During the whole of that period, and during the subsequent years he spent as editor in chief of Mirror Group newspapers, the dear old Daily Mirror was a by-word for loyalty to the Labour Party. And for Mike – unlike some other Fleet Street editors – keeping it loyal was no hypocritical exercise dictated by a domineering proprietor. When he advised his four million readers to vote Labour, he was only urging them to do what he intended to do himself.

For Mike was brought up by his much loved dad to believe that the Labour Party was the best hope for ordinary people to make a better life for themselves. How do I know this? Because he tells me so in an article in the Daily Mail headlined: “It would break dad’s heart but I’m voting Tory”.

Yes, that’s right: he’s voting Tory and he announces it in the Daily Mail. In my book, that is two outrages for the price of one. I can’t say I find it easy to comprehend either of them, let alone to forgive. But of the two, choosing to trumpet one’s treachery in the most viciously anti-Labour newspaper in the land is the more unforgivable of the two.

Not surprisingly, Molloy does not attempt to explain why he wrote his confession for the Mail rather than, say, seek the rich rewards of writing for Tribune. But I understand that it arose from a paragraph in one of the Mail’s many gossip columns saying that he was planning to vote Tory at the forthcoming election. The Mail’s top brass, who have never been known to miss an opportunity to kick the Labour Party’s backside when an opportunity offers itself, promptly phoned Molloy and asked him to write a piece.

Of course, he could have said no. But he didn’t, and being an accomplished professional he was able to deliver 1,000-or-so highly polished words to run alongside the paper’s leader column. It was accompanied by a strap-line declaring: “In this devastating denunciation, the man who edited the staunchly Labour Daily Mirror for 10 years reveals why he feels so betrayed by the party he loved.”

In fact, the “devastating denunciation” directed by Molloy at “new” Labour is pretty impressive, –and some of it might have been lifted from my previous column. Taken as a whole, it might amount to a persuasive case (although it doesn’t persuade me) for not voting Labour next time round. Indeed, I have many friends who have allowed their membership of the Labour Party to lapse, and a number who have told me they won’t be voting Labour again.

However, not voting Labour is one thing – some of my defecting friends cheerfully justify voting Liberal Democrat or Green. But voting Tory is another thing entirely and Molloy does not even try to explain how he made that huge leap from a lifelong position on the progressive wing of politics to active support for the party of wealth and privilege.

But if he offers no overt explanation, there is a hint at his real motive. After a slightly pompous passage in which he declares that it is “a measure of our civilisation as to how compassionately we respond to those in our society who need help,” he goes on to suggest that “the liberal establishment” blames the middle classes for inequality and seeks to punish them with “ever higher taxes”.

Compassion or no compassion, I think that means Mike Molloy doesn’t like paying his taxes. And if you don’t like paying your taxes, there is only one party to vote for, isn’t there?

Molloy rounds off this section of his argument with the following sentence: “The truth is that Old Labour principles of fairness and equality and support for the working classes seem to have evaporated under this Government.” While there may be a smidgen of truth in this, the point seems strangely inappropriate to the case he has just made. Does he really think that a government of wealthy Bullingdon Club members will better serve the principles of fairness and equality and support for the working classes?

I hope old John Molloy, Mike’s dad, hurries back from the other side to put his foolish boy right about that. But he will be a bit late – the 69-year-old lad has already publicly endorsed his local Tory candidate in Ealing. Yuck.

* * *

I found Tony Blair’s appearance at the Chilcot enquiry scary. His 58 mentions of Iran when he was supposed to be talking about Iraq left little doubt that he would be up for a spot of regime change in Teheran,  were he still in Number 10

The frightening thing is that, in his role as Middle East “peacemaker”, he probably knows a lot that we don’t know about American-Israeli intentions in the Gulf. Let’s hope Barack Obama and Gordon Brown aren’t as gung ho as George W Bush and Blair were.

The fact is that we can only comprehend a small range of numbers. It’s like only knowing the first six letters of the alphabet. All those financial figures that engulf us are impenetrable. They disappear into meaninglessness after four digits.

