The Electoral Commission have joined the data dumping fiesta today with the release of all the spending receipts from the 2010 election campaign.
There are thousands of pages of to work through, ranging from balloon purchases to contracts for the big ad agencies.
While we work through those, the commission have done a decent job or representing the major trends in this chart. Note how comprehensively outspent Labour were in 2010, particularly on the advertising front. While the spending on leaflets was roughly comparable, the Tories spent almost seven times as much on ads.
Jim Pickard
Kiran Stacey