat deal was remote to the point of vanishing.

Why then has the Yes campaign apparently fallen so short? The important point about all these events over the last two years is that no significant popular mobilisation has taken place to underpin, nourish and channel energy into political and democratic reform. Nothing akin to Charter 88 or the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the late 1980s and early 1990s has animated recent reform efforts. There has been little in the way of intellectual meeting of minds in the broad penumbra of supporters on the reform side. The public has simply not been engaged, despite the best efforts of the Yes campaign.

In contrast, the No camp, which is essentially the right of British politics combined with Labour tribalists, has pulled all its forces together. Indeed, what I believe to be the intellectual weakness of the contemporary right in Britain is offset by organisational strength and campaigning effectiveness across a range of inter-related groups. It does not command ideological hegemony, as it did in the 1980s, but makes up for it in unashamedly hardball political mobilisation - almost as if an ideological insecurity, and the wound of failing to win an outright majority in 2010, has been sublimated into concerted political aggression. It's rough stuff, but progressive opponents need to learn how to respond to it, not complain about it.

More importantly, however, lessons need to be learnt about the politics of reform. In other parts of the world - notably Canadian states - citizens have been directly involved in randomly selected deliberative assemblies with the task of framing questions and potential referendum options on electoral reform. Popular legitimacy can be built into the process from the start, not sought at the end.

For progressive political forces, the referendum experience must also be taken as an opportunity to reflect on how to marshall deeper forces for change. The Liberal Democrats are now too weak to drive change on other issues, like party funding, without broader progressive support. They have to reach out - not just within the Coalition on things like Lords reform, but beyond it. For its part, Labour remains too divided on these issues, and needs to go through a process of renewal akin to that undertaken between 1987 and 1997. Civil society needs to be engaged, as it was in Scotland prior to devolution. And wider intellectual groupings need to be formed, to sit alongside campaigning organisations. Even if electoral reform for the Commons is now off the agenda for the foreseeable future, momentum for wider change must begin afresh.

This piece was originally published on Nick Pearce's ippr blog. 

City experts say Lloyds Banking Group's first-quarter results, including a £3.2bn provision to cover payment protection insurance compensation claims, show the company is still paying the price of its merger with HBOS

Lloyds Banking Group: what the analysts say

Howard Wheeldon, the senior strategist at BGC Partners

'Yet another fine mess you got me into' might have been the perfect expression for the relatively new Lloyds Banking Group CEO, Antonio Horta-Osorio to have used in describing the unfortunate swing back into loss at the bank for the first quarter of 2011. Perhaps older hands at Lloyds might have preferred to go one step further - using the lyrics of the old Beatles song "Yesterday" [Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away, now it looks as though they're here to stay, oh, I believe in yesterday...] as they look back to a time when albeit considered pretty dull Lloyds TSB as it was then was a reasonably profitable member of the traditional pack of four UK clearing banks. So much for the past and the days before Lloyds' then-management in the form of then chairman Victor Blank and then CEO Eric Daniels were to be so brilliantly taken-in by that master of economic disguise Gordon Brown (you know, the former British Prime Minister who really did believe that he saved the world!) into taking on the fast failing HBOS.

Two and a half years after Lloyds took on HBOS and almost exactly ten years since the ridiculous 'city' induced merger between the then largest UK mortgage lender Halifax and the Bank of Scotland those that had placed their trust investing in any of Halifax, Bank of Scotland or Lloyds TSB have little left to look at but still burning embers. It doesn't really need me or anyone else to remind those that ended up holding Lloyds Bank shares following the 'takeover' of HBOS in September 2008 what happened next but I'll do it all the same – a total of around £157bn governmental and central bank support (this has subsequently been reduced to £70bn) with the government and taxpayer left holding 41% of the shares, maybe around £16bn of additional subsequent losses following the takeover and to top it all now being forced under rules laid down by European regulators to shed as many as 600 branches. For this mess let me remind that we can only blame the immediate former management - so it's a very big thank you to Messrs Blank and Daniels for the mess that they left behind. What an awful mess it was too and particularly of the legacy that Sir Brian Pitman and other more worthy past members of this once fine bank had left them only a few years ago.

For all that and for all Lloyds Banking Groups additional round of bad news today, slipping back into a Q1 net loss of £2.4bn following the correct decision to set aside £3.2bn to compensate clients (in terms of the mortgage protection policy aspect we may assume that this is mainly from HBOS) for alleged mis-selling of insurance on mortgage loans there can be little doubt that Lloyds is on the mend. The new CEO Antonio Horta-Osorio has made great strides forward over the past few months. Despite the drop back in share price today following the latest round of disappointing news we may in little doubt that the huge additional set aside that they announced today most probably marks the end game of deep seated bad news that has been lurking around and still coming from the HBOS corpse over the past eighteen months.

Horta-Osorio may not have got this one absolutely licked yet but in our view he has got Lloyds back on the right road and importantly, heading in the right direction. Of course there will be many more potholes ahead but I doubt that any will be quite as deep or dangerous as those that we have already seen. The garage sale at Lloyds is yet to come and who knows what else the bank might decide to throw in! True also that the quality of underlying profits at Lloyds Banking Group leaves much to be desired and that being far more dependent than its peers on the specific UK banking arena meaning that it does not have large scale activities overseas or a massive investment banking scenario to hold things up there will remain worries over the parlous state of the UK economy and of how this might further play out to potentially impact on Lloyds. So not the end of bad news yet but for all that we should be able to believe that the worst is probably now over for Lloyds. As to the possibility of the government selling down the current state shareholding, I wouldn't get too excited just yet!

Bruce Packard of Seymour Pierce

Lloyds made a statutory loss of £3.5bn, including PPI provision of £3.2bn, which was well above expectations. This compares to Q1 2010 statutory profit of £721m, this quarter's loss is ten times higher than the full year 2010 statutory loss of £320m. Combined business made a pre-tax profit of £284m v £1.1bn in Q1 2010. At £2.6bn, bad debt impairments were higher than Q1 last year, but down on the £3.7bn in Q4 10.

Net Interest Margin has declined from 2.12% in the final quarter of last year to 2.07% driven by the increased cost of wholesale funding. This is surprising since the cost of wholesale funding ought to be falling, but is explained by the fact that Lloyds is increasing the term issuance on its debt and competing for deposits to strengthen the funding position. These conditions are expected to continue for the remainder of the year. Strong deposit growth of £6.8bn in the quarter ... Q1 tends to be a good quarter for deposits due to the ISA season.

Core tier 1 capital has fallen by 20bp in the quarter to 10.0%, despite RWA (risk-weighted assets) falling by £15bn, because of the large statutory loss reported. Although these numbers may be perceived as the new Chief Exec "kitchen sinking" the results in his first quarter we have another interpretation. In March last year Lloyds released a statement guiding the market higher, and at the half year reported an extraordinary 36bp increase in Net Interest Margin. Rather than a 2011 "kitchen sink" from an incoming Chief Exec, we would see these results in the context of a 2010 "massage table" from his predecessor. Our recommendation on Lloyds is HOLD, with a target price of 65p.

Richard Hunter, Head of UK Equities at Hargreaves Lansdown Stockbrokers

Whilst Lloyds believe the PPI provision will put an end to the issue, the pain is currently being felt both in terms of the quarterly performance and the current share price.

There are other elements of concern within the statement. Lloyds has not traditionally been able to benefit from the international diversification of some of its rivals and where it has, such as in Ireland, it has been forced to make further writedowns. In addition, subdued lending demand has led to a decrease in net interest margin, which is of some concern given the current benign interest rate environment. On the plus side, deposit growth by customers is progressive, whilst the cost synergies resulting from the HBOS integration programme appear comfortably on track.

John-Paul Crutchley of UBS

The £3.2bn cost of PPI redress is a very significant number but puts Lloyds at the forefront of the industry in terms of dealing with this issue. Other notable issues with the results include further significant funding issuance (£13.5bn) and asset disposals of £21bn including £10.7bn of Treasury Assets at very close to their marked level.

To his supporters, he is bold and charming. To his detractors, he is lazy and reckless. But after his first year in office, do we have any idea who the prime minister is?

In a neat symmetry, the first year in the premiership of David Cameron is ending as it began: in the judgment of the British people, delivered on the first Thursday in May. This time his name is not on the ballot anywhere, as people vote for devolved assemblies, local councils or on the AV referendum. But the results, especially on AV, will inevitably be read as an interim verdict on the man who – five days after the general election of 2010 – entered Downing Street as the first Conservative prime minister for 13 years.

How is he doing in the job? What kind of leader is he proving to be? Is he destined for success of failure? These are the questions both his allies and opponents, those working with him or working to unseat him, still grapple with, 12 months on.

If Britain says No to AV today – as the polls suggest it will – then Cameron will be hailed as a winner, the man whose late intervention turned around what had been an ailing No campaign. The Tory right, in parliament and the press, will lavish him with praise. He will be the hero who saved Britain's time-honoured electoral system of first-past-the-post. If Yes springs a surprise, then he will be branded a loser – the result a second failure by the man who couldn't win a majority last year, even against the "open goal" created by a recession and an opponent as unpopular as Gordon Brown. The view that is formed tomorrow, as the votes are counted, could well define Cameron for years to come.

For now, friends and foes of the PM are able to present rounded cases both for and against him – sometimes citing the same evidence. Neither view has fully taken hold in the public imagination; Cameron is still a work in progress, the collective mind not yet made up. After just a year, that's natural enough. What's more intriguing is that some of that uncertainty lingers at the core of the political class. Conversations with those in the inner circles of both government and opposition suggest many have not entirely worked out what to make of the country's new-ish leader – neither the strengths that could be the making of him, nor the weaknesses that could prove his undoing.

Cameron boosters start with a simple point that few contest: that he looks and sounds the part. Whether in a lineup of world leaders or "on the sofa with Phil and Fern," as one ally puts it, he seems "comfortable in his own skin". Often mentioned is his early and graceful performance delivering the government's apology for Bloody Sunday. He is able to speak fluently and rarely looks ridiculous. If this is remarked upon, it may be because of what some analysts call "the contrast principle": put simply, he benefits from the comparison with Gordon Brown.

In private, too, he has won admiration even from those who don't share his party label. One coalition insider says Cameron has close to the full package: "He has a genuinely commanding personality, he's incredibly intelligent, charming, pleasant, professional, courteous – all that takes you a long way."

Above all, say Cameron's advocates, the PM has the quality Brown so conspicuously lacked: courage. This first year has been bolder and more radical than anyone expected, whether attempting to eradicate the entire deficit in four years, launching a wholesale reorganisation of the NHS in England or leading the way, along with Nicolas Sarkozy, in pushing for military action in Libya. All those moves have entailed high risks. The threat of double-dip recession remains real. If he is seen as the wrecker of the NHS – despite the notorious "air-brushed" 2010 posters declaring his personal promise that the health service was safe in his hands – his entire decontamination strategy for the Tories will be in shreds. What was billed as a rapid, limited intervention in Libya could turn into a long, drawn-out war.

Those looking for an explanation for the pace and scale of the government's ambition are directed to look no further than the precedent set by Tony Blair. "David's obsessed with the lessons of Blair's first term," says one friend of the PM. Hadn't Blair come to regard his first four years as a waste, wishing he had started reforming straight away? Well, Cameron and the coalition are determined to learn from his mistake. Besides, Cameron does not have the advantage enjoyed Blair: he won no majority, let alone a landslide. The result is an extra sense of urgency. "You only get one shot," says that Cameron friend. "And you've been working for it all your life. No wonder you don't want to waste it."

That reference to Blair is a recurring theme of the Cameron premiership and the wider coalition: a near-compulsive interest in the former Labour prime minister, cited as a role model and guide by the coalition's upper echelons much more often than, for example, Margaret Thatcher. Blair is offered as a precedent – usually with chapter-and-verse references to his autobiography – either to be followed or avoided.

A perfect example came during the House of Commons Libya debate. Cameron stressed that there would be no ground invasion and that military action had full legal backing from the UN: indeed his attorney-general sat at his side. He might as well have said: "This is the un-Iraq. Everything about it will be different." But when he came to make the positive case, the comparison Cameron reached for was Kosovo in 1999, when Blair was lauded. During the debate, the prime minister took an intervention from the veteran leftwinger Dennis Skinner. He treated him with exaggerated courtesy, just as Blair used to do – and for the same reason: in order to render Skinner harmless. Every aspect of Cameron's conduct that day could be traced to the Blair playbook.