We all know what a tenner looks like. It furnishes a few scoops, a visit to the cinema or even a newspaper offer for dinner at a posh restaurant where you can be patronised for showing a voucher rather than an interest in the wine list. I’d say most of us still have a fair grip of a pony and can contemplate a wedge. I’ve had hold of three-and-a-half grand in used fivers, money I slipped to an Australian in exchange for a camper van with dodgy plates. But much more than that, and it all gets vague. It just becomes a shedful.

So we turn off when someone tells us they’re going to put billions more into the National Health Service. You know Labour would quite like to if it were convenient and that the Tories think it sounds good, but won’t. The actual figures are too big to think about. Like the national debt. Do we care if it’s £870 billion? Not me. If we owed a couple of grand, I’d support an effort to repay it.

But more than a billion is too much to contemplate.

The media shows splendid contempt for figures. John Humphrys began a Today programme piece on Haiti the other

morning asking: “How many are dead in this latest earthquake? Hundreds? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? We don’t know. “

And then, having conceded his total ignorance, he proceeded to pontificate about how bad it would be if the worst of these “unsubstantiated reports” happened to be true before conducting a series of interviews based on his lack of knowledge. It confirms that figures don’t matter.

My tax form’s another good example. The Inland Revenue don’t write to me and say: “This is how much tax you’ll have to pay.” They send me some figures. “You have been assessed as a 636L”, they tell me. The number means nothing to me. To be fair, they always tell me I can challenge the decision, and I always do. So they reassess it and, a few months later, they write back to tell me I’m now a 637D. I have no idea if I’ve got a better or worse deal. I still wallow in primeval mathematical sludge.

This is the power of the imprecision of numbers. They affect precision while telling me nothing.

Crime statistics are another favourite. A shock announcement says that crime has gone down by 3 per cent. It’s an interesting figure, but it’s meaningless. It has no significance. I don’t think: “That’s good, crime’s gone down. I’ll nip down to the supermarket today while I’m safe, rather than risking next week’s figures.”

Numbers are vague in all kinds of contexts. For example, the number of people in your union’s membership is susceptible to enormous variation. Like most figures, it depends who’s asking. Counting is not an exact science. A union can have almost half a million members when its general secretary appears on Question Time, a quarter of a million at the TUC and half this number when it’s a matter of paying affiliation fees based on membership to outside organisations.

I’m pleased to see that Harriet Harman has begun to share my suspicion of numbers and statistics. She was busy last week discounting the figures thrown up by her brainchild, the National Equality Panel. The NEP had the nerve to drone on about the richest 10 per cent of the population being 100 times as wealthy as the poorest.

This was not to Hattie’s taste. She was bullish and talked that way if you add a “t” to the mix. She dismissed the figures to the extent that she concluded the Government needed to “sustain” its action. What? Keep going? So the gap can get even wider and Peter Mandelson can become even more intensely relaxed?

We even go to war on the basis of vague numbers. Like: “We are going to war because the Iraqis have a lot of weapons of mass destruction’. “How many exactly?” “A number between nil and a million.’ Well, that seems precise enough to commence mass slaughter.

The point is that, if numbers are so hugely unreliable, why do we have a national obsession with measuring everything? There are more people in education measuring performance than there are teaching. The police force has more statisticians than coppers. We’re blinded with so much bogus information that we’ve no idea what’s happening.

The only conclusion is that figures say nothing and measuring is bunkum. And that isn’t just a personal view. It is shared by 65 per cent of the population, almost 50 million people, of whom 32 per cent have committed a crime, 68 per cent failed their SATs and 22 per cent, like obsessive measuring, have passed the number on their sell-by date.

Over the past decade, we have built on that universal support for all families: there have been significant increases in child benefit, the winter fuel allowance and the state pension, which will soon be linked again to earnings.

We have created a new pillar of our welfare state for the 21st century – Sure Start – which is open to all families with young children regardless of income. And the free nursery places we have introduced for three and four-year-olds are another universal entitlement.

Alongside this, our welfare state rightly gives extra support to those who need it most. Labour’s child and working tax credits support those on both low and middle incomes – with more for those who need it most while ensuring that moving into employment pays. The same is true of pension credit, which we designed to ensure it helps the poorest pensioners most but does not penalise those who have saved.

It’s only through this combination of universal support for all families and targeted support – what we call progressive universalism – that we have been able to lift half a million children and almost a million pensioners out of poverty.

