Labour’s lead down a point to 5% The August poll by Ipsos-Mori in the Sun shows a slight reduction in the Labour lead compared with July and might just take the heat out of the 2007 general election suggestions. The shares are with changes on last month – CON 33%(-2): LAB 38%(-3): LDM 15%(nc). The striking feature of the numbers is the sharp cut-back in the the proportion saying they would vote for the three main parties – 86% in…
The Importance of Leeds One favourite piece of lazy journalism is to assert that “the Conservatives have no MPs/Councillors in the main Northern cities†and that, without these, they cannot win a Parliamentary majority. In fact, there are hundreds of Conservative councillors in the urban North, and the main Northern cities usually cited, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, and Sheffield are irrelevant to the Conservatives’ Parliamentary chances. The Conservatives could win an overall majority of 100, without coming close to winning a…
Are there better ways of predicting likelihood to vote? A local party ward organisation that I’m familiar with was one of the first to get its records computerised and can access detailed data on individual electors going back for more than two decades. Not only can you see how they responded to canvassers on each occasion that they were contacted since the late 1980s but there’s also a record of whether they voted or not. For it’s not often appreciated…
What’s this going to mean politically? Extraordinarily this story from the Financial Times is not covered on the main news page of BBC online. Yet the size of the intervention – an injection of 95 million billion euros into the money markets – sounds too huge to be confined to the business pages. I’m no expert on financial markets but this does look worrying and could have a big political impact. To my mind it makes an early election looks…
Could the emerging opposition “attack dog” damage Brown? Go into Google, type in “Chris Grayling MP”, click on the “news” search button and the above is what you get. A whole series of references to attacks that he has made on the government which might not be commanding the big headlines at the moment but, I am told, are starting to irritate the Labour hierarchy. For the 46 year old Epsom MP and shadow work and pension secretary is fast…
A guest article by Peter the Punter Mediums are utterly useless. They have yet to give me a single winning tip I couldn’t have worked out for myself. Messages from the other side of the betting counter can however be helpful. Although they are unlikely to reveal the winner of the next race at Kempton, they may nevertheless contain something every bit as useful to punters. I recently had dinner with an odds compiler from a major firm and although…
Could optimism and praise help him take back the initiative? We are going through an extraordinary period and Labour supporters are, no doubt, pinching themselves to confirm that Gordon’s first weeks are not a dream. By all accounts the public response to the way he’s handled his first three big crises has been enormously positive and if this wasn’t the poll-free holiday period Labour would surely have been consolidating the initial big leads. So what does Cameron do? Each step…
The above story went up a couple of hours ago on the Slate web-site and should provide some welcome relief for Obama who has come under a lot of stick from all sides following comments about Pakistan. Recent polls on the Democratic nomination have seen Hillary Clinton widen her margin. As for Rudi – he still enjoys a good polling margin. For the White House Race betting click here. Mike Smithson