Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrat leader, on Monday held open the prospect of talks with David Cameron in a hung parliament after he said that a commitment to electoral reform was not a "precondition" to any deal.

Mr Clegg said it was vital that all parties worked together to address Britain's £163bn deficit and warned Mr Cameron that he would be taking grave risks if he attempted to do it alone.

"I think that's a recipe for profound political and social tensions," he told the Financial Times, arguing that a minority Tory administration would have to reach out to other parties.

It's none of your business. How you will vote is none of my business. This country cannot proceed along any lines that make sense or promise hope unless we can all get along no matter how we vote and unless we respect the primacy of the secret ballot. Having said which, open and free discussion of the people, parties and policies up for consideration is all part of democracy too.

Every election has its FFS moment. That's the point when normal politics is disrupted by an event so stupid it makes me swear at the telly a lot. The FFS moment is usually something that's got nothing to do with the issues and everything to do with the media being so bored that they suddenly get very very excited indeed over something like Labour's Party Political Broadcast about Jennifer's ear in 1992 (remember that?) or John Prescott thumping someone for having the audacity to wear a mullet in 2002. These moments when they happen are often described as the "defining" moment of the campaign, generate a lot of headlines and then go on to have no influence on the eventual outcome whatsoever.

I thought this election was going to be different. The seriousness of the financial meltdown that is its background noise, coupled with the dominant and obviously historic position of the live televised debates within it, seemed to be enough to feed the media beast. The closeness in the polls, and Clegg's sudden rise to the role of Kingmaker Apparent (remember that?) was all the excitement we needed.

Labour's Ed Balls and Peter Hain have backed tactical voting in marginal seats to "keep the Tories out".

Schools Secretary Ed Balls told the New Statesman that he always wanted Labour to win but recognised there was "an issue" in Lib Dem/Tory marginals.

But Gordon Brown told GMTV he did not back tactical voting and wanted people to "vote Labour" .

The Lib Dems called it "desperate". David Cameron said it showed voting Lib Dem vote could keep Mr Brown as PM.

In other election developments on Tuesday:

• Gordon Brown tells GMTV he will take "full responsibility" for Labour's election performance
• Mr Brown, Mr Cameron and Nick Clegg visit seats across Britain
• Mr Cameron's visit to Northern Ireland is back on again - flights had been grounded due to volcanic ash

Ipsos-Mori saying 36 pc of voters in marginals still 'undecided' . normally 10pc undecided on the day -- amongst my friends, I'd say higher

Rumours reach me of TV cameras waiting outside the offices of #philippastroud

A Channel 4 survey reveals that people cannot recall specific policies set out in the TV debates.

The survey's results were revealed in Dispatches: Election Uncovered, in which journalist Ben Laurance asks how democratic our election system really is.

All figures in the survey are from YouGov Plc for Dispatches. The total sample size was 2,351 adults. Fieldwork was undertaken between 29 April and 1 May 2010. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all GB adults aged 18 and over.

As we enter the last few days of the election campaign, this survey reveals that:

The majority cannot recall specific policies set out by each leader during the debates: 67% could not recall Labour policies; 56% could not recall Lib Dem policies; 63% could not recall Conservative policies.

(Seriously, I have missed what date it is.)

A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!

A leading constitutional expert has warned that plans for a 'Tory coup' - in which David Cameron declares himself Prime Minister - would bring the Conservative party into direct conflict with Buckingham Palace.

Professor Stephen Haseler, professor of government at London Metropolitan University and director of the Global Policy Institute, said:

"This plan is a direct challenge to the role of the Queen. It will put the Tory party on a collision course with the monarchy."

"The monarch, under our constitution, must wait until the outgoing Prime Minister has advised her to appoint his successor. This convention is designed to avoid the Queen being maneouvred by politicians."

"Cameron's coup would not only embarass the Queen and draw her into political controversy, it would also raise serious questions about the future of the monarchy."

This Thursday the Brits vote in their general elections, and most recent polls suggest the Conservatives--with the decline of Prime Minister Gordon Brown--now hold a slim lead. Another indicator: the endorsements made by Britain's top national papers this past weekend.

