“Were you one of the first or did you wait till the outcome was clear?” Spare a thought a thought this morning for Labour MPs as they agonise over what to do. Do they join the still handful of their colleagues who have taken massive risks with their careers to become part of the initial batch or do they wait and see? It’s a very hard call because like all rebellions there will come a moment when the outcome is…
Will it enable Obama to refocus more strongly on the economy? The economic and financial impacts of the failure of Lehman Brothers have been rippling outwards today as stock markets around the world are sharply down (with the FTSE dropping almost 4% and the Dow currently down about 2.5%). But what will be the political consequences of the events on Wall Street? With the polls and the markets narrowing in the White House race, is this one “event” that actually…
Three ministers set to quit The Evening Standard is reporting that that a Minister of State, a junior minister and several Parliamentary Private Secretaries are set to resign in a bid to oust the Prime Minister. Also, the Daily Telegraph is reporting that Thursday’s NEC will be the focus for an attempted coup by MPs, and that the PM has been “put on warning by senior party figures that he has only a matter of weeks to save his troubled…
Will tax and public spending cuts help stem the Tory surge? Today’s crisis at Lehman Brothers and all the attention that Labour’s leadership crisis is getting are somewhat over-shadowing the Lib Dem conference in Bournemouth. The party which finds it difficult getting publicity at any time always looks for a boost from its conference and this is just more bad luck for Nick Clegg. For many in the party the key issue is how do they deal with the threat…
Could he still be a contender if the conditions were right? An interesting piece on the Telegraph blog this afternoon went into the suggestion that the man behind the current moves within the Labour party is John Reid. I’ve had his name in the back of my mind since this comment by the Telegraph’s astute Scottish political expert, Alan Cochrane, on the paper’s blog three months ago. Cochrane observed: “…But with Charles Clarke, David Blunkett or John Reid all absenting…
Wouldn’t this clear the air and he could possibly win? One thing’s for certain – the disquiet within the Labour party about the leadership that has suddenly gone public is going to continue even if Team Brown manage to see off the current threat. And all this does is make Brown look weaker and weaker resulting in it being even harder for him to govern properly adding further to Labour’s polling woes. But it does not need to be like…
Overnight buying points to a majority of more than 62 seats While Labour’s travails over the leadership continue there’s been a further sharp move on the commons seats spread betting markets where political gamblers “trade” the number of MPs the parties will get at the next general election as though they were stocks and shares. Serious money is being wagered with punters being ready to risk a lot of money. The numbers in the panel above are with SportingIndex and…
If there’s going to be a contest could one of these win? With all the focus over the past 24 hours being the growing number of Labour figures calling for a leadership contest the finding of today’s Populus leadership focus group have not merited the attention they perhaps deserve. For the pollster put together a group of 20 Labour voters from 2005 and showed them clips of Brown and six possible replacements. As they watched they registered their reaction by…