We could not have raised child benefit for all by as much as we raised child tax credit, but nor could we ensure that every family or every pensioner who needed support got it unless we continued to invest in universal benefits, too.

But over recent weeks and months, the idea of such a progressive universal welfare state has come under attack.

Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats have long had a policy of cutting tax credits for all but those on the lowest incomes and abolishing child trust funds altogether. Now they’ve been joined by the Tories. Under the cover of their plan to cut the deficit deeper and faster, their “age of austerity” agenda would see child trust funds, tax credits and Sure Start cut so that they are only available to those on the lowest incomes.

As George Osborne has set out, tax credits would be taken away from families where a working couple earn just £16,000 each. Child trust funds would be abolished for all but the poorest families – those on less than £16,000 a year.

And Sure Start would no longer be a universal service, but one to help the poorest families only. David Cameron says he wants to go back to the earliest days of Sure Start when it was only available to some families in some communities. He says this is to take Sure Start back to its “original purpose”.

However, as one of those who was part of the Treasury team which created Sure Start, our intention was always to roll out Sure Start to be a universal service available to all families with young children in every community.

The Tory plans are a deeply retrograde step which hark back to the days when we ghettoised support for the poor.

Tory outriders in right-wing think tanks – with their calls for universal child benefit to be abolished – give a flavour of where the debate in the Conservative Party is going.

But it is a debate we can and should be confident of winning. Since the launch of David Cameron’s airbrushed billboards at the start of the year, we have finally seen Conservative policies come under the scrutiny they deserve.

And as people begin to digest what the Conservatives are proposing, it’s not just the voters that are getting increasingly worried. The Tories are also concerned that under the daily pressure of an election campaign, as the media begin to ask the tough questions and in the forthcoming television debates, David Cameron and George Osborne will be found wanting.

After all, in just a few short weeks we have seen incoherence and confusion on a range of flagship Tory policies – from marriage tax breaks to how quickly spending should be cut this year.

That’s why Labour MPs in marginal seats echo what I’ve been hearing on the doorsteps in my own constituency over recent weeks. People are starting to ask whether they want to gamble everything on Cameron and Osborne. Will they really be on the side of families like mine? What will happen to the economy under the Tories? And what about neighbourhood policing, local schools and children’s centres?

So, in the coming weeks, there is all to play for and there’s so much at stake – from economic recovery and expanding educational opportunity to the support millions of families rely on. And yes, the very principles of our progressive welfare state, too – because we’re all in this together – although not if David Cameron and George Osborne get their way.

Ed Balls is a Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families and Labour and Co-operative MP for Normanton

I can’t help but wonder how the gap might be narrower had Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt, the Goon and Blewitt of “new” Labour, hadn’t temporarily thrust into reverse the political recovery early last month with their ridiculous “snow plot”. I suspect the full murky picture of that episode, including the involvement of very senior Cabinet ministers, won’t be painted until after the general election. Should Labour be pipped at the post, followed by Cameron squeaking into Downing Street from where he’d unleash hell on working people who rely on a Labour government, the Labour Party has a duty to remember who to blame. Labour’s Militant moderate tendency – Blairite Trots who predict defeat then recklessly seek to turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy – must not escape their share of responsibility. The Labour left has behaved impeccably. If anything, it has been too loyal.

Yet what’s most striking in Westminster is the visible loss of confidence in the Conservative Party, the swagger evaporating as doubts creep in. To fail to win an overall majority after the deepest recession for 80 years would be a humiliation for Cameron. The Tory leader who confessed he “messed-up” on handouts for married couples suddenly doesn’t know whether he’s cutting or spending. A European referendum isn’t the only cast-iron guarantee rusting badly as the harsh glare of sustained scrutiny exposes the lack of substance behind the spin.

The showdown in May deserves to be decided on the substance of policies, but it’s pointless to deny the importance of personalities. Here, too, the Conservatives

are in trouble. The intention of the spinners in the Millbank Tower Labour occupied in 1997 was to run a presidential campaign – to present Cameron as the Tony Blair of 2010. Clifford Singer’s brilliant poster-mocking MyDavidCameron.com website cruelly exposed the weakness of the strategy. Any last vestiges of a mystique protecting Cameron – the idea that here was a new and serious potential Prime Minister– disappeared as he was turned into a national figure of fun.