The result, Cameron's friends say, is that the prime minister is enjoying some of the former Labour leader's success. He may lack Blair's landslide majority and bulging coffers, but they reckon he's inherited Blair's Teflon exterior, the lucky knack that allows gaffes and missteps to go unpunished. Last month, for example, the prime minister gave a dressing down to a Daily Telegraph reporter while out on the road, complaining about a story he deemed unhelpful. "You fucker," he said to him. Just imagine for a moment how that would have been reported had Brown been the culprit. One Lib Dem has already written the headline he knows the Sun would have used had the deputy prime minister been the offender: "Clegg's final meltdown." But the story was confined to the news-in-brief and diary columns. The political press corps, true to the principle that you should only kick a man when he's down, still fears Cameron – and so lays off him.

The rosy assessment of the prime minister concludes with a nod towards the opinion polls. Cameron's personal numbers are ahead of the Conservative party's, one pollster tells me, adding that Ed Miliband is in the reverse position, his own ratings lagging behind Labour's. With an expected boost coming tomorrow, Cameron's position is looking healthy. Or at least that's how his friends see it.

The contrary view has poll numbers of its own. Labour sources direct you to the latest Ipsos/Mori survey that has Cameron with a net rating of -3 (with Miliband on +1), adding that Cameron has never got close to the popularity enjoyed by Blair. More surprisingly, they note that the PM has not even reached the level notched up by Brown during his three-month honeymoon.

It's not just Labour partisans who speak this way. One coalition player reckons "stock in Cameron is selling way above its true value at the moment," anticipating the day when the prime minister gets a much tougher ride which, he implies, would not be undeserved.

The critics light upon those same traits identified by his admirers, seeing them not as assets but as liabilities. Where his friends see boldness, for example, his opponents see recklessness. To them, it's folly that the government is attempting simultaneously to eradicate the deficit, reshape the NHS, transform the welfare state, fight a new war in Libya and much, much more besides. The Downing Street machine is simply not equipped to cope, taking on so many major missions at once. They accuse Cameron of embarking on major policy changes that he has simply not thought through – with Andrew Lansley's health reforms only the most obvious example. The forestry sell-off, too, suggests a government that acts first and thinks later. Some put Libya into the same category.

Related to this is the debate over Cameron's management style. Early on it became fashionable to describe the PM as a chairman of the board, rather than chief executive. Breaking from Brown's micro-management and obsession with detail, Cameron preferred to give his cabinet ministers their head, allowing them to nurture their own pet ideological projects. He would hover presidentially above the fray, allowing Michael Gove to start his free schools, Iain Duncan Smith to introduce his universal credit and Lansley to upend the NHS.

His defenders say all this is an exaggeration, that he is hands-on, that every cabinet minister knows any serious decision has to go through Cameron. But the impression lingers. One coalition insider believes the health-reform car crash happened because Cameron failed to ask the question of Lansley that Blair had pressed on his own reforming health secretaries: "OK, I understand the policy: now what about the politics? How do we make this fly?" (Others dispute the notion that it was sloppiness that allowed Lansley's scheme through, insisting that Cameron approved it because he agreed with it: "It's worse than you think: he believes this stuff," says one friend, quoting – guess who – Blair.)

This criticism runs deeper, suggesting that there is a kind of patrician laidback quality, even a laziness, to Cameron – as if, while in his head he knows he should be like Blair, giving the impression of constant activity, in his heart he'd rather be like Harold Macmillan, taking a month off in the summer and making time for a decent lunch. One close-up observer says that if Blair was a shark, permanently on the move, Cameron "is a whale. He sleeps."

The laziness critique has gained momentum with the PM's gaffes, whether branding Britain as America's "junior partner" against the Nazis in 1940 (when, in fact, the US had not yet joined the war) or wrongly accusing an Oxford college over the precise number of black students it had admitted. "He busks it," says one Labour bigwig. "He doesn't actually do the work." One Downing Street insider reports that the prime minister's aides have advised him to avoid all mention of dates when he speaks – because of his unfortunate habit of getting them wrong.

More seriously, one former cabinet minister believes that Cameron's style and his ambition form "a terrible combination". You can't simultaneously promote a packed agenda and be a hands-off leader, he says. You might be able to delegate the detail, but success demands that a prime minister shepherd the policy through, overseeing the overall strategy and the politics. Above all, once you've trusted a minister to do a job, you stand by him. Instead, say his detractors, Cameron has developed a nasty habit of letting his ministers hang out to dry once things get uncomfortable. Few senior Tories will have forgotten the fate of Caroline Spelman, whose forestry sell-off plan was publicly dumped by Cameron at prime minister's questions. Lansley's career appears to be hanging by a thread.

All this, say his opponents, belies Cameron's initial, meticulously crafted image as Mr Nice Guy. The veneer might be smooth and charming but underneath is a less pleasant character – and increasingly, they believe, the mask is slipping.

The best example came late last month, when Cameron told Labour frontbencher Angela Eagle to "Calm down, dear." Earlier, the PM had fumed at Ed Balls, describing him as "the most annoying person in modern politics". Labour top brass have delighted in reports that Cameron often lets rip in private, with a temper whose ferocity has shocked civil servants. Less heir to Blair than heir to Brown, they chortle.

They hope to cast Cameron as Flashman, the public school bully of Tom Brown's Schooldays with an added streak of vindictiveness: they cite the prime minister's blocking of Brown as a possible head of the International Monetary Fund, a job his predecessor pined for. That struck even non-partisans as spiteful.

Take a step back from this cluster of criticisms and you'll see that they don't quite fit together. Is Cameron a weak figure, not fully on top of things, u-turning under pressure, backing down at the first sign of Telegraph displeasure, whether over England's forests or a morning suit for the royal wedding? Or is he a bully, arrogantly driving through a radical programme, ignoring his lack of a mandate, bent on fulfilling his ideological mission? The trouble with the latter description is that it might sound too much like praise: pollsters remember that it never hurt Thatcher or Blair to be described as too tough.

Labour reckons "arrogant" is the key word, one that encompasses both Cameron's placing of a personal photographer on the public payroll (a decision reversed under fire) and his serial breaking of promises (including the vow that there would be "no top-down reorganisation of the NHS"), evidence, they say, of a contemptuous disregard for the electorate.

For the moment, Labour's critique is a lonely one. They have no allies among the Lib Dems, as they did in the Thatcher era, and the bulk of the press remains firmly on Cameron's side. If he wins a No vote today, that will become truer still. After one year in Downing Street, David Cameron retains the power of fear. For now, at least.

Betting on poker: Pros, politicians play for charity Washington Post (blog) Bobby Scott and poker pro Phil Gordon at the final table of "Bad Beat on Cancer" fundraiser at Union Station Tuesday night. (Tony Brown ) Rep. Joe Barton celebrates a winning hand. (Tony Brown ) Good day for poker players on Capitol Hill Tuesday: ...

Everything about the Glencore float is whopping. The prospectus, weighing in at 1,637 pages, is so big that it even dwarfs the stack of budget documents issued when Gordon Brown was Chancellor.

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48 min: Schalke win a free-kick aboiut 35 yards from the Manchester United goal, a mite left of centre. The ball's played to Jeffersen Farfan, who dawdles over taking his potshot, allowing Paul Scholes to block and clear when he eventually pulls the trigger.

47 min: Schalke substitution I haven't got around to mentioning yet: Edu on, Alexander Baumjohann off.

46 min: In his half-time interview, Alex Ferguson seemed decidedly upbeat, saying that the only cause for concern on the part of Manchester United is the number of crosses Schalke right-back Atsuto Uchida is getting into their penalty area. "If we can sort that out, we should be OK," said Ferg.

Second half: Schalke get the second half underway needing to score three goals without reply to book their place in the Champions League final against Barcelona. On the evidence of what we've seen so far, you wouldn't give them a snowball's chance in hell of doing so.

"If Darron Gibson were clever, he'd get himself a second booking at the end of the game," writes Daniel Barron. "That way he can convince himself that he would have been picked for the final if not for that pesky suspension."

Half-time

44 min: Schalke win a free-kick about 45 yards from the Manchester United goal, in the left channel. Raul sends a raking diagonal delivery towards Kyriakos Papadopoulos, but Manchester United clear.

41 min: Anderson gets booked for a needless studs-up challenge on Alexander Baumjohann. Although there were no Manchester United players within a yellow card of missing the Champions League final before tonight's game, Messrs Scholes, Gibson and Anderson are each just one ill-advised lunge away from watching it from the stands.

39 min: During all that goal-scoring excitement, Manchester United went close to bagging a third, with Antonio Valencia beating Manuel Neuer again, only to see his goalbound effort blocked on the line by Schalke centre-half Benedikt Howedes.

37 min: Schalke win a free-kick a few yards outside the Manchester United penalty for a Darron Gibson foul that earned the Manchester United goalscorer a booking. Moments later, Paul Scholes gets booked for persistently shoving and nipping at the brace of Schalke players who'd joined the Manchester United defensive wall. After a long delay, the free-kick gets taken; Jefferson Farfan hits it straight into the aforementioned wall.

GOAL! Manchester United 2-1 Schalke (Agg: 4-1) (Jurado 34) From just inside the Manchester penalty area, Jose Manuel Jurado takes advantage of some slack defending by Chris Smalling and Jonny Evans to fire a quite splendid surface-to-air screamer into the top left-hand corner with a swing of his right peg. That's a fine strike - unstoppable.

GOAL! Manchester United 2-0 Schalke (Agg: 4-0) (Gibson 31) That's a terrible rick from The Greatest Goalkeeper In The World (Who Nobody On Fleet Street Had Heard Of Eight Days Ago), who practically throws one into his own net. From a throw-in down near the corner flag, Manchester United put some slick passes together to work an opening for Darron Gibson on the edge of the Schalke penalty area. He fires off a right-footed drive, which Manuel Neuer palms into his own goal off the upright. Oh Manuel.

28 min: Credit where it's due, although he gets a lot of stick, much of it deserved, that really was a splendid, inch-perfect, dare I say visionary pass to Valencia from Darron Gibson. I suppose you could argue that even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then.

GOAL! Manchester United 1-0 Schalke (Agg: 3-0) (Valencia 25) Schalke concede possession very cheaply just inside their own half, the ball is pinged towards Darron Gibson, who plays a killer 25-yard pass down the right flank into the path of Antonio Valencia who rifles a low diagonal drive past Manuel Neuer into the bottom left-hand corner.

23 min: "This is a joke, right," says Michael Bertin. "A Champions League semi-final featuring one team in the bottom half of its domestic league and another team playing a second-choice side?" This is no joke, Michael. This is deadly serious. After all, this is the biggest Cup competition in the world after the FA Cup. And several other cups.

20 min: Manchester United win a free-kick down near the corner flag on the left side of the pitch after Draxler upends Antonio Valencia. Nani sends an outswinger across the face of the six yard box, where the ball is only half-cleared as far as Dimitar Berbatov. He sprints (OK, breaks out of a walk) through the left-hand side of the penalty area and tries to play a cross through to Chris Smalling, only to see his delivery intercepted.

17 min: After picking up the ball from Anderson in midfield, Nani tries to thread it through the gap between Atsuto Achido and Benediky Howedes for Dimitar Berbatov to chase. His through-ball is intercepted by latter, allowing Schalke to clear. This is pretty turgid fare, but Manchester United fans will be happy enough with how things have gone so far. A Schalke goal would really put the cat among the pigeons for those of us of a neutral bent. Well, those of us of a "neutral" and a "wanting Manchester United to lose" bent.

15 min: Neuer flaps at a cross from the right, only to win a free-kick because the referee adjudged him to have been impeded by Antonio Valencia.

13 min: Dimitar Berbatov weasels his way in behind the Schalke defence, lets one opportunity to pull a diagonal pass across the face of goal pass him by, then turns centre-half Benedikt Howedes inside out and gets his pass away at the second time of asking. At the near post, Neuer clears.

12 min: There's a pause in play after Darron Gibson goes down injured after a collision with Farfan. He slid in to try to dispossess the Peruvian and shipped a shin in the ribs for his troubles. It looked serious for a while and the stretcher-bearers were summoned, but it seems like he's just winded. After getting a few moments to catch his breath, the Irishman is able to walk to the touchline before returning to the action.

10 min: It's been a pretty dreary opening 10 minutes, but Schalke are already showing they have a lot more about them than last week's humiliation suggests. It wouldn't be correct to say they're dominating this evening, but at least they're making a game of it.

8 min: Jefferson Farfan is given far too much space in the hinterland of the Manchester United penalty area and unleashes a low drive that fizzes not too far wide of Edwin van der Sar's right upright.

