The Chancellor of the Exchequer reassured the world in the spring that Northern Rock’s assets were “good quality” as he set aside further billions of debt towards keeping the business going.

Even at the time this seemed odd, given the lender’s rush for market share last year at the top of the housing market. Among its products was the notorious 125 per cent loan-to-value mortgage, which has since ceased to exist.

My colleague Norma Cohen reveals this morning that repossessions at the Rock are racing ahead of its rivals. According to data from Standard & Poor’s, she writes……

“While loans originated by Halifax had a repossession rate of about 0.12 per cent as of March, those of Bank of Scotland had a repossession rate of 0.20 per cent while those originated by Northern Rock had a rate of 0.425 per cent.” 

Here is the full article, which will make interesting reading for anyone who cares about the housing market, the economy and yes, UK politics.

It’s been a hell of a long time coming and here are the MP expenses highlights. With ear-splitting drum roll………

Tony Blair: £11,200 on a new kitchen in Sedgefield

Gordon Brown: A £4,700 kitchen and a £372 Sky subscription

Peter Mandelson: A £3,000 shower. Correction: bathroom improvements including a shower.

(As passed on by a Tory who spent the last two hours reading the expense claims, by 14 senior MPs, forced into the open today by freedom of information requests).

Senior Tories to follow once we’ve read through pages of this stuff.

 I’ll leave you to decide whether this is a big deal or not. Bear in mind that it has always been open knowledge that MPs could spend about £23,000 a year on mortgage costs, rent and other expenses needed to maintain a second home.

UPDATE:

The Sunday Times has led with the receipt from Ann Keen MP, showing she claimed insurance on her 70-year old husband’s life.  That does seem curious.

We thought the most entertaining nugget was in Gordon Brown’s expenses, where the then Chancellor failed to add up his sums properly - to his own advantage. Here is the full story.

Just got off the phone with Graham Stringer, MP for Manchester Blackley, who has broken ranks and called for a (any) cabinet minister to challenge Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership.

If MPs know who might replace the prime minister it would make it easier to raise the 70 signatures required to start the process, he argues. 

The system is stacked to make such a challenge difficult, he says. “Sneaking around trying to get 70 signatures would be a bit silly. We’re in a situation where it is almost impossible when you want a change to change things….I hope that any or some senior members of cabinet announce that they want to stand in a leadership election.”

There are now about 150 Labour MPs whose jobs look vulnerable in the wake of the Crewe defeat, he tells me. It is in their self-interest to challenge Brown, he says. “People are now fearful for their seats”. There was often discontent under Tony Blair, he admits, but that was different: “He was a winner”.

Ouch.

A swing of 17.6 per cent to the Tories cannot be dismissed as “mid-term blues” or, as is often the case, a mildly discontented electorate giving the government a poke.

True, the swing is less than the two big Tory-to-Labour swings of the mid-90s, which preceded the landslide of 1997. Then, Labour took Dudley West (1994) and South-east Staffordshire (1996) with swings of 29 per cent and 22 per cent respectively.

But rewind the clock - 30 years - to the last Labour-to-Conservative byelection victory. That was Ilford North, which was won with a swing of just 7 per cent. It came one year before Margaret Thatcher’s seminal election victory which put the Tories in power for 18 years.

But how would the Conservatives fare in office? George Osborne, shadow chancellor, did not offer a wholly convincing roadmap when interviewed on the Today programme this morning.

As one former Labour minister told me - I interrupted his breakfast this morning - this is a bad time for any government; petrol prices, financial turbulence, commodity prices, inflation. Are the Tories offering much more than the classic “time for a change” message?

“A tiny bit of me says, ‘fuck you Cameron, you try and do it’. I’d love to be in opposition right now, undermining them, writing articles, tearing strips out of their policies,” says the Labour MP.

As an afterthought. The Liberal Democrats won’t be the focus of today’s coverage. But their meagre 15 per cent haul last night bodes ill for the third party. Remember: Lord Rennard and his men used to be known as the byelection pros. This morning, they are eclipsed.  

If and when Labour lose Crewe & Nantwich at today’s by-election there will be endless head-scratching about how Gordon Brown can improve his act.

There will be demands from the left of the party; and from the right. There will be debate about Mr Brown’s policy platform and whether it is right or wrong. No doubt his handling of the economic downturn will also be mulled over.

But my informal polling (friends, family, apolitical colleagues) brings to mind a famous quote from Sex and the City. One of the women is pining after a man and can’t work out why she has been spurned. A friend offers the cathartic reply: “He’s just not that into you”.

