Blog: Feeling sickly? Head swimming? Aching to get away from it all? You’ve got election fever – a virus which comes around every four or five years which can only be cured by a flight out of the country.

What’s more, the fever will get worse from today when the REAL election campaign begins with the launch of the governing party’s manifesto.

Interesting that Labour should choose the West Midlands for the launch. We always like to say that it’s where the election will be won and lost because of the number of marginal seats in the region.

It’s not strictly true, but it’s good to see that Gordon Brown & Co seem to agree with us.

The man who drew up the manifesto, Climate Change (not it’s time for a change) Secretary Ed Miliband says Labour’s programme is “about the future”, which is comforting as we don’t want a repeat of what’s happened over the last two years.

In one of those sweeping statements about “the future” that are impossible to justify, he said that investment in “green businesses” of the future could “unleash a wave of thousands and thousands of jobs”. These would be unleashed, for instance, in the manufacture and building of wind turbines, which have so far proved to be ugly, incredibly expensive, wildlife killers (especially of wild birds) and unproven in generating affordable electricity.

“This will be a pro-business manifesto, supporting enterprise, supporting companies to invest,” said Mr Miliband, which struck me as rather ironic given that more than 100 business leaders have taken issue with the Government’s plan to increase National Insurance for employers as well as employees from next April.

It’s been put about that the Conservatives won last week’s jousting (mainly by the Tories, but also by commentators and some Labour MPs), although there is no evidence this has fed through to the polls.

If the NI debate goes on for the next three and a half weeks, the immigration issue will become irrelevant because so many people will be clamouring to leave the country.

At the manifesto launch today, Mr Brown was due to declare there would be “no return to business as usual” under a re-elected Labour government – quite funny really because whenever he has been in a spot of bother over the past couple of years, his official spokesman would always tell us the Prime Minister was at his desk getting down to, you guessed it, “business as usual”.

By John Hipwood