6 min: Schalke's Japanese right-back Atsuto Uchida steals a few yards on John O'Shea and tries to latch on to a pass up the flank from Kyriakos Papadopoulos. The Manchester United left-back recovers his poise to hack clear.

4 min: Picking up the ball a few yards outside the Schalke penalty area, Nani jinks his way between two defenders and past another before trying to play in Dimitar Berbatov. His pass is deflected wide for a corner, from which nothing comes.

3 min: Schalke enjoy their first period of possession, pinging the ball around midfield as they try to settle into the tie for the first time in nearly 100 minutes.

2 min: Manchester United win the first corner of the evening, when Manuel Neuer is unable to prevent a Christoph Metzelder back-pass from going over the line. The ball's swung into the mixer from the right-hand quadrant and Jefferson Farfan heads clear.

Game on: Manchester United Reserves kick off, playing from left to right, away from the Stretford End. They wear their usual home strip, while Shalke wear navy shirts, shorts and socks with light blue trim.

More emails: "There seems to be a lot of former Middlesbrough coaches out of work," writes Brett LeQuesne. "Who gets a job first? Southgate, McClaren or Strachan?"

"You've stumbled on Fergie's tactical blackspot- he has a weakness for central midfielders called Darren (or variant)," writes Nick McLoughlin. "Fletcher was poor for his first three years, Gibson unproven, Ferguson blatant nepotism. Obviously the sort of genius that will secure you a podcast punditry award!" Speaking of podcast punditry awards ...

Not long now: Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack. The teams emerge from the tunnel down by the Stretford End at Old Trafford and ITV cut to an advert break. Their programme is sponsored by Ford, don't you know?

In the ITV studio: "There's no way Sir Alex Ferguson is ever complacent but he's obviously got one-eyed firmly on Chelsea," says Gareth Southgate. "Berbatov's got to take the challenge on tonight," adds Gordon Strachan, shortly after talking about players who get the hump when they feel their manager doesn't trust them.

Another email: "I thought the bride looked lovely. Didn't you?" asks Tim Smith. If you're alluding to the Royal Wedding, Tim, I'm afraid I missed it. Like Gordon Brown (no, the other one), I wasn't invited. I did, however, see photos and thought Kate looked very glamorous, if worryingly thin.

An email: "Good to see Darren back in contention," writes Gordon Brown, who feels compelled to write "real name, honest!" in brackets next to his sign-off. "He could be very useful over the next 5 games." Please note: he wrote Darren, not Darron. Distinctions don't get more important.

Man Utd: Van der Sar, Rafael Da Silva, Smalling, Evans, O'Shea,
Gibson, Scholes, Anderson, Valencia, Berbatov, Nani.
Subs: Kuszczak, Evra, Owen, Giggs, Hernandez, Vidic, Fletcher.

Schalke 04: Neuer, Uchida, Howedes, Metzelder, Escudero,
Papadopoulos, Jurado, Farfan, Baumjohann, Draxler, Raul.
Subs: Schober, Sarpei, Edu, Schmitz, Karimi, Huntelaar, Matip.

Referee: Pedro Proenca (Portugal)

Good evening everybody and welcome to tonight's minute-by-minute coverage of Manchester United v Schalke in the Champions League semi-final second leg. Sir Alex Ferguson's side won the first leg doing handstands, with only the heroics of Schalke's highly coveted goalkeeper Manuel Neuer helping a surprisingly over-awed German side avoid total humiliation.

Manchester United's manager has said that complacency won't be a problem in a second leg many are considering a formality for the Premier League leaders, but Wayne Rooney's tight hamstring, last Sunday's league defeat at the hands of Arsenal and what looks suspiciously like complacency have forced Ferguson to make nine changes and draft in the second string in order to rest several players ahead of United's potential title-decider against Chelsea this Sunday. Should his plan backfire and United lose, he'll have a lot of difficult questions to answer.

With a berth in the final against Barcelona at stake, Ralf Rangnick's Schalke squad have been making all the right noises ahead of tonight's encounter, even though they almost didn't make it to Manchester - their departure from Dusseldorf airport was delayed by 90 minutes yesterday as a result of visa problems encountered by their five non-EU squad members. Having put five past reigning Champions League holders Inter at the San Siro, they've every right to feel confident about pulling this tie out of the fire. After all, it is surely inconceivable that they can play any worse tonight than they did last Tuesday, isn't it?

Interestingly, only two of Schalke's players have played at Old Trafford before: Raúl and Angelos Charisteas, with both finding their way on to the score-sheet for Real Madrid and Greece respectively. A portent for the night's entertainment ahead? Probably not, but it's something for neutrals to cling to. History, however, is very much on Manchester Un ited's side: they've never lost by two goals at home in Europe and never surrendered their advantage after winning the first leg away from home.

Labour leader Ed Miliband puts team on election footing as Andy Burnham says odds government will not last have shortened

In Ed Miliband's headquarters in Norman Shaw South, Westminster, there is wedding and election planning going on. Miliband gets married at the end of the month and in the next fortnight will have his stag do – a very Miliband affair. A cross between a stag and hen do (resist "hag" do) it's a knees-up with his partner Justine, at home with old friends but with not a paintball cannon or pair of pink plastic devil horns in sight.

Miliband has put his team on election footing. At the most recent campaign meeting Andy Burnham, Labour's election planner, observed that the odds of this government not lasting until the next election had shortened in the last week. Burnham asked the party's general secretary Ray Collins to look at whether Labour could fight an election in the coming year. Collins has set up contingency plans for just such a poll.

In Miliband's office a phrase they use to describe the coalition government has, for them, a pleasing radioactive fuzz. The "half-life" of the coalition government keeps shrinking, they say – it appears not to follow a smooth curve downwards but instead seems to surge in finite periods, each lasting only half the length of the one before.

Early on in his leadership, Miliband was admired by Tories for his assessment that the coalition would go the distance. They thought that he was the first person in Westminster outside the quad at the top of government (David Cameron, Nick Clegg, George Osborne and Danny Alexander) who understood it was a five-year exercise and so he should do a proper party rebuilding job.

Miliband's insight looks maybe too cool-headed after the energy secretary Chris Huhne jabbed his finger like a Lib Dem Zola. But Huhne probably won't quit the cabinet. When US energy secretary Steven Chu visited, someone who found themselves in conversation with the two energy secretaries heard Chu say he wouldn't mind going back to academia, but Huhne couldn't agree. He said he "loved" his job too much.

The vivid nature of Huhne's remonstrations with the prime minister are just what they seem – 60% pure anger, 10% electioneering, 30% longer term strategic repositioning. Few will now think the two parties too close.

But an unintended consequence from this period of intended consequences wrought by the Lib Dems is a sense from Tories that their coalition partners are odd and unpredictable.

After Huhne's eruption in cabinet, and as Vince Cable and Nick Clegg darted to the energy secretary's side, George Osborne did not tend to Cameron but went up to Alexander, Lib Dem chief secretary to the Treasury, seeking explanation. Those present report not knowing if Huhne's next step would be to resign outside Downing Street then and there. Osborne has long grown weary of what he thinks is Lib Dem whingeing – he thought the front bench shouldn't have gone ahead with supporting the tuition fees rise (they could have abstained) because sometimes brute politics trumps ideology.

He is supposed to have thought that the coalition should go all the way to 2015, for the Tories to be able to say they have fixed the economy. More and more Tories at the highest levels are tempted to uncouple. Thus another election becomes a small chance, but a chance.

So where is Miliband? On the face of it, he is not ready. He's been sticking defensively and would have to twist earlier than he might otherwise. His team have policy groups out in the field that are not due to report for 18 months and his brains trust is working backwards from 2015 rather than the other way round (the government after all, is pushing through legislation for fixed-term parliaments which would effectively require both Labour and the Tories to want an early election).

He is feeling around the territory of making the principle of universalism smarter – so an end to monolithic universal benefits for all. After the work Iain Duncan Smith has done in this area, a return to Gordon Brown's tax credits would not be feasible. A similar critique is true across the portfolios.

With the policy groups works in progress, the scope is there for Labour, challenged too early, to get battered.

The Labour leader also has another pitfall to avoid. The election that never was, dangled by Brown in autumn 2007, forced the Tories to come up with the inheritance tax wheeze – a policy that worked for a time but was a problem in the post-crash era that they had to dump. Miliband will want to avoid making a similar hostage to fortune. A pledge to reverse the VAT rise – costing £13bn – would be just one such idea he needs to have an iron will to resist.

All the above give cause for concern, but in reality an early poll would empower the Labour leader who would be likely to sequester himself and top aides and ram through chosen policies. Space for shadow cabinet pet projects would not be massive. He would probably choose policies Brown blocked him from putting in the last Labour manifesto – such as more family-friendly hours and remutualising Northern Rock.

The Tories would be likely to go to the polls claiming Labour always leaves the country's finances in a mess. Labour can mount a strong argument that the Tories can't be trusted with the NHS. "Never would the charge '24 hours to save the NHS' have quite so much plausibility," a friend of Miliband says.

Labour find themselves quite up for an election. Which may be why the Tories ultimately won't force the issue.

New primetime programme will feature four antiques dealers pitted against each other

It is usually confined to the daytime schedules and majors heavily on brown furniture and china of varying degrees of ugliness. But Channel 4 is hoping to reinvent the antiques genre with new primetime show Four Rooms in which four dealers offer their own cash for items brought in by members of the public.

Part Antiques Roadshow, part Dragons' Den and part major-league Dickinson's Real Deal, the show brings four new antiques dealers to television and then pits them against each other – and a bunch of sellers determined to get the best price for treasures that include a Banksy (wall included); a mummified mermaid; a polar bear and an enormous Hitler bust.

Sellers see each of the dealers individually in turn – but only progress to the next dealer after they have turned down their rival's offer. And there is no going back if subsequent deals prove less lucrative.

"It feels like a closed world where I have no understanding of what things are worth and why they're worth it," said Tanya Shaw, commissioning editor at Channel 4. "So that was the starting point – can we find a format that lifts a lid on that world, and that also makes it feel Channel 4 by the dealers we have, and by the objects, which are the kind of objects you don't see on other shows."

The dealers are Emma Hawkins, owner of Hawkins & Hawkins Antique Curiosities and Taxidermy in London's Westbourne Grove; Andrew Lamberty, who owns Lamberty in Pimlico Road; Gordon Watson, owner of Gordon Watson in Pimlico Road; and Jeff Salmon, owner of Decoratum in Marylebone.

"When I was first approached I said it sounds a fabulous idea but you won't want me if this is just going to be another middle England show, if you're looking for another dealer with a tweed suit and a plum in his mouth," said Salmon, who was swayed by the objects on offer and the hope of invigorating a young audience about art.

Watson said that, given the general standard of antiques programmes, he initially had no interest in the show. "My worry was that I was going to be bored. All those other programmes are so formulaic, and as a dealer I look at them and think 'What a load of shit'. So as a dealer I worried: 'Am I going to be motivated?'."

The programme-makers spent six months finding items to put in front of the dealers for the eight-week show.

"We were very, very tough on what we let through and it had to be stuff we were surprised by, fascinated by … objects that our four dealers would be excited by and wanted to buy," said Camilla Lewis, executive producer for the show.

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Former British PM and leader of the Labor Party Gordon Brown warns Scots that should they vote for the Scottish National party in the coming parliamentary elections, they might end up with an economic collapse similar to that of Iceland and Ireland.

Have you celebrated the women in your life lately? Gordon Hospital and its Spirit of Women program have partnered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in commemorating Women's Health Week, May 8-14. According to the CDC, 35 percent of women over the age of 20 are obese, 33 percent of women over the age of 20 have hypertension, and ...

Gordon Brown was hemmed in between the soft fruit and the yoghurt at a supermarket in Livingston. The former prime minister crouched down between two small children while their mother lined them all up in front of her camera phone.

Coalition tensions rise over what could be crushing victory for no campaign in Thursday's referendum on alternative vote

Coalition tensions over what could be a crushing victory for the no campaign in Thursday's referendum on the alternative vote have exploded into extraordinary scenes in cabinet , with the Liberal Democrat energy secretary, Chris Huhne, confronting David Cameron and George Osborne over campaign leaflets that he believed smeared Nick Clegg. During the ensuing row, Osborne said he was not going to be challenged by a cabinet colleague acting as if he was "Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight".