On the eve of Thursday's general election, text messages will be sent out to the Britons who have agreed to the scheme, instructing them which political party their 'partner' in Afghanistan wants to vote for.

The Give Your Vote project aims to drive democracy outside UK borders, in a "symbolic gesture" of global equality.

"There are local elections for local decisions, national elections for national ones, but no global elections for global decisions", said May Abdalla of Egality, which runs the project and is manned by a dozen volunteer aid workers, researchers and documentary makers.

Since last week, support for the Lib Dems has fallen back in many regions - particularly in the North East and the East Midlands - however, they have held firm in some areas of the country

The latest regional voting intention data from PoliticsHome and YouGov shows the Liberal Democrats falling back across the country, although they are still in a strong position in many regions.

The threat to many of Labour's heartland seats, especially in the North East where Nick Clegg's party were poised to win Newcastle Central, Newcastle North and Newcastle East last week, has receded. The Liberal Democrats have dropped six points in the region in the last week, while Labour have gained five.

@jonsnowC4 Strange Cameron cancelling interview with C4news..he'd agreed for 23rd April then postponed to yesterday now cancelled mmm

So we'll see where he turns up having avoided one of the harder questionings he would have received during the campaign

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

Despite accusations of Conservative complacency in this election campaign, the party has put a great deal of effort into planning what happens if parliament is hung and they are some way short of an overall majority.

Here is what has emerged as the Tory plan:

* Declare victory anyway.

* Have the party's media allies strain every sinew to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.

* Insist on being given the keys to No 10 without having to talk substantively to any other party first - to avoid a coalition or any substantive policy concessions.

* Make a partisan challenge to the civil service in seeking to overturn any existing constitutional convention or practice that might conceivably get in the way, or even slow this down a little.

* Threaten to drag the monarchy into political controversy for partisan advantage by challenging the conventions designed precisely to avoid this.

* Hold out against electoral reform, whatever the election result.

* Threaten apocalyptic political and financial meltdown if anybody disagrees.

Hilarious goings-on at Granada TV in Manchester tonight, where strangely ITV had agreed to host Labour's big election rally with Gordon Brown and his Cabinet.

At one point a workman was seen unscrewing a big sign with the ITV logo. In the studio itself studio-hands were told to replace their T-shirts which had ITV logos.

Funniest of all my BBC reporter colleagues have been asked to do their pieces to camera so that the Granada TV sign is not in view.

I am told that at one point a flustered Granada manager came out and said to the TV crews something to the effect of "Archie Norman doesn't want to be associated with the fact that the Labour Party is using the studio".

In the absence of a three leader debate on Channel 4, Messrs Clegg, Brown and Cameron pledged to do wide-ranging individual interviews with me for Channel 4 news. 
 
Interviews with Mr Clegg and Mr Brown duly took place on the agreed dates.

You may have heard me billing them as "the first" and "the second of three interviews with the main party leaders".
 
Obviously, we try hard to be fair to all the parties, but in this case I'm afraid we won't be able to deliver on that promised third interview.

Yglesias is right. For sure, Gordon Brown -- like the Rubinites here in America -- made the great mistake of buying into the promises of high finance. But is there any doubt that a Tory government would have done the same?

And I understand the sense that Labour has been in office too long. If I were British, I might well consider voting Lib Dem.

"David Cameron is an idiot. A simpering, say-anything, dough-faced, preposterous waddling idiot with a feeble, insincere voice and an irritating tendency to squat near the top of opinion polls. I don't like him. And I've got a terrible feeling he'll be prime minister one day. Brrr." (Charlie Brooker, 2007.)

Brrr indeed. With just a few days until the general election, the prospect of "Call me Dave" running the country seems almost inevitable. Almost

She makes no speeches on the hustings; she remains aloof from the political fray. She admits no party affiliation and is not permitted to vote or stand for office. Yet, she addresses Parliament with bejeweled and regular fanfare; for more than half a century, she has held  secret conversations with a cavalcade of 11 prime ministers; and, in a peculiarly British way, she could be cast in a central, yet largely powerless, role if Britain's elections on Thursday stray into the gray zone known as a hung Parliament.

Queen Elizabeth II was  crowned as Britain's sovereign in 1953 -- a time when Winston S. Churchill was Prime Minister of England and Dwight D. Eisenhower was President of the United States.

