We wrote this morning on page 3 of the FT about the drying-up of private and invidual donations to Labour in the six months to March 31. (ie the period covering Ed Miliband’s leadership). Part of the issue is that the party has no policy platform – given all policy is up in the air for two years – and therefore little to offer business other than criticism of the coalition. The other is that political donors are often rather fickle. Here is more of our analysis.

The crucial calculation we made was to look at donations for the same period for all of the last decade – excluding the two general election years. In a typical six-month period Labour used to get about £2.4m a year. This time it only received a tenth of that figure. Read more