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Tory myth number three: Crime has soared under Labour leading to David Cameron’s “broken Britain”.

The Tory leader enlisted a bereaved former soap opera star to support his party’s claims that Britain today is far less safe than it was when Labour came to power in 1997.

His “broken Britain” mantra has been a cornerstone of his party’s election campaign and one that has been echoed by the Liberal Democrats.

Mr Cameron’s claim is, according to non-partisan experts, just plain wrong and flies in the face of statistical and empirical evidence.

But it does not help Labour’s case that one of its own advisors, Louise Casey, told the Police Review that ordinary people no longer trust official crime statistics.

Certainly, the Tories have tried hard to discredit the figures that disprove their thesis, focusing some of their firepower on the widely-respected British Crime Survey. It found violent crime has dropped by 49 per cent since 1995. Elsewhere, all neutral statistical sources show a downward trend.

Tories have tried to disown the BCS figures because they don’t include murder and don’t recognise the true extent of crime among 16 to 24-year-olds.

But figures for 2008/9 show that at 651, the murder rate is at its lowest for a decade.

Sir Michael Scholar, the chairman of the UK Statistics Authority since 2007, criticised the Government’s “premature, irregular and selective” use of crime statistics.

But Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling has also come in for criticism from non-partisan academics and officials over his own selective use of statistics and choosing to ignore that in 2002 the methodology was changed, materially altering the data.

Professor Rod Morgan, the joint editor of the Oxford Handbook of Criminology, was asked on BBC Radio 4 about Tory claims that Britain is more dangerous today than 13 years ago. “I think that position is not defensible. All the evidence suggests that volume crime, including violent crime is significantly down.” The Tories are simply wrong to say otherwise, he said.

“I think because there is a genuine view right across the political spectrum that the major parties have out-toughed each other in an unsustainable way and crime has become, alongside the cuts that are in the pipeline, the great unmentionable.”

If there is more crime 13 years on, it may just be because Labour has created more crimes: 50 Criminal Justice Bills and 4,300 newly created offences overall.

What is equally overlooked is the marked increase in reports of domestic and sexual violence because of a deliberate campaign to encourage people to come forward.

This is crime that has always been there, unseen by the statistics, and it can only be progressive that it is at last coming out into daylight.

Headlines are getting curiouser and curiouser as the country falls further down the election rabbit hole. First an Elvis Presley impersonator was brought in to serenade Gordon Brown and Labour Party members in Northamptonshire. The Prime Minister looked suitably embarrassed and was happy to heed the words “A Little Less Conversation” – after a quick shaking of hands, he made a beeline for the door. Next the party was stood up by children’s TV character Peppa Pig at its families manifesto launch. Channel 5 declared: “In the interests of avoiding any controversy or misunderstanding, we have agreed she should not attend.” Peter Mandelson remarked that the decision was “far, far too political [for him] to understand”.

Nick Clegg’s transition from the political periphery to the heart of the general election battle has revealed that he, too, can tap dance to the same old tune of campaign backtracking. Initially he told the world that a coalition with Labour, if the party finished in third place, would be “preposterous”. However, as the Liberal Democrat leader sensed dwindling interest in his party from undecided Labour supporters, he was quick to retreat from this assertion, stating his (increasingly repetitive) mantra: “I’m not the kingmaker, David Cameron’s not the kingmaker, Gordon Brown’s not the kingmaker. I would work with anybody. Of course we’ll talk to each other.”

Sally Bercow discovered this week that retreating from your words is not quite so easy once they have been published in 140 characters on Twitter. The Labour candidate was quick to delete her comment that she had “Been heckled by a couple of smack heads in a stairwell”, but it was to no avail as she was caught out by fellow tweeters who subsequently kicked up a storm.

Gordon Brown delivered the gaffe of the week when he called Rochdale pensioner and widow Gillian Duffy, 66, “a bigot” in front of an open microphone after he had argued with her about pensions, tuition fees, and east European migrants.

Mr Brown was heard blaming his aide Sue Nye for allowing the meeting. He returned to apologise, accompanied by an even bigger press pack than was there for the original encounter.

When I read Nick Clegg’s interview in the Evening Standard on Monday, my eyes leapt to the end of the piece. Sam Leith writes of the Lib Dem battlebus:

“Inside it’s very plush and new: comfy sofas of pale leather; flat-screen tellies. The snacks are appropriately austere: a bowl of fruit and a big basket of individual pots of jam. There’s Molton Brown liquid handwash at the sink. Copies of two magazines: Harper’s Bazaar and Food and Travel. On the table is the controller for an Xbox 360.”

Could it be true? Could Clegg be the first leader of a political party to play Microsoft’s best-selling Xbox 360 games console, titles for which include the equally best-selling (and mildly controversial) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2?

As an Xbox gamer myself, I couldn’t resist asking. But no. Nick Clegg’s spokesman says: “I can confirm that he doesn’t play Xbox. It just came with the bus.” Some journalists have played football games on it, he added.

Maybe it’s just as well. Some prople have reported adverse reactions to using Xboxes of the sort that would not become a potential Westminster kingmaker.

If Clegg ever gets the urge to have a go, folks in the Tribune office recommend Tropico 3, Halo 3 and, of course, Modern Warfare 2.

Spotted on the garage door of a VERY large house near Tribune’s offices in North London:

Please note that Tribune does not endorse this type of campaigning.

In the movie “Blazing Saddles” the black sheriff played by Cleavon Little outwits the disappointed and hostile townsfolk by pointing a gun to his own head and threatening to kill the sheriff before making his getaway.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband appears to have performed a perverse corollary of this in an exchange which caused many people to question just how much self-awareness there really is in New Labour’s inner circle. Or, for that matter, just how often they really do get out into the real world to meet “real people”.

In a Guardian interview Miliband tried hard to give the impression that people should just move on from Iraq and get over it.

He told his interviewer, without the slightest hint of embarrassment: “I met some guy in Soho yesterday, when we were launching the Labour lesbian and gay manifesto. And I said to him, ‘Look, you’ve punished us enough about Iraq, all right? So don’t start punishing yourself.’

“Some people feel very, very strongly about it, and I respect that. There are people who resigned from the government because of Iraq. But what on earth is the point of punishing yourself or punishing the country for Iraq given that the alternative government, the Tories, also voted for it?”

Within 24 hours it was reported that one of Mr Miliband’s last official acts before the election was to approve an £80,000 bill to change the size of the typeface of the FCO’s logo.