And often enough since then her role has seemed ceremonial -- touring far-flung outposts of onetime colonies (the United States, for instance), receiving state visitors at Buckingham Palace (George W. Bush, for example), shaking hands, nodding politely, asking non-intrusive questions: "and what do you do?" she is said to inquire when she meets her subjects.

The Conservatives are committed to replacing the Human Rights Act 1998 with a British Bill of Rights.

But what does this actually mean?

Tories say privately they are not where they wanted or expected to be in the polls, says the Beeb man on the Cameron bus

This is a dispatch from David Cameron's Britain, the country that could be waiting for us at the other end of the polling booths and the soundbites and the spin. I didn't have to take a time machine to get there; I just had to take the District Line. In 2006, a group of rebranded "compassionate Conservatives" beat Labour for control of Hammersmith and Fulham Council, a long stretch of west London. George Osborne says the work they have done since then will be a "model" for a new Conservative government, while Cameron has singled them out as a council he is especially "proud" of. So squeezed between the brownish dapple of the Thames and the smoggy chug of the Westway, you can find the Ghost of Cameron Future. What is it whispering to us?

The Tories should invite the IMF to provide blunt advice about how to cut the scale of the budget deficit, leaving the party able, if necessary, to row back on unaffordable promises to safeguard spending and cut taxes, according to senior bankers and economists.

Bob Janjuah, chief markets strategist at the Royal Bank of Scotland, told a group of German bankers and fund managers in Berlin that the plan would involve the IMF performing a "technical audit" of Britain's public finances, rather than lending any emergency cash to Britain, as it currently is in Greece.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies warned earlier this week that the spending cuts currently planned by the Conservatives are even deeper than those initiated by the IMF in the 1970s, and could be the harshest since the Second World War. Days later Mervyn King, the Bank of England Governor, was reported to have warned that whichever party won the election would soon find itself ejected from power "for a generation" because of the scale of the spending reductions that it will have to imposed.

1337: You can't please everybody, it seems, even when you work right through the night. When David Cameron and his entourage met junior school children in Calverton, Nottinghamshire, one pupil blurted out: "You all smell of fish." Clearly, the tell-tale signs of that earlier visit to the fish market in Grimsby are still lingering.

'You can't talk about immigration'. I seem to be hearing this phrase all the damn time lately.

Isn't the world a strange place sometimes. I could have sworn that a huge amount of time this election has been spent talking about immigration. I was absolutely certain that both TV debates featured all three leaders arguing about who had the toughest approach to immigration. I was even pretty sure one of the debates was supposed to be about international affairs, not domestic affairs like immigration. I was pretty certain that the BNP and UKIP centre their entire political ideology around immigration, whilst the Conservative Party are planning to introduce a cap on immigrants, Labour are creating a Australian-style points-based system and the Liberal Democrats are creating an amnesty for illegal immigrants whilst peppering new arrivals to emptier parts of the country.

I was pretty certain that the Daily Mail runs huge amounts of stories about immigration, as does the Express, the Sun and other tabloid newspapers. These tabloids and some of the broadsheets also point out that if we reach a population of 70million because of immigration bad things will happen and life in Britain may well end. Immigration, immigration, immigration. One of the key issues of this election. Everyone is talking about it. When prospective and current PMs go on Radio 1 it is the main issue that young voters want to bring up. As far as I can perceive: everyone wants to know what is going to be done about immigration, and they are not shy to talk about it.

Protestors were involved in a scrum while Conservative leader David Cameron was visiting a factory in East Renfrewshire.

Mr Cameron had not long arrived at Linn Products in Waterfoot when a small group of people from Right to Work tried to storm through doors on Tuesday evening.

The protestors, carrying banners with the slogan 'Tax the Fat Cats' were then involved in a scuffle with Special Branch officers who were standing near by.

SIXTEEN Page 3 Girls in all their glory represent the very image of freedom in this country.

But if Labour or the Lib Dems win the election, this could be the last time they are allowed to pose together.

MPs Harriet Harman and Lynne Featherstone will move swiftly to change the law and ban Page 3 forever.