In tense exchanges, leaked by Conservative sources within an hour of the cabinet meeting, Huhne demanded to know if Cameron would disassociate himself from the leaflets issued by the no campaign that he said had smeared Clegg's leadership of the Lib Dems. He challenged the prime minister to sack any Conservative official linked to this literature, which said Clegg had broken promises.

Cameron replied that he was not responsible for the all-party no campaign literature. Huhne then asked the chancellor whether he had any knowledge of the literature. Osborne apparently replied that this was always going to be a difficult period for the coalition.

When Huhne again asked him to explain if he had known of the leaflets, Osborne complained that cabinet was not the right venue for this discussion before making his Paxman remark.

Huhne then suggested that people would draw their own conclusions from the pair's failure to condemn such smears on the deputy prime minister.

Huhne did not consult Nick Clegg before his demarche and defended his role in the confrontation. "I think these have been unacceptable leaflets," he said. "In any other walk of life such behaviour would be seen as nasty, personal and vindictive."

He added: "The home secretary Theresa May used to characterise the Tory party as the nasty party and this episode shows it has a way to go to before it achieves full rehabilitation. The underhand tactics show how desperate the political establishment is to hang on to power."

Huhne's increasingly bitter public attacks on his coalition colleagues, including such a direct challenge to the prime minister, were dismissed as a yes campaign stunt by Tory sources.

The row also angered parts of the all-party yes campaign that saw the inter-party row as a distraction from its final push message, as well as an attempt to highlight the no campaign's failure to disclose all its funding. One yes campaign spokesman said: "Nothing Huhne has done has been authorised by us, or been helpful to us. The difficulty from day one was that we didn't want the referendum seen through the prism of the coalition."

A ComRes poll published by the Independent on Tuesday showed the no camp romping home by a massive 66% to 35% among those saying they were certain to vote. Yes campaigners sensed defeat was inevitable.

Meanwhile the yes campaign published an appeal signed by Ed Miliband, David Miliband, Lord Ashdown, Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg and two-thirds of the shadow cabinet calling for a yes vote.

Ed Miliband also made his most explicit appeal for a yes vote on the basis that it could help nurture an anti-Tory progressive alliance in the country. Labour has always been at its best when it been a force for political reform.

Writing for Comment is Free, he said: "If you believe this is a big C conservative country then perhaps you will believe that when forced to choose and elect someone with more than 50% of the vote, it will aid the right.

"But if you believe that this is a genuinely progressive country, then we need an electoral system that can reflect the views of the electorate and give expression to the anti-conservative majority."

But the former Labour cabinet minister Lord Boateng lambasted the appeal for a progressive left. "The irony is overwhelming Lib Dem cabinet ministers trying to unite the left while they prop up a Conservative government implementing Conservative policies. If the Lib Dems find the Tories so distasteful you have to ask why they continue in government then."

John Healey, the shadow health secretary, also shared a platform with May to say the only reason the referendum was being held was because the alternative vote "gives the Liberal Democrats an open return to power, gives the Lib Dems a way into government election after election, and gives the Lib Dems a shield against loss of support".

Huhne insisted he was not planning to resign, adding whatever the Liberal Democrats do after the results come in on Friday will be done as a team.

Huhne is known to want the coalition to continue, but is understood to believe personal trust between the parties has been lost irrevocably. One source said: "From now we will be consulting the lawyers first when we are offered an agreement by our coalition partners." Support for a more businesslike approach towards the coalition is also coming from another Lib Dem cabinet minister, Vince Cable.

Cameron will deny he is making any explicit concessions, but there are already signs he is backtracking on health, public services reform and the speed with which he brings in elected police commissioners.

Since the royal commission of 1908, political calculation has dominated the debate over electoral reform

In all the petty mud-throwing over Thursday's AV referendum one key protagonist who has attracted neither praise nor blame is William Robert Ware, the Harvard-educated American architect who devised the model while briefly dabbling in voting systems in his spare time as a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

That was in or about 1870, and Ware's was not the first high-minded attempt to inject greater "fairness'' into the ancient winner-take-all method of picking leaders now widely known as first-past-the-post (FPTP). The architect's starting point was the single transferable vote (STV) system, independently invented for multi-member constituencies by both the Danish politician-mathematician Carl Andrae (1855) and the British political scientist Thomas Hare (1857).

Ware adapted STV to the needs of elections where there is a single winner: whether for national constituency politics, state or local council ballots, more widely in choosing mayors, presidents or party leaders and — since 2009 — winners of Hollywood's Oscars. Colin Firth, who is campaigning for a yes vote, got his King's Speech Oscar that way.

Known in many countries, including the US, as "instant-runoff" (IRV) or the "preferential ballot", AV had to wait until a modification of the Ware model known as the "contingent vote" was first used in an election for the colonial government of Queensland, Australia. By 1908 true AV was being used for a state election in Western Australia. Hare's STV had been adopted by Tasmania in 1897, but in 1918 it was AV that Australia adopted nationally.

A high-minded democratic instinct for experiment in the young dominion (it abandoned property qualifications to vote long before Britain) was part of the story. But so was low partisan calculation. Australia emerged from World War I with its old Labour v Liberal position fragmented. Faced with a Labour candidate winning the 1918 Swan byelection on 34.4% of the vote, the conservative Country (30.4%) and National (29.6%) parties joined forces over AV to avoid it happening again.

By now AV was on the radar in Britain too. The Proportional Representation Society — known as the Electoral Reform Society (ERS) since 1958 — was founded in 1884 by Sir John Lubbock, the first Lord Avebury, to promote proportional representation (PR). Its own preferred model, then as now, being pure STV. CP Scott, editor-owner of The (Manchester) Guardian, was an early supporter. So was the Rev Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll).

Early efforts to attach STV to political reform bills failed (Gladstone had declared he would prefer a reactionary Tory government to STV) – and the society flagged until after the great Liberal landslide (in informal cahoots with Labour) of 1906. At this stage – though not after the Liberal collapse in the 1920s – radicals such as Asquith and Lloyd George ("a device for defeating democracy") were both hostile.

Yet after a vigorous campaign by the ERS's dynamic new secretary, John Humphries, in 1908 Asquith conceded what remains Britain's only royal commission on voting reform.

STV was proposed for Ireland under the doomed 1914 Home Rule bill (and adopted to this day after independence in 1921), but by 1917 the royal commission was recommending AV.

Humphries duly helped ensure that a Speaker Conference in that year split the difference, an attempted compromise which often characterises the PR battle. It proposed AV for 358 of the then-569 UK seats (the mostly rural ones) and multi-member STV for densely-populated urban areas.

During debates on the representation of the people bill (the reform which gave the vote to all men and women over 30) the Commons narrowly rejected STV and — by one vote — inserted AV. The Lords voted for STV. Efforts to achieve further compromise floundered, though STV was introduced for the then-university seats. Over the next few years backbench bills proposing STV or AV were routinely defeated.

But in 1923 a sea change occurred in British politics. Lloyd George's Tory-dominated coalition had collapsed. Exhausted and divided by the war, the Liberal party was overtaken by Labour which formed its first, brief, minority government. Facing the political wilderness, Asquith and Lloyd George finally embraced electoral reform as their route back to influence and power.

In circumstances like those facing Gordon Brown in 2009-10, their chance came after 1929 when Ramsay MacDonald formed Labour's second minority government. To shore up Liberal support against Stanley Baldwin's newly-defeated Tories, MacDonald offered not STV but AV as part of a Lib-Lab progressive alliance which, speculation suggested, might have sent Lloyd George back to the Treasury. The history of the Great Depression might have been different if the Keynsians had prevailed and deficit spending eased the horrors of mass unemployment. Instead, Labour's latest representation of the people bill – including AV – passed the Commons by 295 to 230 votes on 24 February 1931. The Speaker refused to allow discussion of the more radical STV option – as outside the scope of the bill. In the Lords attempts to insert the 1917-18 compromise of 100 urban seats elected by STV also floundered.

An AV amendment to cover conurbations of over 200,000 was passed by the Lords on 21 July. But by now the government, grappling with spending cuts and the tottering value of sterling, was close to collapse. The bill fell with the government on 24 August and MacDonald emerged as head of a three-party coalition, buttressed by a very distorted general election result. In varying guises a national coalition ruled until Labour's great postwar victory in 1945.

With a Lab-Con duopoly now claiming up to 95% of the vote, electoral reform again disappeared from the political agenda until 1974 produced a hung parliament, prompting moderate Tories such as Douglas Hurd and Chris Patten to flirt with PR, versions of which were by now in use in many countries.

After Labour's third defeat by Margaret Thatcher it set up the Plant Commission, which recommended a version of AV and a referendum. As opposition leader, Tony Blair promised the Roy Jenkins commission, which produced yet another refinement, known as AV-Plus, for Westminster, to match the use of the additional member system (AMS) in the new devolved assemblies.

Blair's landslide victories killed that option. Only when defeat again loomed did pragmatic politicians reach for the electoral reform lever to save themselves. Brown, and now the coalition leaders, Cameron and Clegg, mix high rhetoric with low calculation: business as usual.

John Harris, page 30

Leader comment, page 32

FORMER prime minister Gordon Brown yesterday stepped in to the Scottish election campaign to insist that Thursday's vote is a straight choice "between the job creators and the job destroyers".

From milk cows to after-school clubs, ideas flooded in from children all over the country about the kind of school they would like. Here is their manifesto

★ Active – with lots of different sports, including judo, dance, karate, football and abseiling, and a swimming pool with slides. Playgrounds with climbing frames and treehouses where you could learn about nature.

"Rock climbing could help your education because you have to think where to put your hands and feet."

★ Calm – with a chill-out room; music instead of bells, and a quiet place inside at playtime for drawing, reading and board games.

★ Comfortable – with beanbags, big enough chairs, small enough chairs, slippers, and somewhere personal to store things. There should be cold drinks in the summer and hot drinks to warm you up in winter.

"Pink fluffy carpet so we can walk around in our socks."

★ Creative and colourful – with lots of room to make and display art, bright painted walls in corridors and dining rooms, and flowers in the classroom.

"I would like to ban the colours black, brown and grey from our school."

★ Expert - with teachers who don't just read up about their subjects, but live them, and visiting celebrities to talk about what they do.

"In the classroom we should have Stephen Hawking to teach us science. I would like Gordon Ramsay to cook our lunch, but he would have to promise to zip his mouth. I would like Besse Cooper to teach us history, according to the internet she is the oldest person alive today so she could tell us about her life."

★ Flexible – with more time for favourite subjects, no compulsory subjects apart from maths and English, and more time for art and sport.

"If we're doing something that needs a lot of thinking, there should be enough time to finish."

★ Friendly – with kind teachers who speak softly and don't shout, and special members of staff that you can go and talk to. You should be allowed to sit with your friends in class and assembly.

"The cool thing is the friendship bench. If anyone sits on there sad, someone comes up to them and always says what's wrong and they will sort it out with a big cuddle and go off and start playing together."

★ Listening – with forums for classes to express their views and also chances for pupils to have quiet chats with teachers. Don't just listen, but take children's comments seriously and make changes as a result.

"I like the idea of having a suggestion box because we can share each other's ideas with the school council."

★ Inclusive –with pupils of all achievement, ability and background learning together. Everybody should learn in one room, with opportunities for small group or private work.

"I think it's unfair that only the people who are good at writing stories have their stories displayed in the school hall. I think everyone should have their work displayed. That way no one feels left out."

★ International – with food from all over the world on the dinner menu and pupils from all over the world in the classroom; with opportunities to go abroad to learn languages and about other cultures.

"At lunchtime a buffet with Namibian, Chinese, Indian and French food would be served on flower-shaped plates and we would listen to music from that country as we ate."

★ Outside – fortnightly school trips (without worksheets), animals to look after like chickens, sheep and horses, and greenhouses to grow fruit and vegetables to eat at school and sell to raise funds.

★ Technological – with iPads to read and work on, MP3 players for relaxing during breaks or to help concentrate while working alone, and usb sticks to take work home (and save paper).

"There should be digital recorders available for lessons, so if you go to the toilet, when you come back you can catch up on what you have missed."

What the perfect school would have

★ No homework (all the work would be finished at school)

★ A flexible timetable

★ An hour-long lunchbreak

★ Pets

★ First-aid lessons

★ A choice of uniform to express your personality

★ After-school clubs in all sorts of subjects

★ Hot dinners

★ An iPad for each pupil

★ A football field

★ Fewer tests (but not no tests at all)

Publication of donors reveals extent of Tory money funding NOtoAV group and the yes campaign's dependence on charitable backers

The fullest yet account of the donations made to the campaigns for and against electoral reform reveal the extent of the Tory money funding the NOtoAV group and the yes campaign's dependence on its charitable backers.

