When Michelle Obama comes to London on 15 October to raise funds for her husband's US presidential campaign, she will perform her usual riff. She will tell audiences she is "always a little amazed at the response that people get when they hear from Barack" because, in her eyes, he is the man who "won't put the butter up when he makes toast" or "put his socks in the dirty [...]

''My mum's voting BNP. All the older people are, everyone around here is," says Tate Keating, 21. Standing two minutes from Becontree Underground station in Barking, Margaret Hodge's constituency, I ask her why. "Well, it doesn't matter if you're white, black, Asian, Chinese: you don't want people coming here and taking your jobs," she says in a matter-of-fact way.

Further down the road, I stop the manager of a local [...]

By an uninteresting coincidence, the Ukip candidate for Liverpool Walton shares my name. The more famous Joe Moran is a former Scoutmaster and Territorial Army volunteer. I was worried my students might confuse me with the man who has been protesting in their local paper about "the EU devil" and collapsing border controls. But most students have no idea who their local MP is, never mind a marginal candidate likely [...]

Do you remember 2001, when Oliver Letwin said something about the Tories wanting to cut taxes by £20bn if they won and, after an almighty ticking-off, disappeared into the wilds of West Dorset? Well, he is there again . . . I think. He wasn't doing anything on Sunday, Conservative Central Office informed me. My eight-year-old daughter, already a seasoned pedant, said: "If he isn't doing anything, he isn't breathing [...]

A recent incident gives a clue to how British expats in France would like to vote. It was a 50th-birthday dinner. Over duck, chips and cases of wine, the talk inevitably turned to crime back in the UK: the expat dinner-party equivalent of the English "schools and house prices" whinge. Everyone apparently had an elderly mum or dad back home "too afraid to go out because the youngsters are out [...]

After a week of campaigning, the broadsheet Yorkshire Post had clearly had enough. "Drama that is yet to grip its audience", read the headline on page seven of last Monday's edition. Page seven is normally reserved for second-rate crime, fundraising and animal stories. For example, "Warning after cow attacks dog walker" was the very serious second story on page eight that day.

With 251 years of publishing history behind it, [...]

Once upon a time, you used to be able to identify a student area by the Socialist Worker posters and donkey jackets. Today, at the gates of Glasgow University, the only visible slogan is the name "Topshop", emblazoned on every third girl's handbag, and the only evidence of any political protest is an old "No War" peace sign, scratched into the pavement outside the library. Politics and fashion have always [...]

My street in Birmingham, Yardley Wood Road, is three miles long and stretches from white working-class Warstock and Billesley down to Sparkbrook, an inner-city Asian area with a high ratio of new immigrants.

Ali Yasin, the young owner of Sparkbrook's Stag News, thinks the election in his area is not going to be affected by the city's main talking point, the closure of the Rover car plant. "I don't want [...]

National preoccupations, like visitors to Norfolk, have trouble getting up the A11. Even if they make it up to Norwich, they will have despaired by Asda on the ring road, and turned back for home.

Since the last general election in 2001, prosperity and foot-and-mouth have cut deeply into the county's old agricultural character, and traditional market towns like Aylsham have been turned overnight into dormitories of Norwich.

Yarmouth is [...]

Jon Snow's mea culpas upon accepting a deserved Richard Dimbleby Award on Sunday must have been the best that politicians have had from the broadcasters since the BBC fired its director general for standing up to No 10. Their pleasure can have lasted no longer than 7.30pm on Monday. Snow, presenter of Channel 4 News, had accused political interviewers of being too cynical. Jeremy Paxman, whose BBC1 interviews with the [...]