Members of the public who don’t like the Member of Parliament for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath can’t always put their finger on why this is so. Unfair, but true. They’re just not that into him.

Here, my colleague Alex Barker offers some typically vague criticism from the people of Crewe - which may offer a pointer to Labour’s poor prospects tonight.

The strapline is deliberately provocative. I’m sure you can think of many good reasons.

But there is little doubt that the Tories’ fund-raising attempts are going more smoothly than Labour’s.

 In Q4 of 2007, the Conservatives raised £11.3m and Labour £5.9m.

Today the Q1 figures for 2008 came through.

At first sight the Tories don’t seem so far ahead; at £4.2m compared to Labour’s £3m. But this disguises a weird anomaly. Boris Johnson’s campaign to be London mayor - which raised nearly £1.5m - is excluded from the Tory figures. Money for Ken Livingstone, by contrast, is included within the Labour total.

We won’t know how much Ken raised for a few more weeks. But for a true like-for-like the number should be subtracted from the £3m tally.

A senior Tory tells me, over a cup of Earl Grey, that 30 Labour/Lib Dem councillors have defected to the Conservatives in the last 12 months.

Only one Tory councillor has quit the party during the same period.

UPDATE:

Mea culpa - apparently my source (who should know better - you know who you are) has underestimated the number of Tory defections. Here is a link with some extra information.  

Caroline Flint has just announced a new £200m fund to buy unsold properties from desperate homebuilders and then rent them to social tenants.

By my calculations, that money could buy…..less than 1,000 average British homes.

In a country of more than 50m people, this is the equivalent of a finger in the dyke.

The  government’s other measure to prop up the housing market is no more impressive.

It is - as I predicted in this morning’s FT - opening up shared equity schemes to more first time buyers. I hope, for their sake, the youngsters ignore this temptation - at least until prices have fallen by 10 per cent or more.*

* The government’s own prediction, as spotted on Ms Flint’s cabinet briefing notes yesterday.

Charles Clarke, the dissident former home secretary, was fairly loyal last night at a debate  held by Progress magazine at (ironic this) the Thatcher Room in Portcullis House. However, Mr Clarke conspicuously failed to answer the question of whether Gordon Brown was the right man to lead Labour into the next election.*

The motion: whether Labour could hold the south.

The most gloomy prognosis was from Peter Kellner, president of YouGov, who said Labour’s notional majority would end with the loss of just 24 seats. Of these, he argued, 17 were ominously south of the line from the Wash to the Severn.

With the public mood about the economy at its most pessimistic for 40 years, said Kellner, the result of the next election depended on how the UK’s finances panned out over the next year.  

John Denham, skills secretary, hinted that Gordon Brown should not be blamed for Labour’s situation in the south.

“We lost one and a quarter million votes between 97 and the last general election, (in the south)” he said. “The sort of policy decisions that say this has all happened in the last six months isn’t necessarily the right starting point for Labour’s strategy in the south”.

His recipe for a southern revival sounded - to me anyway - Thatcherite in tone. Labour succeeded in 1997, Denham argued, because it had spoke in general terms about a society it was trying to create.

“A society where it has been possible for people prepared to work hard to see improvements in their lives”….he said….”It  was a party that said we have a bias towards those who are prepared to pay their way…we have to tell that story again in a 21st century world.”

* Meanwhile Tamsin Dunwoody, the Labour candidate for the Crewe & Nantwich by-election, was asked three times last night whether Mr Brown was an asset or a liability. She refused to answer the question.

It was Sian Berry, the Green candidate for London mayor, who told me - a while back - that people care less about the environment during difficult economic times.

“In about the mid-1980s, environmental issues started to appear spontaneously, and it kept rising up to 1989,” says Ms Berry. “At the top of the economic cycle it was considered more important than health and immigration. During the recession it dropped like a stone.”

There is even a word for it: Maslow’s theory (look it up on Google).

Hilary Benn, environment secretary, will tackle the theme in a speech tomorrow in Washington.

“Some will say that these pressures mean that we must put our economic interests first - that we must choose economic stability over environmental stability. We need both. So I believe that this is a false choice….” he will say.

“We must resist temptation to put off dealing with climate change for another day, when the world economy is stronger.”

But there is growing evidence that green issues are sliding down the policy priority list; the lukewarm path to bin taxes and road taxes…the possible cancellation of autumn’s fuel duty rise…

Nor are the Tories banging the green drum any more. There was little or no mention of the environment in David Cameron’s big policy speech last week.