Waiting for Gordo and the next slew of polls

For newspapers every Thursday of this campaign is like election day itself - there's nothing really to do until quite late in the evening when the action is over.

Meanwhile there are a few things happening - Shadow Defence secretary Liam Fox was burgled in one of these bizarre campaign twists. A Tory press conference was cancelled as a result. Distressing to be robbed but Thatcher walked out of the rubble of Grand Hotel in Brighton and went to the Tory conference the next morning.

In further news the SNP and Plaid have been told by the BBC Trustto forget it - they are not getting in on the big boys leaders' debates. The SNP have been left raging against the machine. Oh, and Nick Clegg has been branded a Nazi in an almost Comical Ali headline in the Daily Mail.

The Telegraph have had a go at Clegg over political donations too but he insists he has done nothing wrong, and will prove it. Sooner the better for him.

He will be bruised though not floored by the allegations. Pretty much everyone thinks the dirty tricks will backfire on the Tories and that it may already be too late for any negative stories on the Lib Dem leader to get any traction

Interesting how the Tories, or rather their media attack dogs, have gone negative while Labour is almost lovebombing Clegg. Peter Mandelson was on Radio 4 at lunchtime defending him more robustly than any Lib Dem would. Mandelson was there just to make sure the story becomes "Tory smear".

Extraordinary for one party figure to come out so strongly to defend someone in another party. He accused the Tories of "pushing the smear button".

“I think the coverage is frankly disgusting. I am not a defender of the Liberal Democrats, I am an opponent of the Liberal Democrats,” he said. “It offends against basic decency, it violates basic rules of electioneering in this country

There's lots of shennanigans going on around Clegg and the media's handling of him right now. The Independent has positioned itself as a kind of outsider newspaper - mirroring Clegg - and has been repaid for its advertising campaign, namechecking Rupert Murdoch, with a visit from the News International heavies from Wapping led by Rebekah Wade, or so we're told.