Interesting Peston post from Facebook:
"On Monday, before the appalling events in Manchester, I made the bloomin' obvious point on News at Ten that momentum was with Labour and against Theresa May and the Tories.
My explanation was that she had misread the mood of the country, with her stress on all the challenges we face and how she is the solid choice to lead us through hard times. People seem to want more of a positive vision of how their lives will improve than she has provided.
If a poll in the Times newspaper is accurate, that remains the case - with Labour's poll deficit cut to 5 percentage points, down from 10 a few days ago in most polls and around 20 at the start of the campaign.
To state the obvious, she remains in the lead, but the trend is seriously going against her.
What is it all about?
Well obviously May caused considerable anxiety among older voters with her plan to force all to pay for their social care. And her hasty u-turn on Monday, when she announced there would be a cap on costs after all, did not smack of competence - which was supposed to her almost-unique selling point.
But the incident spoke to me of a bigger problem for her and the Tories - which is that her manifesto is a bit dour and uninspiring.
It is a coherent analysis of big challenges the country faces. It is supposed to play to her strengths of resolve and tenacity to meet these challenges.
But, as the social-care debacle epitomized, it is long on collective effort and short on rewards. It majors on fear of everything going wrong, especially over the nature of Brexit, rather than hope that - to coin a phrase - things can only get better.
And if the EU referendum of last year taught us anything, it is that voters prefer hope over fear: they chose the hope of a more prosperous self-determining UK, promised (perhaps spuriously) by Johnson and Gove, over fears of economic catastrophe, whipped up by Osborne and Cameron.
Given that May defined her early months in office and herself by distancing herself from DC and Osbo, it is odd perhaps that she seems to be repeating their mistake.
Because the whole thrust of Labour's campaign is to promise immediate goodies to everyone, all paid for by higher taxes on the richest 5%.
Now there is a credible argument that in practice Labour's policies would end up making the country and most people poorer - because if the public-sector deficit and national debt rises as fast as it may under Labour, ultimately interest rates and taxes would rise.
But in making that plausible argument that Labour would make us poorer the Tories risk being as little believed as Cameron and Osborne were over the economic disaster that would "obviously" be triggered by Brexit, and has not materialized yet (though there is mounting evidence that the costs have been postponed rather than cancelled).
Too many in this country have suffered stagnating and declining living standards for too long. And they just want a leader who is promising to make things better.
May absolutely understood that last July when she made her famous first statement as prime minister outside 10 Downing Street, where she pledged to devote herself to those just about managing.
So it is both bizarre and a disaster for her that the only new and eye-catching policy in her manifesto was a social care policy that promised to make old people poorer.
To be clear, that policy was intellectually honest about the scale of the challenge and - many would say - a fair way of tackling the problem, by sheltering struggling younger people from the costs.
But as a symbol of what the country would be like under her stewardship, for many it was depressing. Too much wholesome bread, not enough circuses.
She has two other problems. In the current British climate where businesses and the wealthy are widely blamed for Britain's malaise, and where she has done almost nothing to counter this narrative, she can't and won't attack Labour's raid on the richest 5%.
And although many commentators felt that the tragic events in Manchester would see voters opt for her supposedly safe pair of hands at the the tiller in preference to the untested Corbyn, that is not an extrapolation that can be drawn from the EU plebiscite.
The Remain campaign thought the then prime minister Cameron and their side would pick up votes following the hideous murder of Jo Cox by a right wing fanatic, but in fact the murder did not shift the distribution of votes.
That said, Corbyn is taking a risk today with a speech where he will be seen as focusing too much on the UK's supposed responsibility for fomenting terrorism with military interventions in the Middle East, rather than on how how he would protect British citizens from future terror.
Also of course there are still almost two weeks left before polling day, and opinion poll leads ebb and flow.
But this election contest is anything but the foregone conclusion many wrote it off as being.
And if May were - as today's Times poll suggests would happen - to win with no more seats than she inherited from Cameron, that would be a personal humiliation for her, which she would struggle to survive for long.
We will certainly see what she is made of, in the days ahead."