Among around 50 donors to the NOtoAV campaign are several high-profile City figures, including hedge fund financiers, bankers and businessmen.

Lord Sainsbury donated £100,000 while Tory peer Lord Wolfson, the boss of clothing chain Next, gave £25,000.

Tory donor Jonathan Wood, a former star UBS trader who founded the hedge fund SRM Global, gave £50,000 to the NOtoAV campaign. He was the biggest shareholder in Northern Rock when it collapsed and he later tried to sue the government over its handling of the bank's nationalisation. He described the government's taking of controlling stakes in Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland as "theft".

A similar contribution to the campaign was made by Adrian Beecroft, a well-known figure in the venture capital industry. One of the three founders of private equity firm Apax Partners, he now chairs Dawn Capital and owns four Aston Martins.

Another £50,000 came from Alex Knaster, a Russian financier, who set up London-based Pamplona Capital Management with $1bn to help Russian firms invest overseas.

The former chief executive of Alfa Bank, Russia's largest private commercial bank, was part of a group of Russian investors who brokered a truce between BP and its partners in the TNK-BP joint venture in 2008.

Stockbroking and corporate finance group Shore Capital has given £25,000 to the campaign while hedge fund Odey Asset Management Group, founded by Crispin Odey in 1991, has donated £20,000. Odey, a former Barings banker, is one of London's leading hedge fund managers who awarded himself a £28m bonus in 2008 after predicting that the banks would fall and shorting UK bank stocks.

He previously found himself on the losing side when the US Federal Reserve unexpectedly lifted interest rates in 1994.

Odey is closely involved with the Conservatives and is married to Nichola Pease, who belongs to one of the Barclays founding families and is the deputy chairman of private wealth group JO Hambro. Like many hedge funders, he has threatened to relocate to avoid the 50% tax rate.

Tory donor David Mayhew, the former chairman of Cazenove - known as the Queen's stockbroker, which was taken over by JP Morgan in 2001 – gave £30,000 to the NOtoAV campaign.

Another donor, with £10,000, is Nick Finegold, who pocketed some £10m last year when he sold his share-dealing brokerage Execution Noble to Banco Espirito Santo de Investimento and became a vice-chairman of the Portuguese investment bank.

A similar contribution came from property developer Terence Cole, who founded Marcol with Mark Steinberg in 1976 and built it into a multibillion euro international property business.

Peter Hargreaves, co-founder of the financial services firm Hargreaves Lansdown, and the former Barclays finance director Naguib Kheraj also donated £10,000 each.

Of the £3,436,622 donations made to the Yes camp, £2,167,096 came from two charities: the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Electoral Reform Society.

The ERS has a private subsidiary that administers elections in the UK and has been accused by the chancellor, George Osborne, of standing to profit from the referendum and a yes vote – something it strongly denies. Other campaign groups including Make Votes Count and Unlock Democracy have also given around £20,000 a piece to the campaign.

Only £506,000 of the total is accounted for by donations from companies and individuals – 14 in total. They include financing companies Brompton Capital – which has previously donated to the Liberal Democrats - and C&C; Alpha Group.

Other Liberal Democrat donors listed include Paul Marshall, the hedgefund millionaire who is a longstanding donor to the Liberal Democrats. Alan Parker, the head of Brunswick PR, who has the famous distinction of being close to both Gordon Brown and David Cameron, is listed as is Neil Sherlock, partner in charge of public and regulatory affairs at KPMG.

The yes campaign has also received £330,119 in smaller donations, below the £7,500 mark and declares another £330,119 in donations in kind in the form of lent office space and seconded staff.

Full list of donors

NOtoAV

Peter Cruddas £400,000

Jonathan Wood £100,000

Michael Davis £100,000

Lord (John) Sainsbury £100,000

Michael Farmer £100,000

John Caudwell £75,000

Lord (Philip) Harris £75,000

Lord (Graham) Kirkham £75,000

FIL Investment Management Ltd £50,000

Mark Samworth £50,000

James Lyle £50,000

Sir Donald Gosling £50,000

John Spurling £50,000

The Funding Corporation Limited £50,000

IPGL Limited £50,000

Edwin Healey £50,000

David Mayhew £30,000

Christopher Rokos £30,000

Lord (Stanley) Fink £28,000

Andrew Sells £25,000

Lord (Charles G) Leach £25,000

Lord (Simon) Wolfson £25,000

Killik & Co LLP £25,000

JC Bamford Excavators Ltd £25,000

Ivor Braka £25,000

Lord (David) Wolfson £25,000

Jeremy Hosking £25,000

John Nash £25,000

Arbuthnot Banking Group plc £20,000

Nicholas Jenkins £20,000

Hugh Sloane £15,000

David Ord £10,000

Andrew Brannon £10,000

William Cook Holdings Ltd £10,000

Peter Hargreaves £10,000

Rhoderick Swire £10,000

Charles Caminada £10,000

Naguib Kheraj £10,000

GMB Union £10,000

Richard Hoare £10,000

Robin Fleming £10,000

Electoral Commission £114,000

Adrian Beecroft £50,000

Graham Edwards £50,000.00

Alex Knaster £50,000

Jonathan Wood £50,000

Lord (Stanley) Fink £25,000

The Shore Capital Group £25,000

Odey Asset Management Group Limited £20,000

Randox Laboratories Limited £20,000

Terence Cole £10,000

Nick Finegold £10,000

George Robinson £10,000

Britt Shaw £10,000

Charles Wigoder £10,000

Small donations £248,130

Total £2,595,130

Yes to Fairer Votes

Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust £1,021,000

Electoral Reform Society £1,146,096

Electoral Commission £114,000

Paul Marshall £75,000

Brian and Margaret Roper £85,000

Make Votes Count £20,000

Crispin Allard £20,000

C A Church Ltd £15,000

Brompton Capital £100,000

C&C; Alpha Group £50,000

Anthony Jacobs £50,000

Alan Parker £30,000

Cru Publishing £25,000

Unlock Democracy £19,338

Andrew Wainwright Reform Trust Litd £15,000

Nat Puri £15,000

Roland Rudd £10,000

Ramesh Dewan £10,000

Neil Sherlock £8,000

Small donations £278,069

Donations in kind £330,119

Total £3,436,622

Like most people, I’m mostly glad that Osama is dead. He directly caused the deaths of thousands of people, and indirectly led to the deaths, displacement and exile of millions more. Would Sparky have launched the grand $3 trillion and yet-to-be-paid-for invasion of Iraq if Osama hadn’t leveled the Towers? No, of course not. So Osama had a lot to answer for, and while I would have preferred to see a trial, this will do. What I’m having some trouble with are the responses from the right, the ones that question Obama’s timing of this exercise. Many of these have been neatly summarized over at Alicublog, where Edroso has his usual fun with the lunacy that emanates daily from the cognitively impaired (check out his Voice column too). Drudge seemed to think it was to do something bad to Donald Trump, that sort of thing.

What is being overlooked here is the obvious, as usual. Much has been made here of the failure of the Royal Wedding planners to invite Gordon Brown and Tony Blair to the wedding of the century, or the millennium, or something. Many commentators seem greatly troubled by this. If that’s true, imagine how Obama must feel. This is hugely embarrassing. So, clearly Obama went after Osama at the point that he did in order to distract attention from his grievous failure to receive an invitation to the Royal Wedding, and remove all that Royal Wedding coverage off the front pages of the world’s newspapers. And he’s been remarkably successful. Simple, really.

The excitement of the Royal wedding did not last even as long as the long Bank Holiday, displaced as it has been by Mr. Bin Laden’s death. There was little in the way of politics to the wedding: omitting Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from the guest list hardly counted as a constitutional crisis. As [...]

No to AV campaign's cross-party claim under scrutiny as 42 of 53 named donors revealed to be from Tory sources

The official campaign against AV has been almost exclusively funded by Conservative party donors, among them hedge-fund managers, bankers and big City names, raising new questions about the organisation's claims to be cross-party and politically neutral.

An analysis of the most complete set of accounts of donations reveals the extent of the no campaign's reliance on the City for funding and how the Tory party fundraising machine helped shore up support for No to AV, which has seen it strengthening its lead in the polls in the runup to Thursday's vote.

The link between the no campaign and the Tory party's financiers is causing some unease among Labour opponents to AV. But Margaret Beckett, the former foreign secretary, called it a "necessary evil" to counter the arguments of the better funded yes camp.

Both campaigns provided the Guardian with every donation received in recent weeks, updating their previously declared donations.

Despite the support of more than half of the Labour benches, 42 of the 53 named donors to the No to AV campaign are also Tory donors, having given £18.4m between them over the past decade. Nine are not readily identifiable in official donor records, a 10th is official funding from the electoral commission and just one is a Labour donor, the GMB union.

Among the Tory names are seven Conservative peers including Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover, who has donated nearly £3m to the Tories in six years. Jonathan Wood, who was the biggest shareholder in Northern Rock when it collapsed and later tried to sue the government over its handling of the bank's nationalisation, and Lord Fink, the Tory co-treasurer who has been described as the "godfather" of the UK hedge-fund industry, have both come to the aid of the campaign in recent weeks, giving another £75,000 between them.

Stockbroking and corporate finance group Shore Capital has given £25,000 while hedge fund Odey Asset Management Group, founded by Crispin Odey in 1991, has donated £20,000. Lord Wolfson, the boss of clothing chain Next, gave £25,000.

John Nash, chairman of the healthcare company Care UK, has donated £25,000. His wife has previously donated more than £230,000 to the Tories including, controversially, sums to the health secretary Andrew Lansley, from whose health reforms the company could profit.

Beckett, who is also a member of the committee on standards in public life, which is reviewing political funding, said: "The people who have the money are people who fund the Conservative party.

"This is the truism in politics. I think it's a pity, I'm sorry about it. Am I excited about it? No.

"I would feel really uncomfortable being in a position where the yes campaign has £2m from the off and we aren't able to have any funding to counter their arguments … It's a necessary evil."

The figures reveal for the first time that the yes campaign has now outspent the anti-AV camp by £3.4m to £2.6m, the majority from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Electoral Reform Society (ERS). George Osborne has accused the ERS of having a vested interest in a yes vote. The ERS's commercial subsidiary Electoral Reform Services Ltd (ERSL) is printing the postal ballots for the referendum. The organisation has denied it would profit from a yes vote.

The yes camp received an additional £236,579 from the ERS in the past month along with £50,000 from the venture capitalists C&C; Alpha Group and £30,000 from Alan Parker, head of Brunswick PR, who has the distinction of being close to both Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

It has also received £75,000 from Paul Marshall, the hedge fund manager and Liberal Democrat donor.

But the No to AV figures do not include donations it received prior to the referendum bill passing in parliament. The law requires that the official campaigns name all donors who give more than £7,500 but it does not apply to the period before the bill got royal assent, during which No to AV lobbied to become the official no campaign. The yes figures include all sums received since it was set up last summer.

Some Labour supporters of the no campaign called on the organisers to fully disclose all their funding sources. An aide to David Blunkett, the former home secretary, said: "He's not involved in any of the administration of the no campaign. But he thinks both campaigns should disclose all their funding."

Martin Bell, the former MP for Tatton and supporter of the yes campaign, said: "We have a right to know who set them up and who bankrolled them from the start."

A spokesman for the No to AV campaign said: "There are people who donate – across the political divide – who prefer not to be named when they do. We have disclosed everyone who has donated from the time of royal assent in accord with our commitment.

"Prior to that ... there was no legal basis or reason to disclose our funding sources. It is a much easier job for the yes campaign because they are received funding from two opaque organisations."

Miliband will be sitting prettiest after the local elections. But if he is serious about power, he must talk to Lib Dems

Labour tribalists think they have never had it so good. By Friday, according to their reckoning, hundreds of council seats will have returned to the fold, the AV referendum will have been lost and their public enemy number one, Nick Clegg, will have been humiliated. A year after Gordon Brown was driven from Downing Street in that most treacherous of coalition agreements, revenge will be sweet.

I am not sure I subscribe to these fantasies, but for the moment I will suspend my scepticism.

The shorthand predictions are that Ed Miliband will take 600 to 1,000 council seats back into Labour control; David Cameron will lose a similar number, but Tory disappointment will be offset by crowing at preserving first past the post. Clegg will stagger, battered and bruised; the Liberal Democrats will be set back nearly 20 years in local government. Speculation about a leadership challenge will begin in earnest. Chris Huhne will be said to be waiting in the wings; Tim Farron is already being talked up.

