All politics is slieght of hand...

The Guardian's election coverage [Guardian Unlimited: Election 2005] points to this article by Nick Herbert, one of the shortlist to replace Howard Flight at Arundel and South Downs. The "hot" snippet is this:

"The whisper is that there is a top-secret, extremely clever strategy afoot: go along with spending rises now, but return to a tax-cutting agenda when — if — the party is re-elected. So the repositioning of the Tories is to be based on a lie; a fact that is unlikely to escape the public."

As commentators such as Mathrew Parris have pointed out, hardly anything new here; if you read the whole article it puts the snippet into the context of what probably a majority of Conservative voters think.

What is more interesting is this hardly any different from what Labour did in 1997; expunge the word "redistribution" and publicly commit to stick to the previous Government's spending plans for at least 2 years and not mention all the other juicy plans they had.

Whose fault is it that no one seems to feel they can present their policies in an honest way; the politicians, the media or the voter?