Buller Boys hurt when they’re the butt of ribaldry. The £500,000 billboard blitz, with its airbrushed photo of a tie-less Cameron, now symbolises the vacuity of economic and political thinking he’s seeking to ditch publicly. The focus groups are telling him that an electorate which may think debt needs cutting is equally fond of the services and benefits the borrowing funds.

And with the Cameron card dog-eared, no longer a trump to beat Labour, the Conservatives have little else in the pack. One of the best MyDavidCameron.com re-mixes substituted Tory guff on “cutting the deficit not the NHS” with, next to Cameron’s face, the words: “George…Osborne? No, can’t say it rings a bell”. The Shadow Chancellor’s recognised internally as a liability, a vote-loser. He’s not the only one. The Tory team is so substandard that its members are kept largely in the shadows to avoid frightening the voters. Chris Grayling, Theresa May, Eric Pickles, Liam Fox – these politicians are not vote winners.

Asked to name popular members of his frontbench, Cameron identified William Hague and Ken Clarke before running out of names. The only Tory with genuine widespread support, that professional jester Boris Johnson, wasn’t mentioned by Cameron because the two detest one another. Cameron resents being overshadowed. Johnson humiliated his junior in the Buller, but Cameron is now his senior in the Tory Party.

To be a one-man band is a potentially fatal weakness for the Tory Party, when Cameron is off-tune and hitting the wrong note when he blows his own trumpet.

Watching last Sunday night’s Channel 4 drama on Mo Mowlam was to be reminded of how Labour fought the 1997 general election with a cast of politicians reasonably well known to the British public. They included Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, John Prescott, Robin Cook, Peter Mandelson, David Blunkett, Jack Straw, Margaret Beckett and, of course, Mighty Mo herself. Some I respected, a few I liked and admired. Labour, however, indisputably put on the pitch 13 years ago a team the Conservatives are unable to match.

The lexicon of political soundbites includes the cliché about oppositions not winning elections, governments losing them. Well, Labour’s stopped losing and the Conservatives aren’t winning. If Brown matches fear of the Tories with positive reasons to vote Labour, he’ll be the comeback kid. I know – I sometimes can’t believe it myself.

There remains something distinctly old school about London’s 100 club, located in a basement on Oxford street. Fitting then that this famous venue should play host to Saint Jude, fronted by singer Lynne Jackaman. Wearing ‘spray-on’ leather-look leggings, Jackaman, petite beneath unkempt blonde tresses, looks every inch an old school ‘rock chick’. Fortunately for the crowd she sings the part as well as she looks. When Jackaman opens her mouth to sing Soul on Fire the audience surges towards the stage: it’s going to be a steamy night with more than a few surprises thrown in.

The first is Jackaman’s voice. Though she moves like a less awkward Janis Joplin her voice has more than a touch of Tina Turner during Turner’s Phil Spector-era prime about it. But Jackaman is not simply a belter, as she proves on The Way I Love You, a gorgeous track ground out with furious intensity by her all male 4 strong band, led by guitarist Adam Greene.

When she speaks, Jackaman sounds like any other polite young lady from the suburbs, but when she fills her lungs to sing, the sound can be very rude indeed. The only complaint I hear from the old blues-man swaying next to me is that the sound is not loud enough. I yell back into his one good ear that it sounds loud enough to me.

Despite the threat that mayhem might take hold at any moment, Jackaman retains complete control of the situation, and of her audience, never more so than on the bluesy ballad, Down and Out, sung in a voice which teeters on just the right side of heartache. At times there is an almost ecstatic, other-worldly quality to her performance, when you begin to wonder if she knows exactly where she is. And then to remind her that she’s actually in subterranean London on a wet weekend a legend enters the building, in the form of Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood. Seemingly anxious to forget about his well-documented domestic discord, Wood listens appreciatively for a few moments before seizing a guitar and taking to the stage. Lesser performers might be forgiven for a bit of a wobble in the presence of such rock n roll royalty but Saint Jude play on as if sharing a stage with a Rolling Stone is an everyday occurrence. And who knows, on this form one day it might just become one.

