I’m working up the energy to make my final two long posts on the parties, their policies and their manifesto pledges – we have foreign policy, my personal pet peeve, and social policy, which promises to be highly subjective. I’ll get around to those, hopefully over the weekend, but first I’d like to speculate about endorsements.

It’s customary for each of the major newspapers, and many of the main weekly news-based periodicals, to endorse a party or candidate at election time. In the coming week we can expect to see all of this swing into action, which means that it’s prognostication time.

Expect the Murdoch press to go blue this year. The Sun is historically opportunist and has thrown its weight enthusiastically behind Cameron and the Tories. The Times has been more measured but is unlikely to be able to resist the pressure to obey the corporate line.

They stuck by the Blues through the lean years, and they’re sure as hell not going to turn on him now that he has a sniff at power. They have too much access and too much influence within the Conservative party to make a principled rejection likely or desirable. Expect all of these to stay reliably right-wing.

The flip side of that soin is the question of what happens to Labour’s pet press, when Labour is heading for the worst crushing they have seen since 1983. The Mirror has a phenominal amount invested in its support for Labour, particularly Labour’s left wing – it is largely bankrolled by the Unions and has a great deal of access to Charlie Whelan, Ed Balls and the rest of the “Old Labour” remnant. In 2001 Mirror readers were 60% more likely to vote for Labour than the general populace, making them by far the most supportive constituency for the Government. In 2010 they will have to continue that trend. The Guardian is less dependent and thus less dogmatic, and may well go for the Lib Dems. Uniquely, they have an open endorsement process, in which all members of the production team can have a say and in which the readership can make their opinion felt; by most accounts the Lib Dems got a heavy majority of the support this time around. They have form; the Guardian embraced the Lib Dems in the European elections last year. If the Guardian were to go Labour then it would entail a dramatic editorial intervention. The Independent will almost certainly go Lib Dem, despite its generally more left-wing editorial policy.

On the face of it, these two fairly serious publications are straightforward left-wingers in the UK arena. But this really reflects the nature of British politics over the last decade; the Tory party has been a decrepid wreck since 1995, and the Economist and FT have accordingly, grudgingly, kept their weight behind Labour. When the Economist tepidly switched to Labour in 2001 it was a bombshell; it was the first time in 40 years that the paper had gone red, and served to underscore the dramatic intellectual collapse that the Tory party had suffered following the collapse of Thatcherism. It is crushingly unlikely that the Economist will repeat this trick. The question is: have the Lib Dems made a pragmatic enough attempt at credibility this time, or will the Economist revert to form and go Tory? As an institution, the Economist is small-c conservative, and may be content to revert to the safety and familiarity of the two-party system. Intellectually its tendencies are far more Lib Dem, however – although the Tories’ school reform plans are meat and milk to the magazine, their record on civil liberties and economic populism will have dismayed many of their staff, and the Lib Dem’s ideas on Trident and immigration liberalisation will have pleased them. The FT should stay on the left, and will likely either endorse the Lib Dems or not endorse at all.