Is Nick Cohen right – the election will be a “massacre”?
Will his 2009 PB prediction be as good as his 2007 one?
In the week of the 2007 Labour conference, on September 28 2007, the Observer columnist and writer, Nick Cohen, made an extraordinary prediction in a comment that he posted here on Politicalbetting when general election speculation was at its height.
Nick wrote: “My colleagues think that if Brown backs off after marching his men to the top off the hill the commentariat will turn on him. The press will be full of attacks on his weakness and dithering and he’ll get a taste of what life was like for John Major. For what it’s worth my view is that Labour has allowed the speculation to run for so long they’ve trapped themselves. If Cameron has a good conference and the polls change, suddenly it will be Labour which doesn’t know what to do.â€
That was before the Tory conference started and nine days before Gordon Brown recorded his famous interview with Andrew Marr.
So what are we to make of Nick’s latest rendering in the big prediction business posted in a comment on yesterday morning’s thread?
“The campaign will be a massacre. Four weeks of Cameron – whom you can’t help liking even if you disagree with him – vs Brown – whom you can’t help disliking even if you agree with him. Night after night on every bulletin.”
I should add that PB owes a lot to Nick. For not only does he seem to post his best insights here but back in 2004, not long after we had started, his featuring of us a couple of times in his Observer column played an important part in the development of the audience. At the time most of the mainstream media totally avoided any references to blogs.