This is music as it should be, but all too often is not. Raw, powerful and compelling, but surprisingly graceful, thanks in no small part to Jackaman.  Saint Jude are embryonic superstars. If you like your rock n roll down n dirty, catch them while you can. With new CD, Diary of a Soul Fiend out soon it could be many years before they play such intimate venues again. Just ask Ronnie Wood.

Cary Gee

Recently, I joined a fascinating round table discussion on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour with Tory blogger Iain Dale and Fawcett Society director Ceri Goddard on women’s votes. The event marked the launch of the programme’s “Winning Women’s Votes” campaign.

It is a mark of how far we have come in our political democracy that the issue of women’s votes is now a question of national concern for politicians. Last year, we marked 80 years since women’s equal suffrage and it is 50 years since women were first allowed to be members of the House of Lords. Women are finally at the starting line of the general election and our votes will be increasingly in focus.

But the issue for Labour is not just about winning women’s votes. It is about keeping them. It is widely recognised that the swing of women’s votes to Labour were a major contribution to the party’s general election victories in 1997, 2001 and 2005. Opinion polls have shown that women’s voting intentions have been shifting to the Conservatives, with a growing gender gap. According to polling by MORI in 2005 women of all social groups were more likely than men to vote Labour. If women alone had voted at the 2005 election, Labour’s majority would have been closer to 90.

The picture of women’s votes over the past two years has been fascinating. Before Tony Blair’s departure, women were already moving away from Labour. Initially, women responded positively to Gordon Brown, before moving away from Labour through 2008. The situation now may be too close to call. While polls fluctuate enormously, we seem to have a situation emerging where younger women’s votes in particular are moving away from Labour – not necessarily to the Tories, but to a position of “Don’t know”.

It’s quite likely that the winning party at the 2010 election is going to be the one whose message reaches women, particularly younger women. Currently, the Tories may be ahead in this race – not because they are better for women, but they have begun more effectively to address the softer side of political communications that makes politics seem more engaging for women. An example of this is the care taken with David Cameron’s image. The Tory leader has his own photographer, so that pictures taken show him in the best possible light. His public relations skills should ensure that he is effective at selling his a message – whether or not there is substance to it.

The Tories talk about measures to increase the number of Conservative women MPs. Their party may have fundamental disagreements on any positive action measures, including the stance on all-women shortlists, but at least they are talking about women and that gives the impression of change.

However, scratch deeper and the Tories offer very little to women that will be transformative in terms of their life opportunities and the key issues that affect them. The Tories may have committed to a minister for women, but it is not likely that she will be in the inner circle with real influence or power. Will the Tories address equal pay? Will they give serious support to childcare? Would they extend parents’ options around maternity and paternity pay? What about tackling the major social issue of domestic violence? The marriage tax allowance – about which Cameron is unsure whether to say “I do” or “I don’t” – would simply benefit the most secure relationships, encourage fake marriages and stigmatise many single parents (more than 90 per cent of whom are women), who, often through no fault of their own, are left trying to secure their own future, as well as that of their children.

While the polling statistics may suggest Labour faces a huge challenge, the party can take heart when it comes to women. Research by YouGov for the Fabian Society’s life chances project showed that women more consistently than men think that pensioners should not be in poverty, children from low-income households should have same chance as those from high income ones, that there should be a basic living wage, that everyone should have access to high quality healthcare, that all children should have access to a good local school, that no one should experience discrimination because of their gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, class, religion or race. Women’s values are aligned with Labour’s values – and Labour must fight to make its case.

What more can the party do? Three things can make a big difference in attracting women to vote. First, women are more likely to vote for a female candidate, regardless of political allegiance. So, where there’s a female candidate, she needs to be highly visible. If there is not a woman candidate, it is essential to ensure a strong female presence in the campaign.

Second, we need an inclusive style of politics – one driven by belief and passion, not just fact and argument. Emotional engagement and authenticity play a huge part in engaging women – who tend to be very discerning when it comes to the elections.

Third, politics needs to become personal – about the things that matter to ordinary people. The message to the public cannot be delivered in the language of think-tanks. Political direction and priorities need to be communicated in ways that resonate with people’s everyday lives.

