Will there be another “novice” put down? This is 29 year old Kirsty McNeill, the PM’s adviser in charge of external affairs, who is said to have written last year’s conference speech with the memorable “this is no time for a novice” rhetoric. She’s recently had a promotion at Number 10 but if Gord liked what she did last year then she’s bound to be involved again this time. This is the last big one before the general election and…
Why not spend the money when there aren’t the distortions? One of the things to understand about the conference season is that they take place in a very artificial media environment. There’s a long-standing convention that these annual show-piece events are covered by the broadcasters almost to the exclusion of other political news. That was why Brown’s trip to Iraq in the middle of the 2007 Tory conference went down so badly. It was seen as a deliberate spoiler and…
Or is defeatism just too widespread? Last night alongside Ben Page, CEO of MORI, I spoke at a fringe meeting at Labour’s conference about the coming general election and the likely outcome. At the end of the session the chair, Lord Foulkes, asked for a show of hands on what the audience believed would happen. They voted 1. Labour majority: 2 Hung parliament 3. Tory majority. This was a night for keeping your spirits up and there’s little doubt that…
But is “fight-back” the right language to use? In discussing this cartoon with Marf this after she made a point which I think is relevant – that this could be the wrong strategy for Labour. Are they building up Cameron? Are ordinary electors going to perceive that Labour thinks that this is a losing battle and, in Marf’s words, are they” empowering Cameron as a political beast to be reckoned with”? There’s something in that. I do think we have…
CON 39% (-1) LAB 29% (+5) LD 20%(-1) Are we just seeing the conference effect? Labour get a massive boost in this evening’s daily tracker from YouGov for Sky News. The comparisons are with the tracker poll done last Friday. On these figures we are in hung parliament territory and the Tories would be seriously worried if this did not edge down a bit after the conference. Brown, of course, had lots of exposure over the weekend and the Tories…
Will this be Osborne’s eye-catching announcement? A couple of weeks ago at an impromptu question and answer session in Bedford the Tory Chairman, Eric Pickles, let slip that there’d be a big announcement at their conference about pensions. Since then I’ve been pondering over what this could be and the thought struck me that this will be Osborne’s 2009 big announcement. For we have sort of got used to his Monday conference sessions and no doubt we all recall his…
Will this make life easier for Gordon or not? There’s news this morning of a big polling development, the first product of which is seen in the panel above – the YouGov/Sky News daily tracker for the party conference season. This shows day by day how opinion changed during the last week and how the “conference effect” seems to decline as the news agenda moves on. This is unlike normal tracker polls which have generally involved only 250 fresh interviews…
Is this how “a fighter” (his words) strides across the stage? The newspaper front pages (see here) are not good for the PM this morning and the most striking element is the above picture of Brown featured in the Guardian and Independent. It reminds me of the shots of Michael Foot at the Remembrance Day event in the early 80s wearing his duffel coat. It created an image that seemed to sum up his leadership. Looking back overnight the significance…