The prime minister will feel he has his deputy just where he wants him, in a role of subservience. Yet only a few months ago Cameron aides briefed that Clegg was a buffer against the frothing Tory tendency. The relationship has not changed as much as some claim.

The calculation is the same. Does Cameron believe that a full-blooded rightwing government could win an overall majority in a snap election? If the answer is yes, something dramatic will have happened to British voters, who refused wholeheartedly to embrace the Tories in 2010, when it was most propitious – with the hapless era of Brown drawing to a close and cuts still a matter of conjecture. I see no evidence for that.

As for Miliband, he knows his history: repeated local election victories were not replicated in the big votes of 1983, 1987 and 1992. Miliband has seen the comparisons to Kinnock – a leader who was just good enough for opposition, but not trusted by voters with the more onerous task of government.

The better Labour performs in these interim indicators, the more reluctant it will be to ask itself the hard questions necessary to return to power. To what extent can Miliband forge a kind of politics beyond the embrace of bankers, the assault on civil liberties and the viciousness of tribalism that were the worst aspects of the old era? This was the politics that Clegg, spectacularly but briefly, was seen by many Guardianistas – including myself – to espouse just a year ago. We all know what happened next, although I remain of the view that, for all the mistakes, the Lib Dems have played a positive role and can continue to do so.

Miliband will be sitting prettiest next weekend. But then what? Labour's position is not as strong as it may seem. The constituency changes will make it even harder for the party to achieve an overall majority. Labour is likely to fail to win in Scotland, its stronghold. Replicated at a general election, that would be a disaster. It will sweep up certain Lib Dem councils, such as Hull and Newcastle. But, even if it makes similar inroads at the next general election, it will not win a parliamentary majority by regaining popularity in the industrial cities in the north. The polls are solid for Labour but, in the midst of a deep recession, it should surely be well ahead.

The best bet for Miliband and Clegg would, therefore, be to swallow their pride, and start talking. It will be difficult for both to do so openly (Miliband, after all, refused to share a platform with his nemesis during the AV campaign). For all the bad blood of the past year, for all the talk of betrayal, there remains the kernel of a progressive consensus. The more Labour focuses its wrath on the wrong target, the more it will embed a Conservative government.

Next weekend's drama also gives an opportunity for a subtler and cleverer form of politics to take hold on the centre-left. The call by Huhne – in alliance with John Denham of Labour and the Greens' Caroline Lucas – for a "progressive majority" against the Tories marks an important moment for the coalition.

After 5 May, Clegg will be able to emphasise the differences between the two ruling parties. He should push harder and more roughly for issues that matter to him – Lords reform soon, more movement on removing the poorest from income tax, and social mobility.

Cameron has one nuclear option at his disposal – to opt for an early election. But, as Brown learned, fluffing your lines on this can have tragic consequences.

Who will blink first? For sure, Clegg would be punished at an early election, but it is far from clear that Cameron would achieve a majority. Would we be back in hung parliament territory? And this time around would Labour try harder to build bridges with other parties? Just as year one of the coalition was a new experience for the British body politic, so year two promises to be just as unpredictable. Preparation, flexibility and subtlety are the keys to success – not visceral tribal loyalties and loathing. Labour might wish Clegg away, but it may have to put up with him for longer.

If he is serious about power, Miliband should start talking, or at least whispering, to the man he says he cannot abide.

John Kampfner is chief executive of Index on Censorship and author of Freedom for Sale

Mumsnet brought then Prime Minister Gordon Brown into line with THAT biscuit question and now it has turned its attentions to family travel. So just how good is the advice?

Former prime minister Gordon Brown said the SNP risks sacrificing Scottish jobs "on the altar of the abstraction of independence".

Former prime minister Gordon Brown said the SNP risks sacrificing Scottish jobs "on the altar of the abstraction of independence".

EX-PM Gordon Brown said the SNP risk sacrificing Scottish jobs "on the altar of the abstraction of independence".

Former prime minister Gordon Brown said the SNP risks sacrificing Scottish jobs "on the altar of the abstraction of independence".

He is unapologetic in pursuit of his funnyman status

Last Thursday evening, amid the throng camping out overnight for the royal wedding, David Cameron sauntered down the Mall and did what he does best. He pretended to be prime minister. Just as he must have done as a child to his own reflection in the bathroom mirror, he addressed the crowds with a dead relaxed, "Hey, don't freak out, I'm just a pretty normal, although obviously massively powerful, guy" assurance. It was all "Where are you guys sleeping tonight?" and "Don't forget to wake up in time!" He was actually doing quite well until he let slip to one group: "D'you know, when Charles and Di got married I slept just over there." Like he thought the fact he camped out to watch a wedding as a 14-year-old boy would lend him just the sort of common touch he so craves.

It was classic Cameron. The kind of bloke who turns up for a photo opportunity with some builders at a greasy spoon and laconically orders a salad Niçoise. Just like his allusions to a dated car insurance ad a few days previously, it was yet more evidence that there is one thing he craves out of his premiership more than any other: to be regarded as the Chilled Out Entertainer of British politics.

It would be nice to think that the British public didn't need their prime ministers to be fun-loving, free-wheeling kinda guys. That what we really wanted was boring, bordering on weird, eggheads who were content to spend most of their time indoors locked in earnest contemplation of complex policy matters that the rest of us couldn't possibly hope to understand. But as John Major and Gordon Brown found to their cost, the electorate are largely sceptical of anyone with even the faintest whiff of spodiness about them.

This is why "get on and have fun" – the guidance Cameron offered to anyone planning to have a street party last week in the face of local government red tape – has pretty much become the defining sentiment of his first year in power. Lost your job? Get on and have fun! Can't afford to pay your mortgage? Get on and have fun! Can't get your hip replaced? Get on and have fun! There's almost no national ailment that he feels can't be solved, or at least distracted from, by taking off his suit jacket, loosening his tie and suggesting a good old-fashioned knees-up.

The scariest thing of all is how unshakeable he is from his worldview. When he told Angela Eagle to "calm down, dear" he broke the single biggest rule of public discourse: if you're in a suit and occupying a position of authority, never ever make a pop- cultural allusion to impress your audience. It doesn't matter if you're a prime minister, a geography teacher, a vicar or even John Humphrys on Mastermind trying to have a relaxed exchange with a contestant prior to the general knowledge round, it just never works. You don't say "calm down, dear" for the same reasons you don't say "not" at the end of a statement you don't actually believe in. It's silly and patronising and, anyway, even the most witless bores in society have long since moved on to grinningly saying "simples" in a daft foreign accent at the end of their sentences.

But as far as Cameron's concerned, rules like that are there to be broken. In the face of the outcry at his dispatch- box idiocy, he shrugged like an incredulous Top Gear presenter laughing off a bit of light racism. He is unswerving and unapologetic in his pursuit of his funnyman status. In his mind, these incitements to party down, combined with all the jack-the-lad funnies, are slowly transforming him from Bullingdon Club toff to a latterday Jacko from Brush Strokes. And nothing can stop him now.

He has confessed to approaching his premiership like a chairman rather than a chief executive. Over the past 12 months he has preferred to leave the boring policy details over stuff like the forest sell-offs and the NHS to his hapless ministers while he concentrated on banging the "good vibes" drum. He is certainly well qualified for that role, given that he clearly enjoys being prime minister more than any of his recent predecessors. While Brown and Blair sometimes seemed to have aged years in the space of mere months, Cameron, somewhat sinisterly, seems to look more vibrant by the minute. His relish for the job was best encapsulated in the great street-party debate when he told the country: "Let me put it like this, I'm the prime minister and I'm telling you. If you want a street party – then you go ahead and have one." It betrayed an unrelenting sense of self-congratulatory pride in the position he engineered himself into last May. In a way it's almost sweet.

But if he's that hysterical in his first year, wait until his merciless budget cuts really kick in over the next 12 months. He'll doubtless already have planned an extra bank holiday for 2012, codenamed: "National Fun Day". And if any more of his policies blow up in his face, the soundbite will already be written: "All right everyone, I effed up. Now, who's up for some X Box?"

Charlie Brooker is away.

Giles Fraser is on his journey from left to right, as befits his geographical move to the City (Comment, 30 April). Fine. But he must stop these meaningless generalisations about the rest of us. He tells us, after Friday's jamboree, that the left is committed to bloodless rationalism. He's clearly never enjoyed the collective emotion of (say) the Durham Miners' Gala. And socialists have always sought more recreation, less grind. (Does he know how little leave the hyper-capitalists of the US allow their workers?) So "any excuse for a party" is a slogan more at home with the left than the right.

Moreover, the left has nothing to fear in owning that its commitment to the NHS, free education and wealth redistribution is both rational and emotional; they warm our hearts. But it's these that the right seeks to undermine, with its own version of cold-hearted reasoning – before, during and after the welcome bank holidays – "there is no alternative".

Father Patrick Morrow

Uxbridge, Middlesex

• Chris Chivers talks of Milton's poetry in the context of "the depth of the national tradition of which the [royal] couple are the youngest icons" (Face to faith, 30 April). This idea of a seamless and homogeneous national tradition is mythical. Likewise, the irrational bonding and the unassailable links between state, monarchy and church that Giles Fraser imagines in his article conceal a more complex reality. British history and culture is fissured and rich with oppositional currents. John Milton was, of course, an ardent republican who faced prosecution and worse for his support of the execution of Charles I.

Dr Bill Hughes

Timperley, Cheshire

• It's a bit ironic that having snubbed every Labour supporter in the country by not inviting Tony Blair, the party's longest-serving prime minister, and Gordon Brown, who only left office last year, to the wedding, five of the 10 pieces of music (excluding the national anthem) played at the event were written by Fabians – four pieces by Charles Hubert Hastings Parry and one by Ralph Vaughan Williams. So, no socialists please, but their music's alright.

Barbara Burfoot

Alton, Hampshire

• Ian Jack (Royal wedding supplement, 30 April) fails to mention the feminist objections to Charles and Diana's wedding, which proved to be the most accurate in both their analysis and their prediction of the likely outcome. We all knew that Diana was a young, unknowing girl who had been "kidnapped" by a powerful and cynical older man, backed up by the patriarchal establishment, for breeding purposes, and that it would end in tears. We wore our "Don't Do It, Di!" badges, but did anyone take any notice? Perhaps not, but at least partly due to Diana's own fightback, one of the gratifying features of Friday's event, in spite of continued compulsion upon the bride-to-be, both stunningly beautiful and slim as a reed, was the apparent equality in the relationship between her and the groom. 

Isabella Stone

Matlock, Derbyshire

• "Judge it right," says your leading article (30 April) about the monarchy's offering to the nation, "and we buy. Get it wrong, and we may one day look elsewhere." Well, the same can be said of your newspaper – nine full pages of dross, plus a 16-page supplement, and only Polly Toynbee for contrast.

Michael Clayton

Wisbech, Cambridgeshire

• I see now why they had to ban smoking in Westminster Abbey. Polly Toynbee says it's made of cardboard, I had been fooled by this in the past.

David Hockney

Bridlington, East Riding of Yorkshire

• Didn't watch the wedding; would have gone to Red Lion Square if I'd known about the party there. But I thought your supplement was great. Thank you. 

Carol Orchard

Winchester, Hampshire

• Could it be that the little bridesmaid to Kate's right on the balcony photographs – her face glum and hands over her ears – is a Guardian reader?

Peter Higgins

Oxford

Sudden lurches in tax policy just make life harder for businesses and deprive measures of vital oversight and consultation

Six weeks ago, George Osborne picked a fight with gas companies. Yesterday, it escalated several notches – and is likely to turn really nasty before the end of summer. The chancellor will not emerge unscathed from this battle.

Ever since his March budget, Mr Osborne has come under attack from energy businesses furious at his imposition of a £2bn windfall tax on North Sea profits. Shell has estimated that the hike will cost it about $600m; Chevron and BP have complained too. Representatives from the oil and gas industry have been assiduously lobbying ministers and the press. But yesterday, things moved beyond whining and whispers. The company that owns British Gas, Centrica, announced it would close down Britain's biggest gas field, in Morecambe Bay, for routine maintenance – and that production might not be restarted. Centrica claims that the rise in tax on North Sea profits, to 32% from 12%, means that reopening the field may be uneconomical. It estimates that its older South Morecambe field is taxed at 81p for every pound brought in. Hostilities are unlikely to stop there: representatives from the oil and gas industry give evidence to the energy select committee this Wednesday and will in all probability attack both the tax rise and energy secretary, Chris Huhne – just before he turns up to speak to the panel of MPs. And over the longer run, industry observers forecast that other offshore explorers will also mothball their facilities.

