A 'flamboyant exchange of giveaways'

If the Conservatives win the election, life will be a "non-stop festival of sunlit merriment", says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph or so their manifesto would have us believe. "The good life" was the big theme of David Cameron's speech at its launch on Monday. Battling claims of Tory negativity, his speech was "aglow with hope-chat".

He talked of a "brighter future" and adopted the tone of a father "pointing out the wonders of the night sky to his children", rather than that of a party leader pledging capped rail fares and a brownfield regeneration fund. He implied the next Tory government would have "pots of money" thanks to the "mysterious alchemy" of "our balanced plan" for tax cuts, childcare and the NHS.

Meanwhile, Ed Miliband's theme was fiscal responsibility. No extra borrowing, no unfunded promises. Despite the Tories' efforts to highlight his "awkwardness and timidity", he was "disobligingly" confident and assertive. Hence there's a certain "confusion" in the Tory tribe, says Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. They can't decide whether to condemn Ed Miliband as a "useless dweeb or a ruthless, power-hungry cad".

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The Daily Mail's revelations of Red Ed's "tangled love life" merely exposed the Labour leader as a man who dated a series of attractive, intelligent and successful women.

Then, not 24 hours after the Tories had been "defending the super-rich tax avoiders formerly known as non-doms", Michael Fallon re-toxified them "as the nasty party" with his "salvo" over Trident, suggesting that Miliband would betray Britain as he had betrayed his brother, David.

With the Tories' sober "long-term economic plan" failing to cut it on the doorstep, it's no wonder that Tory foot soldiers are desperate for "something sunnier to sell".

"It would be unwise to expect too much of the manifestos," given that the latest poll has the two main parties locked in a "suffocating" 34%-34% embrace, says The Sunday Times. Pre-election pledges will shrink to what goes into a coalition agreement, or what a minority government can get through the House of Commons.

Some policies will "fly and others crash to earth", but what matters amid the talk of "billions cut, saved, taxed or spent" is that Labour has "finally framed its policies into an idea of a country where shared success trumps government for and by the few", says Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. "Each manifesto is dressed up as its opposite hard-headed Labour versus caring Conservatives" but on election day there will be "no disguising the big political choice".

"All serious economic discourse seems to have been abandoned in favour of an ever more flamboyant exchange of giveaways and undeliverable promises," despairs Jeremy Warner in The Daily Telegraph. The Tories' provided no plausible explanation of how the "good life" is to be paid for, while Labour's "feigned commitment to fiscal responsibility breathes deceit from every page".

Meanwhile, the big long-term challenges facing the UK's economy go "almost wholly ignored": our lamentable productivity, our overdependence on consumption, and our persistent current-account deficit. "More than six years after the financial crisis... our politics remain as delusional as ever."