Why I’m not risking any cash at the moment? Over the past four months I have studiously avoided the spread betting markets on the number of seats each of the parties will get at the next election – something that’s felt very strange because for years this has been my main betting arena. My Labour sell and Lib Dem buy contracts have been closed down at reasonable profits as I have waited to see how things look in for the…
CON 42 (nc) LAB 26 (-2) LD 18 (nc) So all the August polls are in the same territory Whether or not there’s a big effort at the Daily Telegraph to get us to buy printed copies of their paper I do not know but their August YouGov poll is now out and is not online. The figures are as above with the changes on the Sunday Times YouGov poll – the last from the pollster – in mid-August. Then…
Times How close will the Megrahi case get to Mr. Brown?? This is the key extract from this morning’s main lead in the Times that follows on from the leaked letter in yesterday’s Sunday Times. “Gordon Brown was dragged into the centre of the row over the early release of the Lockerbie bomber last night after it emerged that a key decision that could have paved the way for the terrorist to serve his sentence in Libya was approved by…
Asahi.com Hatoyama will be next PM, DPJ has majority on its own The results from Japan’s general election are not quite complete, but what is clear is that the voters have delivered an earthquake to the ruling LDP, which has governed the country for almost all of the last 50 years. The DPJ has confirmed that it will lead a coalition including the Social Democrats and the People’s New Party, despite the fact that it will have about 70 more…
Aren’t dirty deals sometimes necessary? The Tories, quite rightly in political terms, are trying to squeeze as much as possible from the latest revelations suggesting that the Lockerbie bomber’s release was one of the prices that the Labour government seems to have been prepared to pay as part of an oil deal with the Libyans. But what would a Cameron government have done in such a situation? Would it, in the interests of ensuring energy supplies, have followed exactly the…
Mail But will he lose the post-visit PR war? There’s an interesting angle on Brown’s surprise trip to Afghanistan in the Mail on Sunday this morning which has all the potential to blow up into a big incident. According to the paper the Tory leader was forced to call off a trip to the country after discovering that the PM had beaten him to it. The report goes on: “The Tory leader scrapped his own visit – which has been…
Sunday Times Was it a “murky” deal for oil after all? The main lead in the Sunday Times tomorrow looks set to take the Megrahi release debate into new territory for the paper says it has leaked ministerial letters suggesting this was all about an oil deal with Libya. This is how the story starts: “The British government decided it was “in the overwhelming interests of the United Kingdom†to make Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, eligible for…
BBC online Won’t his trip just highlight the problems? The big political story this afternoon is the surprise trip by Gordon Brown to Afghanistan and the suggestions that the scale of the British deployment might have to be increased. Fine – but what’s the political point at a time when the opinion polls have shown increasing scepticism amongst voters to the whole undertaking? Such a visit over such a distance is a massive undertaking and there really has to be…