Chancellors should generally avoid launching big tax changes overnight. Sudden lurches in tax policy just make life harder for businesses and deprive measures of vital oversight and consultation. This isn't just this paper's view, but apparently also that of Mr Osborne, who in 2007 blasted Gordon Brown for a "short-term focus on squeezing the maximum amount of revenue" out of the North Sea and so chasing away private investment. Now in No 11, the Conservative chancellor has learned what his predecessors also knew: that taxes on "profiteering" energy companies and highly paid bankers are the most politically acceptable revenue raisers. While it may be good politics, it also looks hypocritical. Nor does the government's appointment last December of Centrica boss Sam Laidlaw to a non-executive directorship in Whitehall look so clever.

On North Sea tax, Mr Osborne and other ministers do not have a totally watertight case. That said, companies are obliged to pay their tax bills even when they are sharply higher. After all, if a family decided to send back its gas bill because it was far higher than the last one, British Gas has the option to come down on them like a ton of bricks. Exactly the same principle applies here.

William and Kate play cat and mouse with the press – and it's round one to the royal couple

The ink is barely dry on the wedding register but already the game of cat and mouse between the press and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge is well and truly on.

Royal sources have told the Guardian that Prince William's decision to return to work as a search and rescue helicopter pilot in Anglesey this week instead of heading to a honeymoon beach with his bride was long planned. The media had previously been led to believe the couple would take a fortnight's holiday shortly after Friday's wedding at Westminster Abbey.

It seemed to be a classic piece of mis-direction intended to keep their honeymoon secret and a senior aide said the decision to delay the break had nothing to do with security fears in the Middle East, as was reportedon Sunday. Jordan had been mooted as a possible destination.

"We don't tend to do things last minute at the palace and we wouldn't have taken any risks with their security anyway," the aide said. "We are concerned to keep their destination private."

That extended to their British mini-break, which began at 11.15am on Saturday when the newlyweds flew from Buckingham Palace to an unknown location in the UK in the Queen's Sikorsky S-76C Spirit. The Scilly Isles and Balmoral were touted as possible boltholes. Their Macavity-like departure set the tone for a couple who are said to be keen to avoid the full glare of publicity in the early months of their marriage.

It also left room for their wedding guests back in London to pick over the bones of the wedding – the winners and losers, the spats and the love-ins which followed a service that David Cameron said was "absolutely beautiful, gripping, moving".

Tales from the eight-hour party at Buckingham Palace on Friday night began to circulate. Prince William, it was reported, introduced his new wife in a speech as "Mrs Wales" while Prince Harry referred to his brother and sister-in-law as "the dude" and "the duchess".

The pair began the dancing under glitterballs in what one onlooker judged to be a "twirly" performance. No well-to-do wedding would be complete without the presence of John Lewis, and so it was apt that the duke and duchess stepped out to a live rendition of the retailer's tear-jerking Christmas advert tune: Ellie Goulding's cover of Elton John's Your Song. The 25-year-old singer went on to perform versions of Bryan Adams's Summer Of '69 and Stevie Wonder's Superstition before DJs played Tinie Tempah's Pass Out and Bodyrockers' I Like The Way You Move.

Few did pass out and even Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall apparently kept going past midnight.

On Saturday, the bride's younger sister, Philippa, hit the headlines as "her royal hotness" after her appearance as maid of honour in a figure-hugging dress.

Already a well-connected party planner, her transformation into a star at the wedding looks set to boost her fortunes further. Less welcome might be the Pippa Middleton Ass Appreciation Society page on Facebook, which has already beenhad been "liked" by almost 90,000 people.

Estimates in the Sunday papers suggested the Middletons may have laid out £250,000 during the wedding on dresses, suits, jewellery, hotel rooms and food, drink and parties for friends, although that did not account for the possibility of discounts from suppliers, such as the Goring Hotel and fashion company Alexander McQueen, which enjoyed publicity throughout the wedding that money could not buy.

There was speculation, too, about the business aspirations of the bride's brother, James Middleton, 23, who registered three companies in weeks running up to the wedding: Nice Wine, Nice Cakes and Nice Group London.

Other winners included Sarah Burton, the wedding dress designer who joined Alexander McQueen as a student intern and won almost universal praise for her chantilly lace and satin creation. "This will open up further avenues for McQueen and it may open up the possibility of her own label," said Sukeena Rao, a style consultant. "Women who may not have considered it before may start to look at the brand. She couldn't have got it more spot on."

Burton's name had already been mentioned in connection with the top post at Christian Dior, vacated after John Galliano was sacked in March for alleged antisemitic remarks.

In the aftermath of the wedding, no aspect of the day was left unexamined. Lipreaders continued their trawl over who said what in the abbey, revealing that the Duchess of Cornwall remarked "it all looks very posh". Perhaps it was, compared with her own wedding to Prince Charles in Windsor town hall in 2005.

The Mail on Sunday revealed it had obtained the 744 horseshoes worn by the steeds of the Household Cavalry, presumably including the one that bolted, and is offering them to readers as mementos.

Political commentator Dominic Lawson even advanced a new theory about the absence of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair: royal revenge because the former decommissioned the royal yacht Britannia when chancellor and the latter banned fox hunting as prime minister, which displeased the Duchess of Cornwall.

The ghost of Diana lingered. Jemima Khan, daughter of Lady Annabel Goldsmith, a close friend of Princess Diana who was not invited, tweeted during the ceremony: "No offence to Camilla but I'd have preferred – out of respect – that no one had substituted for mother of the groom at register signing." That fuelled talk of a rather aristocratic spat between the families over the lack of invitations.

The feelgood factor generated by the wedding was even enumerated in a YouGov poll , which showed that 78% of people think William and Kate will overshadow the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall.

In the face of widespread public warmth about the event, republicans took solace. "They are facing a problem of their own making," said Graham Smith, director of anti-monarchy group Republic.

"They would do well for the Queen and Prince Charles to stand aside, but they can't do that. William will go back to work this week and the attention returns to the old guard."

He said membership of his group had more than doubled to 15,000 in the five months leading up to the wedding and that 1,000 people came to a Republican street party in London on Friday. His group has some way to go yet.

Row over windfall tax on offshore drilling provokes possible closure of field that produces 6% of nation's gas

The dispute between energy firms and the government over the level of tax paid by firms operating in the North Sea dramatically escalated on Sunday with British Gas threatening to shut down an important gas field on the Irish Sea.

Centrica, which owns British Gas, closed the Morecambe Bay field for routine maintenance and warned it may not reopen it because of the 12% tax rise on North Sea profits announced by the chancellor, George Osborne, in the budget in March.

The move provoked an immediate response from the Treasury, which said the rise was necessary and that the company would continue to make substantial profits on its operation.

Morecambe Bay produces 6% of the UK's gas, but Centrica said it may now be cheaper to buy supplies on the open market, shipping them in from abroad, rather than bear the expense of operating Morecambe where gas is subject to an "onerous" tax regime.

Centrica said that UK oil and gas fields are now subject to the highest levels of tax in the world. A spokesman said: "At these higher tax rates, Morecambe's profitability can be marginal. Accordingly, we may choose to buy gas for our customers in the wholesale markets in preference to restarting the field after planned maintenance [due to last four weeks]."

The company added that following the increase in supplementary corporation tax, North Morecambe will be subject to a 62% tax rate and South Morecambe 81%.

"This impacts the trigger levels at which point we shut in production and purchase gas from other sources such as LNG [liquefied natural gas]."

A Treasury spokesman said the tax rise was essential to help motorists cope with the soaring cost of petrol: "The decision to increase the charge on oil and gas companies ... has allowed the government to lower fuel duty, helping hard-pressed motorists at a difficult time. Even with this change, average post-tax oil profits per barrel are forecast to be higher in the next five years than the last five, meaning that profits are expected to stay high."

In February, Centrica reported record profits of £742m at British Gas – a 24% leap on a year earlier – provoking criticism from consumer groups. Centrica had pushed through a 7% increase in energy bills just two months earlier.

Centrica argues that its gas production goes into power stations, not to fuel cars, and that it should not have to pay a tax being levied to help motorists.

The row between business and government is potentially embarrassing for Centrica as its chief executive, Sam Laidlaw, has recently been appointed a non-executive director at the Department for Transport as part of the drive to import private-sector efficiency to Whitehall.

The chancellor sparked uproar in the energy industry when he imposed the £2bn windfall tax on North Sea firms. The industry was furious that the levy was introduced without consultation and warned it could jeopardise investment, damage investor confidence and hit jobs. Last week, Shell and BP both reported big increases in profits but said the tax increases could cost them as much as $1bn (£600m) each. Some companies have threatened an investment boycott in response to the new tax, which follows increases introduced a few years ago when Gordon Brown was chancellor.

Executives argue they need "fiscal certainty" if they are to continue to invest in the North Sea, where production is in decline but thousands of British workers are still employed. They have been lobbying hard to change the chancellor's mind, but so far he has refused to reconsider.

Critics have complained that the energy industry is trying to dodge its responsibilities and avoid paying a fair share of higher taxes at a time of national economic hardship. Unions and consumer groups point out that oil prices have been soaring, thanks to the boom in commodity prices generated by bigger demand from India and China.

Last week, the AA said it planned to ask the European competition commission to investigate whether oil and petrol markets are being manipulated after Shell reported first-quarter profits up 40%, which means the company is making £2m an hour.

In the past, Treasury ministers have dismissed fears that the hike in North Sea taxes would lead to a decline in production. But oil executives have threatened to bring forward the retirement of many big fields, shutting down infrastructure that could affect smaller developers struggling to bring new oil fields into production.

Thousands of jobs in Scotland have been put at risk after Norway's Statoil said it would "pause and reflect" before starting on a £3bn project near the Shetlands.

Oil companies have complained that Osborne's decision would scupper plans to explore the remaining North Sea fields, a move which was expected to create 15,000 jobs.

The optimal dose of ribavirin for chronic hepatitis C: From literature evidence to clinical practice
Authors:

