Conservatives have drawn up a strategy which they hope will give them an outright majority at the next general election.
But even at this early stage, one thing has become clear – the West Midlands is at its heart.
The region is set to be the centre of attention once again as David Cameron and colleagues target West Midlands seats in the run-up to polling day.
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As police and councils face further cuts, benefits are squeezed and unemployment remains stubbornly high, you might have assumed the mood at Conservative Campaign Headquarters is downbeat.
But you’d be wrong. The Tories still believe they can win the next election, and they have a plan in place to do it.
They even hope they will do better next time than in 2010, when they failed to win an outright majority.
Instead of governing in coalition with the Liberal Democrats (or any other partner), they hope to go it alone.
There’s even a clock in the party’s Millbank headquarters programmed to count down the days until polling day on May 17 2015.
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Now, you might be forgiven for assuming there’s an element of bravado behind these ambitions. Parties rarely like to admit they are on course to lose, after all.
But Conservatives have two reasons to be cheerful.
First, they are encouraged by Labour’s failure to establish a commanding lead in the opinion polls.
A YouGov poll published on July 2 gave Labour 38 per cent of the vote, with the Conservatives on 33 per cent, Lib Dems on eight per cent and 海角视频IP on 12 per cent. That’s a lead of just five per cent for Labour.
Other polls have shown Labour doing rather better. Throughout June, opinion polls by a range of organisations gave Labour a lead of between 13 and six per cent over the Conservatives.
But even so, the lead is actually lower than the mid-term leads Labour enjoyed back when Margaret Thatcher was in power before the 1983 and 1987 elections. And of course, Thatcher’s Conservatives went on to win those elections.
Secondly, Conservatives believe the economy is on the mend.
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This was the message of George Osborne’s Spending Review in June, when he announced the economy was moving “from rescue to recovery”.
Conservatives will argue that their tough decisions – opposed all the way by Labour – rescued Britain from bankruptcy. Without Osborne’s cuts we’d have ended up like Greece, they say.
But now, the medicine is beginning to work. The danger of financial meltdown has passed, and while the economy hasn’t actually recovered yet, we can at least be confident that recovery is on its way.
Nonsense, some might say. If you want to know how the economy is doing, consider the fact that the number of people turning to food banks for help has shot up.
According to the Trussell Trust, Britain’s largest provider of food banks, 346,992 people received a minimum of three days’ emergency food from the organisation in 2012-13, compared to 128,697 in 2011-12 and just 26,000 in 2008-09.
But there’s also another story to be told. Look at the automotive sector, for example.
海角视频 automotive manufacturing hit an historic high last year, with a turnover of £60 billion, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.
Total vehicle output climbed eight per cent in 2012 – the third year in a row in which output increased.
海角视频 plants built 1.275 million vehicles last year, still just below the figure for 2007, before the banking crisis, but only just.
So perhaps the Conservatives will convince us that the medicine is working.
The party has also drawn up a plan to help it win, and here it is.
Conservatives will focus on 80 seats – 40 of which they may be in danger of losing and will fight tooth and nail to hold on to, and 40 which they believe they can win.
It means the whole election could come down to battles in just 80 of the 650 seats in the Commons, at least if the strategy drawn up by party chairman Grant Shapps and his team is the right one.
Professional organisers have been employed in each of the 80 seats, in recognition of the fact that traditional party chairman may be very good at organising annual dinners for the faithful but lack the skills required by modern campaigning.
These seats will be showered with resources and Ministerial visits. Their concerns will be David Cameron’s concerns.
So where are they? Well, the party is being a little coy about the 40 seats it plans to defend, partly because they don’t want the other parties to know where their own research shows they are most vulnerable.
It’s not just about the size of the majority. For example, Stockton South, which Conservatives won with a majority of just 332 in 2010, is not on the list.
That’s partly because sitting Tory MP James Wharton is seen as a strong candidate who won’t require too much help. But it’s also because he beat a sitting MP in 2010, who would have benefited from an incumbency vote.
Labour will put up a new candidate in 2015 who will have to start from scratch. In a sense, Mr Wharton will be starting from a much stronger position than his 332 majority suggests.
There’s no secret, however, about the 40 seats which Conservatives hope to snatch from other parties.
The good news for the West Midlands is that many of the seats are in our region.
They are Birmingham Northfield, Dudley North, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Telford and Walsall North, all held by Labour.
As expected, Birmingham Edgbaston is not on the list. Sitting Labour MP Gisela Stuart is too hard for the Tories to shift, and they’ve given up for now.
Solihull, currently held by Liberal Democrat Lorely Burt, is also a target.
There will be no coalition pact once the election is called. Conservatives will go all-out to eliminate their Lib Dem rival, despite five years of partnership between the parties (and the Lib Dems will take the same approach in Tory-held seats).
Opponents of the Conservatives might question the idea that the number of Tory target seats in the West Midlands is good for the region.
But looked at another way, it certainly is a boon because it means the region will be in the spotlight.
When polling day comes, voters are obviously free to do whatever they like. But during the campaign itself, the issues that matter to us will have to be debated by the party leaders and their senior colleagues, during their frequent visits to the region.