“At last”, says the Daily Mail today. “After two largely insipid weeks”, the Tory election campaign burst into life with the party’s promise to remove family homes worth up to £1m from inheritance tax.
It praises David Cameron for freeing “more and more middle-class families” from “paying a punitive death charge that was intended only for the very wealthy”.
The Daily Express is also delighted by the proposal, claiming that it amounts to “another epic stride forward” for the paper’s “crusade to end inheritance tax”. This is reinforced in an editorial and in an op-ed column by Leo McKinstry.
Boris Johnson, a Tory candidate, devotes his Daily Telegraph column to praise for the idea: “Hooray. Great move, Blue team! At last we are doing something to end the unfairness of a tax that has crept up on countless ordinary families”.
The Times’s editorial welcomes the promise. “Inheritance taxes are rightfully loathed”, it says while pointing out that it is “actually less of a pledge than the one made in the last Conservative manifesto”, which was blocked by the Liberal Democrats in coalition.
And Trevor Kavanagh, the Sun’s associate editor, also greets the proposal. He reminds readers that the party’s similar pledge in 2007 killed off Gordon Brown’s plan for a snap election. He points out that it appeals not only to older voters but also to “inheritors in their 40s and 50s”.
The Sun goes it alone with its main story of the day - on its front page, across two pages inside and an editorial. It concerns its orchestration of “a letter to Sun readers” from 100 small traders (aka “100 hard-working entrepreneurs”).
The burden of the letter is that Labour’s leader Ed Miliband “would be a disaster for business”: “We feel the Conservative party is best placed to continue overseeing the recovery of the economy - while a change to Labour will have a negative impact on British business”.
Its editorial bolsters the point, belabouring “Red Ed” for whose policies that “treat business as some sort of enemy: “For small, medium and large businesses, Labour is the problem, not the solution”.
The central message in both the Times and the Mail is about what the latter calls an injection of passion into the campaign to beat “a left-wing Labour party obsessed with taxing and spending ever more of your money”.
The Times’s splash is even headlined Passionate Cameron outlines his Tory dream and talks of the prime minister having “struck a notably more passionate and optimistic tone” in his inheritance tax speech as he tried “to jump-start his party’s campaign with a more upbeat message”.
And the Daily Star’s main political story is headlined, “Put more passion into it, Cameron!” and claims it reflects a call within the Consercvative party.
What it clearly does reflect is the power of Tory spin doctors to set the agenda in their briefings. Passion was obviously the word whispered to the political correspondents.
Although one of the Mail’s political spreads plugs Cameron’s pledge, PM: I’ll stand up for aspiration, another one leads off with a warning from the Institute for Fiscal Studies that tax proposals by both the Tories and Labour “risk having a ‘longterm malign influence’ on the economy”.
It also headlines the TV interview by Andrew Marr with the chancellor, George Osborne, in which he “repeatedly ducked questions” about how a Tory government would find the extra £8bn it has promised the NHS.
The Telegraph’s choice of splash is interesting: Labour plea to voters: the economy is safe with us. It’s built around the leak of one page of Labour’s manifesto, entitled “Budget Responsibility Lock”.
It reveals that Miliband will “put Labour’s fiscal credibility at the heart of the party’s manifesto” by cutting the deficit every year to get national debt falling and obtain a surplus on the current budget as soon as possible in the next parliament.
The Guardian, here, the Financial Times, here, and the Independent, here, carry similar stories on their front pages.
The Daily Mirror is positively ectastic in running a poster-style front page with Miliband’s picture and the headline, “My pledge”, plus an inside spread.