On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Name Five Cartoonists/Comics-Making Teams And The Comics That You Would Like To See Them Remix." This is how they responded: Jamil Thomas * Jason, The Left Bank Gang * Morrison/Quitely, JLA Earth 2 * Paul Pope, Heavy Liquid * Mike Allred, Red Rocket 7 * David Mazzuchelli, Batman Year One ***** Tom Spurgeon 1. Richard McGuire, "Here" 2. Steve Ditko, Amazing Spider-Man #33 3. Dave McKean, Cages 4. Richard P. Butler, Albuquerque Ben 5. Kevin Cannon, Far Arden ***** Marc Arsenault 1. Frank Miller, Ronin 2. Don McGregor & P. Craig Russell, Killraven 3. Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira 4. Tom DeFalco, Herb Trimpe & Barry Windsor-Smith, Machine Man 5. Enki Bilal, The Nikopol Trilogy ***** Matt Seneca 1. Guido Crepax, Valentina 2. CF, Core of Caligula 3. Jim Steranko, "Frogs!" (he actually said he was gonna do a webcomics remix at one point but never followed through) 4. Paul Pope, 100% 5. Any of Bernie Krigstein's subdivided-panel stories ***** Buzz Dixon 1. Carl Barks, Scrooge McDuck "A Financial Fable" 2. Ted Dawson, Spooner 3. Alex Raymond, Flash Gordon "Power Men Of Mongo" 4. Chester Gould, Dick Tracy "Flattop Jr." 5. Dan DeCarlo, Betty And Me "Cool It" ***** Justin Colussy-Estes 1) Steve Ditko, Strange Tales 126-127 (Dread Dormammu, Mindless Ones, Clea -- this is Dr. Strange on overdrive, and, for me, Ditko at his weird best) 2) Matt Fraction, Gabriel Ba, & Fabio Moon, Luxuria (This series practically remixes itself as it goes along.) 3) Jim Rugg & Brian Maruca, Afrodisiac (Jim Rugg's talent has always been on display, but I haven't seen anything that demonstrates his range as much as Afrodisiac, and that's the challenge of the remix, isn't it?) 4) Trina Robbins & Kurt Busiek, Legend of Wonder Woman (anybody remember this? I put it here because I think remixing the material with a more... Marstonian approach? could make it that WW project people have been looking for for the last 20 years. Or maybe I just want Colleen Coover to take on the Amazonian Princess) 5) Floyd Gottfredson, The Seven Ghosts (I've never been able to get over his pacing, and I think he would be able to create and recreate totally different beats of suspense and humor, like stretching out silly putty and squishing it back together again.) ***** Douglas Wolk 1. Chester Brown, Paying For It 2. Gilbert Hernandez, Sloth 3. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, "Chronocops" 4. Karl Stevens, The Lodger 5. Apollo and Lewis Trondheim, Bourbon Island 1730 ***** Sean Kleefeld 1. Art Spiegelman, Maus 2. Jack Kirby, The Hunger Dogs 3. Jim Starlin, The Death of Captain Marvel 4. Jim Steranko, Captain America #110-113 5. Mike Saenz, Shatter ***** Sean T. Collins 1. Grant Morrison et al, Seven Soldiers of Victory 2. Kevin Huizenga, "A Sunset" 3. Al Columbia, Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days 4. Junji Ito, Uzumaki 5. R. Crumb, "The Begats," from The Book of Genesis Illustrated ***** Mark Coale 1. Stan Lee/Jack Kirby -- Avengers #4 2. Neil Gaiman/Charles Vess -- Sandman #19 3. Grant Morrison/Charles Troug -- Animal Man #5 4. Howard Chaykin -- American Flagg #1 5. Dean Motter/Los Bros Hernandez -- Mr. X #1 ***** Joe Keatinge 1. Jean "Moebius" Giraud, The Airtight Garage 2. Paul Pope, Hugo Pratt's Ballad of Salt Sea 3. art spiegelman, Chester Gould's Dick Tracy: Mrs. Pruneface 4. Ross Campbell, Eastman & Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 5. Howard Chaykin, American Flagg ***** Jamie S. Rich 1. Peter Milligan & Brendan McCarthy, Skin 2. Chris Claremont & John Byrne, Uncanny X-Men #141 & #142 3. Dean Motter & the Hernandez Bros., The Return of Mr. X 4. Mike Mignola & Patrick McEown, Zombieworld: Champion of the Worms 5. Adam Warren, Gen13: Magical Drama Queen Roxy ***** Max Fischer 1. Bizarro World 2. Zooniverse 3. The Fifth Dimension 4. The enclosed continuity of Kyle Baker's Plastic Man 5. Birdland ***** Max Fischer 1. Matt Howarth, Those Annoying Post Bros. 2. Noel Friebert, Extreme Troglodyte Comics 3. Brandon Graham, Multiple Warheads 4. Jim Woodring, Frank 5. Chester Brown, Louis Riel ***** topic suggested by Jamil Thomas; thanks, Jamil! ***** *****

Yesterday's budget should worry Liberal Democrat MPs and activists – it hasn't left them with a lot to tell their supporters

As Patrick Wintour was quick to point out in today's budget coverage, George Osborne's economic timetable has also pencilled in no general election rendezvous with disaffected voters until May 2015 thanks to the coalition's fixed-term parliament wheeze.

Fine, George. I can see how that might work for you and David Cameron, though you are going to need both luck and judgment.

But what's in it for the Lib Dems, one asks yet again in the wake of the 2011 budget and the chancellor's only modest success in painting it as a "fuel in the tank for Britain" event?

It's a good question, which today's newspapers answer fairly unenthusiastically. Wintour notes that Nick Clegg won some points on personal tax allowances over green policy. But he goes on to note – alas, with brutal clarity – that "Clegg has nowhere else to go".

So the deputy PM must await the economic upturn, that elusive resumption of growth about which Tory commentators are as sceptical this morning as the Labour-ish and Keynesian ones. Larry Elliott's doubts about growth are widely shared.

But the Lib Dems must battle on in the here and now, not what Simon Hoggart calls the Shangri-La, which young Osborne promises for later on, complete with Fortnum & Mason rose petal jelly for all.

What can Clegg's MPs tell their supporters this weekend and – important to Cameron, too – tell their voters on 5 May 2011, not 2015?

Let's start with the positive, always the best thing to do. Personal allowances were raised by £630 en route to taking people earning below £10,000 out of income tax – a core Lib Dem pledge.

Fuel duties are being cut a bit – always especially important to rural areas where the Lib Dems are strong; it was a concession the old Liberal party wrung out of Labour during the 1977-78 Lib-Lab pact.

At a more abstract policy level, there's that new floor on carbon prices and the prospect that the party's green investment bank will eventually get off the floor with £3bn of Treasury underpinning.

What's more, the petrol cut – not very green, actually – is being funded by an extra levy on oil production which will be run in tandem with the fuel stabiliser, an honourable attempt to adjust local prices to the rollercoaster of world fluctuations in demand.

So far, so good, albeit modest; it's enough to have enraged the Daily Mail, whose headline – 'The price (we're all paying) to keep the Lib Dems sweet' – sits on top of a sour article complaining that Clegg's anti-poverty tax policies will cost £18bn over a parliament, as if many low-paid Daily Mail readers won't benefit too.

The Mail also highlights Osborne's subsidy for water bills in the Lib Dem south-west – an odd one, to be sure, at one level – except that even the Mail can't blame Clegg for geography.

It has saddled the region (it happens to be my home region) with low local incomes and high water bills to pay for the fact that beaches so vital to the tourism industry must be kept clean and, historically, some of the local reservoirs were in the sky. Rainfall is plentiful, but infrastructure weak and subject to sharply varying seasonal demand.

My complaint about the Lib Dems position since the coalition agreement has been that they were persuaded to embrace the core Tory position on the economy – Osborne's Plan A, which says that sharp financial retrenchment is the best road to recovery – and left to tweak policy on the margins.

We saw it again yesterday. In the process, the Lib Dems can claim that the so-called Learjet tax on private flights is a plus, though it only brings the jetset into line with the airline tax the rest of us pay.

Incidentally, coalition planners hoped to switch that tax from people to planes (especially half-empty ones) until told it would be illegal under international agreements, which can be irritating, but are vital to the global order.

Like a lot of yesterday's budget moves against the rich, that one is pretty puny. Thus Osborne extended Labour's £30,000 levy on seven-year non-dom residents to £50,000 for 12-year stayers, but offered to let them off if they invested that amount in the UK instead.

There are plenty of proposals like this. Osborne boasted of simplifying business and tax regulation, but it didn't sound like that listening to him from the press gallery.

And the City is well placed – few places better – to get its lawyers and accountants finding loopholes. Hark, I hear them hard at work as I type.

So far as I can tell, the moves to help real business start-ups, entrepreneurs, science and people who actually makes things and export them, were mostly positive. Good – it may mean that Vince Cable is still earning his salary.

Lower corporation tax in a competitive world is also necessary and may even yield more income, a Tory policy line that actually works in real life.

And who could begrudge Clegg a bit of pork barrel – one of the 21 new enterprise zones will be in Sheffield – after he made such a poor job of protecting the Sheffield Forgemasters? I just wish he wouldn't be so priggish when other politicians play constituency pork barrel too.

It is also is foolish of some Lib Dems to complain, as the FT reports them doing, that tax breaks for entrepreneurs are wrong or that encouragement to philanthropy by an inheritance tax break (the dead don't benefit, nor do their heirs) is either.

As so often in the days after a budget when people get into the small print, the real downside for the Lib Dems is what their trumpeted gains really mean.

At £12.50 a tonne (£16 by 2013), the carbon floor price, designed to incentivise low carbon energy options, is close to market levels and so may not have the desired impact (which is not much desired by the Mail anyway).

As for the green bank, Fiona Harvey reports widespread dismay – from the CBI as well as the usual green giants – that its powers are limited and its arrival delayed.

Ministers stand accused of watering down their "zero carbon" goal for new housing standards, one of the most useful things any British government could do: lacking severe winters (most years) we leak too much heating from our homes and offices.

Apart from the fact that the first Osborne budget "tax grab" (Patrick Collinson's phrase) is about to clobber most of us when the new tax year starts on 6 April, what worries me most about yesterday's package is what should worry Lib Dem MPs and activists – it will wipe out modest concessions on personal allowances and other benefits.

Namely, the latest switch away from linking tax thresholds and benefit levels to the old RPI, which included housing costs, to the CPI which doesn't and is usually lower. "Osbone accused of stealth tax raid on lowest paid" is the verdict of Rupert Jones in the Guardian.

It's worth £1bn a year to the Treasury even before we start asking what the proposed merger of income tax and national insurance (NICs) will mean. Will, for instance, it mean that the effective starting rate of income tax will be 32% unless a new lower band is introduced? Yes. Would it run all the way up the chain, not be capped around £40,000 as it is now?

If so, it would mean the over-65s, who no longer have to pay NICs, will be caught in a new combined income tax trap, paying 32%, 52% or – the £150,000-plus crowd in Clegg's Hallam constituency – even 62%, higher under the coalition than it was under pre-Thatcher Labour.

Osborne pledged to "review" Alistair Darling's emergency 50% rate, another source of dismay to Lib Dems.

Such questions will start tumbling out as today proceeds and, as ever, the Guardian's Andy Sparrow is live-blogging it here.

But the questions alone should make Lib Dem MPs twitchy, let alone the unfolding answers. Those 5 May elections are but six weeks away.

PS: Where did the P-word go? Osborne used to use that cuddly Lib-Lab word beloved of Gordon Brown, "progressive". Not yesterday.

Think this budget's boring? Its whorehouse economics will titillate big business – even if the rest of us are shafted

Every major budget has a defining moment. For most of the media it was the Ford Focus fuel cut, as the only headline fodder in a pretty boring budget. But there was a much more telling moment, which says everything you need to know about this government's guiding principles. Having hammered the poorest by cutting £18bn from welfare payments, driven up unemployment with its public sector cuts – after it was starting to fall last summer – and given all us working stiffs pay freezes, after-inflation wage cuts and pension contribution hikes, George Osborne's tour de force was a handout to big business, with a 2p corporation tax cut. "Britain," he proudly proclaimed "is open for business."

Which says it all, really. Essentially we have become a whorehouse.

"See, anything you like, sir? How about a couple of hospitals? Maybe a couple of dozen schools? How about a university or two?" Most of our major companies have already gone abroad. Remember those promises on Cadbury jobs? Cast aside like a chocolate bar wrapper. The CEO of Kraft doesn't even deign to turn up to parliamentary hearings on the takeover. After all, they paid good money – this is not a relationship they're in.

So we'll have to put whatever's left on offer to the clients. GP commissioning services, a few failed banks; there might be the odd municipal airport somewhere. Of course we recognise these big corporate spenders have every economic bordello in the world to choose from, so we know we have to offer incentives. How about a massage for those tax-haven profits? Perhaps we can titillate you with an anti-strike deal or excite you with cut in safety provision? What about a bit of class? If you're an Arab dictatorship that needs a bit of social cachet, like Qatar, why not add the horse-racing industry to Harrods and Chelsea Barracks?

Two years ago, the neoliberal model of globalisation pioneered by Margaret Thatcher in the 80s collapsed, with the world economy only saved from slipping into the abyss by the action of sovereign states – led, lest we forget it, by Gordon Brown. We all said never again. But here we are, barely two and a half years later, and we're back where we started. Only this time the cuts have to be even more severe than Thatcher's to feed the appetites of the bankers and corporate barons.

Thatcherism was labelled the economics of the madhouse. Maybe the economics of the whorehouse should be considered an advance. But when they've done the business, don't expect a kiss.

 

Hot on the heels of publishing the results of my guesses for 2010, here are the questions for the new year. My answers are being kept safe and will be revealed in 12 months time.

Who will win the Oldham East by-election on 13th January?
 
Will there be a General Election?
 
Who will be leader of Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Demopcrats?
 
Will Barack Obama come to the Royal Wedding ?
 
Will Catherine, nee Middleton, get pregnant ?
 
Who will be first minister of Scotland after the 5th May election?
 
Will Britain vote for AV changing the way MPs are elected ?
 
Who will be the first Cabinet ministers to resign/be sacked? Who will replace them?
 
Will water cannon be used on demonstrators in mainland Britain ?
 
Will taxes go up or down in the Budget ?
 
How long will the big freeze go on ?
 
Will Ed Miliband get married ?
 
Will Gordon Brown leave parliament ?
 
Will David Cameron start tweeting ?
 
Will the Chilcot Inquiry bring credible closure to Britain’s Iraq wounds?
 
Will General Petraeus still command ISAF in Afghanistan ?
 
Will News Corporation buy all of BSkyB?
 
Will there be military action against Iran ?
 
Will Julian Assange end up in jail in the USA?
 
Will Peter Mandelson go on Strictly Come Dancing?
 
Will Russia or China be a bigger headache  for ‘the West’?