What matters in any campaign is that you have a strategic core that makes the judgements, decides the strategy, and can deliver.
It would be wrong for us to offer difference from the Conservative Party at the cost of credibility, but equally it would be wrong to offer credibility at the cost of being clear that there remain very fundamental differences.
Politicians often reveal most about themselves in unguarded moments.
A self-evidently confident politician, Cameron still suffers from a curious hollowness. Ten years after he became Conservative leader, many people still question what he actually stands for or believes in.
Being prime minister is not a job to be performed with an eye for the exit.
As shadow foreign secretary, I have been as clear in my support for the government when it does something we agree with as I am in highlighting that which we oppose.
Labour's task for government is to build consent for an outward-looking Britain as the best way to advance not just our interests, but also our values at a time of challenge, both at home and abroad.
I'm at one with Ed Miliband in saying that it's important that people have the right to express their democratic voices and also their deep concerns about climate change because we have a planet in peril.
As Development Secretary, I have seen in the developing world that climate change there is not a theory, is not a future threat: it is a contemporary crisis.
Stories come and go. The challenge is to frame the questions that voters will be asking on polling day, such as who has avoided a global depression and worked here to deliver jobs.
When I joined Labour in 1982, I didn't feel I belonged to a party born to power. My repeated experience was of bitter and repeated defeats.
Part of the reason I am so evangelical in our campaigning work is that I had an unshakeable faith in Labour values, but we needed a machine worthy of the message. I grew up with a peerless Conservative machine, with vastly superior resources.
Politics requires the sense of possibility. Dare I say it - the audacity of hope.
What people want is a sense of a better future to come.
Obama better understood community organisation and peer-to-peer communication than any recent candidate, and we are applying that lesson.
This Network Generation have grown up in a connected world. With Skype, Facebook, Twitter and the Internet, the world is at their fingertips via their smart phone. They find the idea of watching TV programmes at a time to suit the broadcaster quaint and old-fashioned.
As times change, so do the way each generation see the world. It is rather like the way our generation came to see our grandparents' views on the Empire and colonies as outdated.
Politicians diminish themselves by sounding robotic.
Our responsibility is to protect people and help them into work.
Under Ed Miliband's leadership, we are changing both our party's structures and culture.
