Why doesn’t he mention the change of law that’s going through? This is the video clip of Mandy denying that he has plans to stand for the Labour leadership using a form of words, incidentally, that were deployed by Michael Heseltine repeatedly ahead of the ousting of Mrs. Thatcher in November 1990. His reason – that he is a life peer and “In this country if you are made a life peer it’s for life. It’s like a life sentence”….
After the recent discussion on the uniform national swing I dug up a paper is well worth reading. Mike Smithson
Can the Tories “steal” one of Labour’s main words? At one level the current verbal spats between Labour’s lone capable communicator, Peter Mandelson, and George Osborne look like standard silly season stuff when there’s not much other political news about. The Independent is presenting it this morning as a “grudge march” between the two key strategists in the main parties following last autumn’s fiasco about what happened in Corfu. But it is I believe much more than that. What we…
Tory leaflet – Cheadle by-election June 2005 Was this the dirtiest campaign since the general election? There have been two over-whelming themes in the series of Westminster by elections during the 2005 parliament: the intertwined stories of the re-emergence of the Conservatives as a party capable of winning seats and the difficulties that the Liberal Democrats had in maintaining their historically excellent record of doing very well in this form of contest. For the latter Westminster by-elections had over the…
SportingIndex Could things change during conference season? We have not featured the spread betting prices on the number of general election seats since May 15th because there has been very little movement on the overall result. Then the Tory spread was 355 – 360 seats while today it has moved up just one. So the changes in political fortunes over the past three months have had very little impact on punters who don’t seem ready to back the Tories beyond…
What if Morley & Outwod saw the same swing? The video is the famous one of Michael Portillo’s result at the May 1997 general election. The CON>LAB swing was an amazing 17.1% which was way above the uniform national swing and it was by far the most unexpected result of the night. The victim, of course, was a high profile cabinet minister who was being talked of as post-election party leader. For the thing about the uniform swing is that…
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…
Did Gord’s honeymoon end with his visit to Iraq? My third extract to help us understand that defining first week in October 2007 is a Newsnight interview between Jeremy Paxman and Bob Ainsworth which took place in the aftermath of Brown’s trip to Iraq and the statement on British troop reductions but before Brown’s famous interview with Andrew Marr. Paxman’s normal manner is aggressive but the core of his case was that there had been some fiddling of the figures…