Tom Whipple at The Times has an unusual take on the Conservatives' plans for a national voluntary youth service. He writes: "For Mr Cameron's plans to work - for teenagers really to learn leadership and responsibility - they must be allowed to make mistakes. As a corollary our society must accept an absolute certainty: children will die. And that is a good thing. Young people must confront danger.

My Bold Boggle

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

Imagine the headline in The Sun on Friday: `Number 10 war: Brutal prime-ministerial battle after election draw'.
 
Imagine a close election, a flailing centre left leader facing a 20 per cent poll deficit which is whittled down as polling day approaches partly by the emergence of a new political force. The result? A hung parliament where the conservatives get four more seats than the centre-left.

It did happen, in Germany, in 2005. Gerhard Schroder was the SPD's ageing bruiser who all but fought Angela Merkel's CDU/CSU to a draw. The headline was `Kanzler-Krieg' from the tabloid Bild.

One the eve of the general election, our exclusive Twitter analysis of political sentiment shows that while the latest opinion polls point to a late rally by Gordon Brown's Labour Party, users of the micro-blogging site still favour Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats over the other two main parties.

US market research firm Crimson Hexagon (on behalf of Reuters.co.uk) has been archiving all tweets on British politics since March 22 and analysing them for positive and negative sentiment. All parties have had their ups and downs, most notably in the aftermath of the first leaders' debate (which led to a spike in support for the LibDems and the hashtag #iagreewithnick trending on Twitter) and Gordon Brown's "bigot" gaffe in Rochdale,which gave us the highest percentage of negative tweets for any party during the campaign.

The leafleting and press advertising campaign against a hung Parliament by the Young Britons' Foundation has run into a mini-blizzard of legal queries and complaints

Given at least one newspaper advertisement today and how widespread the leafleting campaign has been (as partly documented by Paul Walters), including several reports that at least some of the leafleting is being carried out by paid-for delivery firms, it is extremely likely that the YBF has incurred costs in excess of the £10,000 limit.

However, whilst this would require registration as a "third party" with the Commission, and the Young Britons' Foundation Chief Executive Donal Blaney told me earlier in the day that, "I confirm that YBF is registered as a recognised third party", according to the Electoral Commission, who I spoke to subsequently, the Young Britons' Foundation is not currently registered.

For the Conservatives, shadow Commons leader Sir George Young says Westminster must become more collaborative and less driven by fighting between parties if it is to regain public trust.

but a hung parliament just isn't right.... has he been sacked yet Dave?

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

Ladbrokes currently predicts David Cameron will win 315 seats - just short of an overall majority - and says a hung parliament would be a "nightmare", costing it £250,000. William Hill also has "no overall majority" as the slight favourite.

The Zimbabwe president said his country would have better relations with London if the Conservatives got in.

"We have always related better with the British through the Conservatives than Labour," he said. "We have a better chance with David Cameron than with Brown."

Really, it isnt the Onion.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

James Forsyth, the implausibly young political editor of The Spectator, has another fine despatch in this week's issue, which has awkwardly gone to press with the election outcome unknown. So he focuses on the two certainties: that Labour and Tory civil wars break out the moment the polls close tomorrow.

The ferocity of the respective outbreaks depends on the precise contours of the results, but there is enough simmering tension already and he is right that "the various factions inside parties [will] race to establish a narrative that is helpful to their cause" with indecent haste.

As anyone who's been following Twitter's #flitwick hashtag will be aware, Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads attended the Mid Beds hustings in Flitwick last night and filmed the event for the organisers and for a live broadcast on his website. I was also in attendance at the hustings (note to Nadine Dorries: I attended because I am one of your constituents. In addition, I voted Conservative at the last general election. Hopefully this disqualifies me from 'stalker' status). Here, in simple and unbiased terms, is what I observed and judged from the evening.

This election offers no dilemma with respect to my voting intention, I will vote, as I have in the past, for my Labour PPC, a party loyalist and fine constituency MP.

"Clegg is bad news for Israel," one official here said. "His party is running on a human rights platform, and the atmosphere is hostile to Israel. We remind the Liberal Democrats of South Africa during apartheid. Even if Clegg decides not to take the foreign portfolio, the very fact that Liberal Democrats sit in the cabinet is likely to mean trouble for us."