When we understand and share our core values, women are more aligned with Labour. However, the way we engage with women, particularly younger women, needs to be inviting. When talking to a local Fabian Society meeting recently about the women’s vote, I was struck by the existence of another gender gap – the wish is there to engage women in local party activity and political debate in a different and more inclusive way, but the understanding of how to do so is limited. The principles are simple, although the championing of them needs to be far more challenging. It is essential go to where women are, at times and places convenient to them. And don’t just go with something to say. Be prepared to listen.

Image matters. too. It’s no secret that, before the 1997 election, senior men in the Labour Party were “Folletted” – told how to dress better and present themselves by Barbara Follett, who co-founded Emily’s List and the Labour Women’s Network. All the things that Cameron and his team are learning, Labour seems in danger of forgetting. “Folletting” feminised Labour’s style – and the party was a better team for it.

So, as well as taking heart from the strong potential to keep women’s votes, Labour must also take note. A male-dominated campaign that does not give genuine visibility to Labour’s women (and with 98 women MPs compared to the Tories’ 18, Labour should have no trouble) or present policies in ways that seem and feel personal to women, but are delivered in the language of Whitehall and Westminster, could have disastrous consequences. Labour risks getting the argument right but the message wrong – and so risks losing women’s votes. The result would be a huge setback for progress.

As someone who has grown up under “new” Labour, through university years, a private sector career, trade union and community activism, think-tank membership and standing as election candidate, I count myself incredibly lucky to have had a Labour Government and the sense of security for family and society which goes with it. I believe that Labour is the party for women’s interests. But in not making its case in an inclusive, informative and personal political style – with women hearing it from women, as well as from men – Labour could end up snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Seema Malhotra is director of the Fabian Women’s Network

In the run-up to the general election, all eyes are on the opinion polls. They play an important part in any campaign. Don’t believe politicians who say they never pay any attention to them. They all do – obsessively. Good polls lift activists and poor polls depress them. But polls can be confusing in what they tell us –and what they don’t.

Newspapers, particularly local ones, public relations companies with something to sell, campaign groups and even political parties are notorious for putting out phoney polls. Questioning the first 20, 50 or 100 people encountered outside the office or – even worse – selected from an email address book, provides no useful measure of public opinion. The same goes for focus groups, which are good for getting a flavour of what the public is thinking, but no more.

Polls can be conducted face-to-face (increasingly rare), by phone (the most usual method) or online (a growing trend, as it’s quick and cheap). At one time, academic experts and polling companies only regarded face-to-face polls as reliable, but there is now substantial evidence that telephone and online polling can give equally reliable results, if they are properly conducted.

The sample size has to be large enough (1,000 is regarded as the minimum to measure opinion nationally), respondents must be selected to reflect the whole population and the questions must be worded neutrally.

Pollsters then “re-weight” the results – this is what makes polling more an art than a science. Re-weighting involves ensuring that the sample more or less reflects the broad political and social make-up of the country. The number of those who said they voted Labour, Conservative and so on at the previous election should accurately reflect the number who actually did. If, for example, the sample contains too many people who said they voted Labour in 2005, their responses are adjusted downwards to reflect the real result. Thus pollsters can ensure their figures reflect how opinion has changed since 2005.

Polls don’t predict, pollsters do. Polls don’t tell you who is actually going to win an election. They ask: “If there was an election tomorrow, how would you vote?” But there isn’t an election tomorrow and how people might vote in three months might be different from their current intentions

Although people tell pollsters that they definitely intend to vote, many don’t. And people don’t always tell pollsters the truth. It’s not that they deliberately lie, but they sometimes give what they think is the most socially acceptable answer.

Finally, the percentage share of the vote doesn’t decide who gets into Downing Street – only seats in the House of Commons do and there’s a less than perfect fit between the two. The current conventional wisdom is that, because of the distortions of our electoral system, the Tories need a lead of around 10 per cent to ensure a majority of one. But that assumes an even swing to the Conservatives across the country, while the Tories are banking on doing better in their targeted marginal seats. Like so much else, whether they are right will become clear on May 7 – probably.

Ivor Gaber is professor of political campaigning and reporting at City University London. He will be writing regularly about the election campaign over the coming months